Mishra’s Workshop is awesome! There are few cards in Vintage both as cool and powerful as Mishra’s Workshop that enjoy so little love. Don’t get me wrong, Workshop enjoys its entourage, but it’s nothing compared to the following of Mana Drain decks, or the feverish devotion of Bazaar of Baghdad pilots. People enjoy playing with Mishra’s Workshop, but even more people enjoy playing with Force of Will.
What if you could do both at the same time? Thanks to Shards of Alara, I now believe that this is realistically feasible. The printing of powerful Blue artifacts has now given us enough Blue cards that we can comfortably support Blue pitch-countermagic in a Workshop deck.
I am proud to present:
Creatures (4)
Lands (16)
Spells (40)
- 4 Force of Will
- 1 Mana Vault
- 1 Sol Ring
- 4 Island
- 1 Time Walk
- 1 Ancestral Recall
- 1 Mana Crypt
- 3 Crucible of Worlds
- 1 Trinisphere
- 1 Memory Jar
- 4 Smokestack
- 2 Misdirection
- 1 Tinker
- 1 Black Lotus
- 1 Mox Diamond
- 1 Mox Jet
- 1 Mox Pearl
- 1 Mox Ruby
- 1 Mox Sapphire
- 4 Chalice of the Void
- 1 Courier's Capsule
- 4 Mindlock Orb
Sideboard
So, how was this built? Why no Sphere of Resistance or Thorn of Amethyst? Where is Ghost Quarter?
Let me start at the beginning…
4 Mishra’s Workshop
4 Force of Will
With those eight cards in place, I asked myself: what is the most powerful thing you can do with Mishra’s Workshop?
The answer, surprisingly, has changed little in the last couple of years.
The most powerful play that you can make is still Trinisphere, an auto-inclusion.
But beyond that, what else?
It seems to me that these remain the two best things you can do with a Workshop. Sure, Sphere of Resistance and Thorn of Amethyst are nice, but they don’t need a Workshop to play them on turn 1. Workshop merely supports them rather than fuels them.
I wanted to include both cards, so that’s what I did:
4 Juggernaut
4 Smokestack
Crucible of Worlds is also an auto-inclusion if you are running Smokestack. It also supports the recurring use of Wasteland, which is surprisingly powerful in this metagame. Players are just running too few basic lands at the moment.
3 Crucible of Worlds
4 Wasteland
1 Strip Mine
And then, I wanted to power out Mindlock Orb with Mishra’s Workshop. This was the key new card that would help us meld together Shops and Force of Will. I started out testing 3 Mindlock Orb, but quickly discovered that I couldn’t draw enough of this card! Additional Orbs could be pitched to Force of Will, and the few that I drew were frankly amazing. I quickly upped to four, and never looked back.
The deck was started to take shape. After some goldfishing and testing, I realized that this deck had plenty of ways to utilize Workshop, between Orb, Crucible, Stack, and Juggernaut. But what about the Blue spells?
Obviously, I was going to include:
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
But what about Tinker? Even with 4 Mindlock Orb, I wasn’t going to stop myself from playing Tinker.
1 Tinker
That leaves twenty-eight open slots, most of which have to be dedicated to mana. I needed to achieve a range of at least 16 Blue spells and at least 28 mana. That means that in the remaining twenty-eight cards I needed about 19 mana sources and 5 Blue spells.
Some of the mana was easy:
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Emerald
1 Sol Ring
1 Mana Vault
1 Mana Crypt
1 Tolarian Academy
Those are pro forma additions to any decent Workshop deck. Seventeen open spots left…
I knew that if I was going to utilize pitch magic, I might as well go all the way and run some Misdirections as well. So I did:
Fifteen open spots.
I need a solid base of Blue mana if this deck is to work.
8 Island
Seven open spots.
My initial instinct was to test 2 Ghost Quarters. In testing they proved quite useful. I just used them as mana until Mindlock Orb came online, at which point they became Strip Mines.
However, as useful as they were, it turns out that Academy Ruins was just better. It turns out that there are a few key cards in this deck that your opponent will try to counter all of the time.
With two Ruins in the deck, a Courier’s Capsule seemed to be an obvious addition. I cut a Misdirection for one.
– 1 Misdirection
+ 1 Courier’s Capsule
After testing, it became fairly clear that the card I really wanted to run was Chalice of the Void. Chalice on zero on the play is a highly disruptive play that could buy Juggernaut enough time to win the game by himself. It also became clear that Chalice set on 1 and 2 was also going to be a solid tempo play that hurts me very little.
And I needed a Tinker target. I thought about Darksteel Colossus. My initial testing ran a Trike. It was a solid beater, but a weak Tinker target. What this deck really needed was a Memory Jar. I tested it and every time it came down it was incredible.
Although the deck tested fairly well, I realized that I hadn’t met my goal of 16 Blue cards. I tested and tested, and realized that the change I needed to make was this:
– 4 Juggernaut
+ 4 Master of Etherium
To support this move, I made the following changes:
– 4 Island
+ 4 Seat of the Synod
Also:
– 1 Mox Emerald
+ 1 Mox Diamond
Let explain these tweaks.
With 4 Seat of the Synod, the deck would have 34 artifacts, so that for every nine cards or so, there would be about 5.1 artifacts. That means that if you can play those artifacts, your Master of Etherium will be about 5 power on turn 2. This also ensures that I have enough Blue spells to support the levels of pitch magic I want to play
However, with Juggernaut, the demand for Blue is not as great. With Master, there is an urgency to get a Blue source online immediately. Rather than cut another card for fifth Island, I just cut an off-color Mox for a single Mox Diamond. With 20 land in the deck, this shouldn’t be a prohibitive addition. It will also increase the frequency of turn 1 Mindlock Orbs and Master of Etheriums.
One of the recurring things I heard from opponent’s was “how cool” they thought this deck was. That’s one of the reason I decided to write about it.
As for the final product, while it is very interesting, I am not certain that I reached the evolutionary endpoint of design here. It is possible that another route, perhaps running Spheres and Thorns, is superior to what I have here. If I had more time to test and tune, I could see myself moving in another direction. While Chalices are sometimes good, it may just be that Spheres are better. I would also start with Spheres over Thorn, since Aggro decks are highly relevant. Also, I think even without Chalice this deck has plenty to use Shops on between Mindlock Orb, Smokestack, Master of Etherium, and Crucible of Worlds.
I also considered Tezzeret for this deck, but rejected that idea because of the casting cost.
Sideboarding
Energy Flux is a card that is very difficult to deal with. With Seat of the Synods over Islands, it is even more devastating. I do not know of a solid answer to that threat, but I decided to run a couple of Echoing Truth anyway. If you can think of a better answer, then by all means do so.
Almost all of my decklists have large amounts of sideboard space devoted to addressing Ichorid. This deck is no different:
I also noticed that this deck had some difficulty with Aggro decks. The Propaganda should help there as well.
Finally, I wanted to include something to address Goblin Welder and threats like Darksteel Colossus:
2 Pithing Needle
2 Sower of Temptation
Both cards have other obvious applications.
There you have it! The look on our opponent’s face when you Force of Will their Rebuild after playing all of these lock parts will be priceless!
A couple of tips on playing:
One of the biggest tricks with this deck is knowing which threats to lead with. It’s a combination of skill, intuition, and experience. You have to gauge relative importance against chance of resolving. To guide your decision-making process, think of yourself as a tempo deck with a long-game.
Another tricky part of playing with this deck is properly using Smokestack. In general, you will be able to support a Smokestack set at one indefinitely. However, there will be times when you will need to ramp it up rapidly. You should use common sense to make this decision, as well as survival instincts.
Finally, on playing Chalice of the Void. If you are on the play, do not hesitate to play Chalice on zero. It is a giant tempo play. Chalice on one is still powerful, but since the restriction of Brainstorm it has lost much of its luster. Chalice on two is still a great play, though.
Bonus Decklist
Creatures (4)
Lands (12)
Spells (44)
- 2 Tendrils of Agony
- 1 Brainstorm
- 2 Cabal Ritual
- 1 Yawgmoth's Bargain
- 1 Vampiric Tutor
- 1 Mystical Tutor
- 1 Yawgmoth's Will
- 4 Force of Will
- 1 Necropotence
- 1 Sol Ring
- 1 Demonic Tutor
- 4 Dark Ritual
- 1 Ancestral Recall
- 1 Imperial Seal
- 1 Mana Crypt
- 4 Cabal Therapy
- 1 Merchant Scroll
- 1 Chain of Vapor
- 4 Strategic Planning
- 1 Flash
- 1 Rebuild
- 1 Black Lotus
- 1 Mox Emerald
- 1 Mox Jet
- 1 Mox Pearl
- 1 Mox Ruby
- 1 Mox Sapphire
- 2 Chrome Mox
- 1 Ponder
For those of you who need a brief tutorial on what this does, it’s pretty simple.
Step 1: Play Academy Rector.
Step 2: Flashback Cabal Therapy, sacrificing Rector, to find Yawgmoth’s Bargain and put it into play.
Step 3: Draw a bunch of cards and eventually play Tendrils of Agony for twenty damage.
But why now?
Strategic Planning has great synergy with the Rector archetype. It buries Cabal Therapies, helps you dig up Rectors, and builds threshold and spells for Yawgmoth’s Will. It also gives you more blue spells to support Force of Will.
The unrestriction of Chrome Mox may also have given this a slight boost.
Finally, this is the last remaining deck where Flash is maximally utilized! You don’t even need Cabal Therapy to find Bargain with Rector. Just Flash Rector into play, let her die, and find Bargain. Good Game.
Rector was so powerful that at one point she was under serious consideration for restriction by the Powers That Be. Once in play, she is very difficult to address. The trick, of course, is getting her into play. At W3, she is not the easiest spell to force into play, but that’s what Dark Ritual is for. (Just hope that your opponent isn’t playing Mindlock Orb!)
There are a couple of critical downsides to this deck. First of all, Extirpate is very annoying and strip out Rectors if timed right, preventing you from finding Bargain. Second, other residual Ichorid hate cards are everywhere, such as Tormod’s Crypt. It makes playing this deck much more difficult, but not impossible.
With practice and skill, you will come a long way!
On Sunday (or “yesterday” when you’re reading this) I’m playing in a local Vintage tournament in the new Shards metagame. I’m super excited, but totally confounded about what to play. I will probably run TPS just to see how it plays in the new metagame, but my backup deck is Parfait. I’ll let you know how the tournament went next week, when you can expect my trademark play-by-play!
I hope you enjoyed this article. Until next time…