A Challenge, Issued.
“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”
-T.E. Lawrence
Man. Magic. Machine.
There once was a man who encompassed all three, a man long since destroyed, a man who at the end, could scarcely be called a man at all.
All men leave behind a legacy, but the legacies of men are far from equal. Mishra’s legacy affects every artifact, in every Magic set, from today until the end of time. Quite a legacy, maybe one unmatched in Magic.
There are those that consider Mishra’s Workshop a fool’s enabler, a trap for the weak-willed and short-sighted. The more one builds around the Workshop, the less incentive and the less access one has to the other cornerstones of Vintage.
Losing the die roll to a dedicated and able Workshop player is one of the most disheartening feelings in all of Magic, and Workshops have a long history of success in Vintage including winning Vintage Champs. Still, a number of Magic players have kindly taken steps on our behalf, to warn us not to fall for the trap of the Workshop.
First was current Vintage Champion Owen Turtenwald, whose primary charge was not aimed at Workshops specifically but rather Lodestone Golem. To summarize his points:
• Lodestone Golem is a poor resistor because most decks play many artifacts and it does not affect ability to deploy fast mana; many opposing decks are comprised of 10 or more artifacts unaffected by Lodestone Golem, and those very artifacts will let your opponents deploy threats or answers through the Golem.
• Lodestone Golems will only be in half of your hands (for accuracy sake – technically less, if you’re not trying to mulligan to it). Even if you have Lodestone Golem in your opening hand, because Golem costs four and Workshop only taps for three, you need another immediate mana producer if you want to play an immediate Lodestone Golem.
• Lodestone Golem gives you incentive to play Mishra’s Workshop, which prompts Owen to ask, “why bother even signing up for a Vintage tournament?”
Backing up these comments last week, Patrick Chapin had a few comments about Workshops in his article last week. Per Patrick: “Workshop decks suck. They really do. Like, a lot. Actually, slightly more than that. A big part of why they suck so much is that they are deceiving. ”
He goes on to explain four reasons why he also believes Workshops are a poor choice, which I will briefly summarize:
• Workshop decks are full of artifacts, and artifact hate is rampant in Vintage.
• Workshop decks play cards with casting costs that are too expensive unless you have a Workshop in play, and you won’t always have one.
• Workshop decks cannot play Force of Will or the other power cards in Vintage (Ancestral Recall, Yawgmoth’s Will, etc).
• You can’t be prepared for all your match-ups, and whether intentional and incidental, every opponent will have something for you.
Strong charges, especially considering the source — not only are these great players, but they are players that actually play Vintage, particularly Owen. Interestingly, one player says that Lodestones are terrible and give you incentive to play Workshops, while the other says that Workshops give you incentive to play cards like Lodestone; regardless of the reasoning, your end result is a deck with Workshops and Lodestone Golems, and that is bad.
No particular skin off my back here, really; I’m no Workshop advocate. I’ll play whatever I enjoy and think gives me a reasonable chance to win games. That has, in the past, led me to Workshops, and I’ve made top 8 with the deck twice in three tries, but lost in the quarterfinals both times. I’ll also take these comments with a grain of salt given the context and the source, but also take them at face value as that is how they are received by the majority of players.
In my last Vintage tournament I played Bob Tendrils, because it beats up on people that play slow Legacy decks full of Trygons and Jaces that look like Vintage decks because they have jewelry and Ancestral Recall in them. Outrageous statements with a hint of truth are easy AND fun!
During that tournament, I lost the die roll to MUD, twice, and went 2-0 on the play and 0-4 on the draw, but hey, that’s Workshops, right? If they roll well, and draw Workshops, you can’t win, and if they don’t, you can’t lose.
What’s Mishra going to do about this smear campaign, anyway? He’s a fictional character, and a dead one at that. I posted a link to Pat’s article on The Mana Drain where we all reveled in the foolishness of Workshops, and went to bed, smug in our superiority.
A Conversation.
“A man’s dreams are an index to his greatness.”
-Zadok Rabinowitz
Over coffee, and the buzzing of machines — lights, computers, cars, air conditioning – a conversation, in progress…
“I read an article speculating about a time in the near-future where humans have finally invented computers capable of mapping, transferring, and storing our consciousness, so that our minds, or even perhaps our souls, can escape the prison of our bodies and we effectively become immortal; a free consciousness can interact with the information in the internet without the impediments of hands or eyes, while a consciousness that can be replicated and downloaded would be free to inhabit multiple “bodies,” whether bio-engineered or mechanical in nature. While based in science, it sounds almost… magical. And the moral and ethical conundrums posed by possibilities are staggering.”
“Indeed. A man with access to this power could easily be tempted to do great evil. If a consciousness can copy itself, and one copy does evil, is the entire consciousness responsible and if so, how is such a punishment handed out fairly? Would you need a jury with access to the full contents of a consciousness? What if a consciousness of great evil had access to such capability, and ran unchecked? Could you ‘execute’ such a criminal? How would you ever truly know that a consciousness has been destroyed completely?”
“Curious — man is tempted enough to do evil when living one life. How would we separate the good men from the bad across multiple simultaneous lives? What about when living a thousand? And what of the men who fail to fight those temptations at all?”
“How, indeed? These questions are beyond my ability to resolve, but there are other things within your sphere of control. Therefore, let’s discuss matters more pressing. For example, if a fictional character has the capability to influence real-world events, is that character still entirely fiction? Let’s say that I am, in fact, not ‘real’, but a created character, and this is not an actual conversation, but a dream, and-”
“Stop. You remind me of someone… a man I met in a half-remembered dream.”
“Do not cut me off, or allow your subconscious to insert dialogue from elsewhere. You are here to listen to me. I am not dead, because I live on in the dreams and imaginations of men, and my legacy powers machines, machines that carry my spark. I am immortal, and my legacy is not a trap. I will not allow myself to be misunderstood in death as I was in ‘life’ to the extent that I ever lived.”
“Now that I know that I’m dreaming, this conversation will become hard to maintain. What am I supposed to do?”
“You already know what you need to do, and you don’t need me to reveal it to you, only to push you where you need to go. There are no absolutes, and those that present them must be challenged, not absolutely, but challenged nonetheless. ‘Reality is wrong, dreams are for real,’ as one once said.”
“Who was that? Thoreau?”
“Tupac, the Rhyme Sculptor. We have reached an unsustainable point of absurdity, so I must bid you farewell. Behold, the chorus of the machine…”
End conversation. Begin alarm clock.
The Slap of the Glove.
“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”
-Paul Valery
Fundamentally speaking, we have to ask this question: Why play any Magic deck over any other Magic deck? When we delve into this question, we can start to understand why it is that one might play a Workshop deck in Vintage, and why such a decision may at times be entirely correct.
First, though, let’s get something out of the way: Many Vintage players have a problem, and that problem is that many of them latch onto a deck, and play only that deck, forever. For a lot of Vintage players, those decks involve blue. This is hardly a phenomenon isolated to Vintage, but it is in Vintage where one finds that unquestionably the most powerful spells are blue, and will always be blue: Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, Gifts Ungiven, Mana Drain, Force of Will, Mind’s Desire, and so on. Thus we see that Mana Drain decks tend to be the most popular, and often are the most winning, archetype. There are cards in blue, such as Tinker and Tezzeret, that will only get better as time goes on through the very nature of their design.
While Mana Drains (being a loose collection of Drain decks over a period of time) are one of the most popular decks and always have dedicated advocates, often among the best in the format, there are others as well: Rituals, Fish, Dredge, and Workshops are others that often have advocates. Some of this has to do with card access, but often people just want to play the same deck. Workshop advocates in particular tend to be exceptionally dedicated and vocal about the viability and, at times, superiority of their deck choice, which is just as often challenged, sometimes derisively, by the Drain advocates.
My personal opinion? Anyone who blindly chooses one deck type over all of the others because they believe blue to be the best as an absolute rule, or Workshops to be the best, or Rituals to be the best, is hindering their ability to win as many tournaments as possible. It is by playing the other decks, in a tournament setting, that we become true masters of our own favorite decks and of formats, especially slower-moving formats of the Eternal variety; and it is by maximizing and leveraging our strength against a projected field that we should choose a deck when trying to win, even while being aware of factors such as card availability, and personal play skill and preference.
In other words, choosing Workshops over all other deck types, forever, does not maximize your chance of winning Vintage tournaments. The same is also true of Mana Drains. Let’s take a look at what Pat said, first, and apply it to Mana Drain decks.
1) You are playing an artifact deck in a format with far more artifacts that creatures, resulting in tons of artifact hate everywhere, even in the combo decks.
Owen’s Tezzeret deck, which is really a Jace deck, is 20% artifacts (12/60). AJ’s TPS deck is just under that number. Artifacts are rampant in Vintage. Clearly, these decks are less artifact-centric than a Workshop deck like Vinnie Forino’s Espresso Stax, which is 72% artifacts; however, while the Workshop deck utilizes fast mana, it also has Workshops and Ancient Tombs. The Jace and combo decks rely on their artifacts for mana and are vulnerable to common hate cards like Null Rod and Gorilla Shaman, not to mention the hurting Wasteland or Magus of the Moon can put on a mana base like we see in that Jace deck. Null Rod is irritating for some Workshop decks and utilized as a weapon by others. A lot of theoretical artifact hate is really incidental hate for Workshops rather than the destruction of their mana base— Nature’s Claim is far less annoying for Workshop players than it is for Oath players, for example, and Shaman is a weapon for Shop, Fish, and Aggro decks to destroy the mana base of Drain decks.
2) You are playing a deck where most of the cards are far too fairly-costed for Vintage unless you have a Workshop on the battlefield. You won’t always have a Workshop on the battlefield.
The Jace deck plays Trygon Predator and Jace, the Mind Sculptor, cards that are painfully slow should a resistor or Null Rod resolve, or if a Wasteland hits you at the wrong time; with no Mana Vault or Lotus Petal, this is far from the fastest of Tezzeret builds. A simple Chalice on 0 can keep this deck from relevant plays on the first turn of the game. You’re not always going to have on-color Moxen, Sol Ring, or Black Lotus. This deck is more vulnerable to Daze than a lot of Tezz decks.
3) You don’t have Force of Will in your deck. Let’s not even start on the non-mana power cards, like Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, Yawgmoth’s Will, and Time Vault.
Workshop decks generally do not play Force of Will, and base-blue versions tend to be too awkward to function correctly. However, decks without Force of Will do win Vintage tournaments. More on that later. 5C Stax is a Workshop deck that has played Ancestral Recall; some Workshop builds have run Key/Vault, and I have seen builds of Two Card Monte that play Recall, Key, Vault, and Will. I think the problem with this thinking is that I can also say that Jace decks don’t play Strip Mine, Bazaar of Baghdad, Mishra’s Workshop, Mind’s Desire, Gifts Ungiven, Necropotence — every Vintage deck has limitations on what it can play. That’s the nature of the format.
4) Not every one of your opponents will be a match-up for which you prepared. People will have things against you every time, by accident. You will often be left out to dry when you show up and those in the know are all maindecking Trygon Predators in their Jace decks.
This is, really, true of every deck. Sometimes you’ll play Jace and Trygon and look silly when people jam Rituals down your throat and you have no relevant sideboard cards and no way to stop Tinker/Inkwell. Sometimes a prepared Fish player will level you with removal spells for your Bobs, and attackers, and Meddling Mage naming Jace, and Wastelands for your fragile mana-base. That’s Magic.
None of this is meant to “rag” on the achievement of Turtenwald, Maher, and Williams (and Ochoa). The Jace deck is an example of a group of people playing the right deck for the right tournament. The problem is that the format, even Vintage, doesn’t just stop now that Champs has occurred. This deck set dominos in motion, waves that will ripple through the format; to think that this deck is automatically the best is short-sighted. Some people will play this deck, will play it well, and will win with it. Other people will play it and get blown out by its bad match-ups, which are easy to find with a little bit of testing.
But what about Workshops themselves — what about the charge that they’re not a good choice if you want to win tournaments?
I looked at the last 60 Vintage tournaments listed on Morphling (spanning March 2010 to August 2010), and of those tournaments, 16 were won by Workshop decks. Another 9 were won by decks without Force of Will, including 6 Dredge, 2 ANT, and 1 Bob Tendrils (with Duress and Thoughtseize only). Clearly, suggesting you cannot win in Vintage without Force of Will is an incorrect assumption when 25 out of 60, or 42%, of tournaments are being won by non-Force decks including 10% by Dredge and 26% by Workshop decks.
During the same time period, 17 Vintage tournaments were won by Mana Drain decks, or 28%, including Drain Tendrils, Tezzeret, and Oath of Druids, while most of the rest were won by Noble Fish. Of the cards mentioned by Pat — Force of Will, Ancestral Recall, Yawgmoth’s Will, and Time Vault — the majority of tournament winners included Force of Will and Ancestral Recall, but only by a small margin. Time Vault decks won around 1/3 of the tournaments. Yawgmoth’s Will, by way of exclusion from Fish, Workshop, and Dredge, appears is less than 50% of the tournament winners.
These numbers suggest that you do not need to play Force of Will, and you can win tournaments by playing Workshops.
What else do people say about Workshops? I’ve heard people say that those that win are just winning die rolls and running hot. I find it ironic that Vintage players would make this claim, since it is usually a charge leveled at the format by people that don’t play it. Numerous players have had sustained runs of success in Vintage (both with and without Workshops), implying that either they have incredible luck that is unlikely based on statistics, or they are all cheats; based on the people involved, I believe neither of those to be accurate. For example, it isn’t just Vintage specialists that win Vintage tournaments — LSV, Ochoa, Sperling, Turtenwald, and Pikula do well when they play the format also. I suppose they just dodge the lucky Shop players?
Most Vintage decks can win if you draw hot and win die rolls. Trust me, playing “Orchard, Mox, Oath, Force your Force” is not challenging; winning off “Black Lotus, Underground Sea, Dark Ritual, Yawgmoth’s Bargain,” or “turn zero Leyline of the Void, Bazaar of Baghdad, Chalice on 0,” or “Mana Crypt, Tolarian Academy, Voltaic Key, Time Vault,” or on and on, none of these are particularly skill-challenging. You can say the same thing about almost any tier-one Vintage deck, with the same degree of accuracy. In fact, because it lacks Force of Will, in some ways Workshop decks actually lack the broken power of Force-wielding Vintage decks as they’re running naked before they get a turn.
What about the charge that Workshop decks play themselves?
To dig into this, we have to understand that there are a range of Workshop decks. Among the Workshop decks, the dedicated aggro builds, whether MUD or Mono-Red, are going to be more linear and “play themselves” the same way people say Zoo or RDW decks are mindless and play themselves. As you play a deck that moves more toward aggro control, the decision trees become more complex; as you push toward full-on control a la 5C Stax or Mono-Red Stax, or aggro combo such as Work/Staff, or even full-on combo like Two Card Monte, you find decks that play themselves no more than TPS or Jace Control play themselves.
To those that would argue deck nomenclature, I will debate you strongly and thoroughly. To go from Elephant Oath to traditional Tezzeret, you replace 4 Oath of Druids, 4 Forbidden Orchards, 2 Oath targets (excluding the Tinker target), and maybe one random reshuffle effect for 4 Dark Confidant, some additional draw effects and tutors, and a reworked mana base. To go from traditional Tezz to Drain Tendrils, you change a similar number of cards. Taking the wide range of Workshop decks and lumping them all together is an unfair, or ignorant, application of terms.
I have seen and heard people suggest that the simple fact that people “can’t agree” on one “best” Workshop deck or build is proof that the cards in the deck don’t matter, and that the deck isn’t skill-testing; the suggestion is that whether you play aggro with Juggernaut and Null Rod, or combo with Metalworker and Staff, or 5C Stax with more broken cards and tutors — it doesn’t matter which build you play, as evidenced by the three Workshop decks in the top 8 of Champs being completely different designs. Yet, when people talk about the top 8 of 2010’s Champs, and the people running those decks — of which 50% did not have Force of Will — I often hear people comment about how the Jace players were lucky that the Workshop players made so many play errors, which is rather contradictory if in fact the decks play themselves.
The fact that different Workshop decks win simply suggests that people believe different Workshop decks are the best choice for a given tournament, for whatever reason, or that Vintage players are not metagaming correctly. This is no different than the fact that the Drain decks that have won tournaments have ranged from Drain Tendrils to Tezzeret to Jace Control to Oath of Druids to Painter’s Servant; no one would suggest that skill is irrelevant to Drain players as evidenced by the lack of agreement on one best Drain deck, would they?
When choosing a deck, you might determine that a given field is soft to Workshops; you might see that Dredge is very popular, and precious sideboard slots that are dedicated to beating Workshops are being used by Tezzeret and Oath to beat Dredge. If you determine you want to play Workshop Aggro, you still have many metagame decisions to make – even at the Workshop Aggro level, you have to decide if you want to go MUD or Mono-Red. If MUD, you have to decide if you want Null Rod or not; if no Rod, do you play Triskelion (good against Dark Confidant and Jace and Trygon Predator) or is Duplicant better regardless (good against Oath, Fish, Trygon Predator)? With or without Null Rod, do you play Karn, and if so, why or why not? In either version, do you play Sculpting Steel to maximize Lodestone Golem and protect yourself against Tinker? Do you play Razormane Masticore to win the mirror and as a weapon against Fish? These are metagame decisions, just like any other deck has to make similar choices.
Back to this “plays itself” charge — you can say the same thing about many of the best decks in other formats as well, as this is hardly isolated to Vintage alone. Tell me if these progressions sound familiar:
Tap land, Putrid Leech, Blightning, Bloodbraid Elf
Thoughtseize, Bitterblossom, Spellstutter Sprite, Cryptic Command
These powerful decks dominated Standard, one blue and one not, and you could easily say that the hands they served up were simple linear progressions — but clearly, there was a lot more to winning with these decks than the “freebie” wins they sometimes (or even, often) coughed up. The same is true of Workshops.
What of the charge that you won’t always have a Workshop? This is obviously true, yet there are multiple solutions to this. Espresso Stax and Two Card Monte use Serum Powder to find Workshop, much like a Dredge deck; Dredge decks win tournaments and don’t function without Bazaar, and are dramatically more reliant on Bazaar than Workshop decks are on Workshop, yet we don’t write them off completely on account of the fact that they won’t always have Bazaar. Further, beyond the wide range of artifact accelerants, Workshop decks can utilize City of Traitors and Ancient Tomb so that they almost always have a first turn play, and can often have multiple first-turn plays without a Workshop.
Owen discusses the difficulty of playing a first-turn Lodestone Golem, to which I say: so what? The goal of a good Workshop pilot is hardly ever to play an immediate Lodestone Golem, for all of the reasons Owen described. That is why Workshop players lead with something like Thorn of Amethyst, Chalice of the Void, or Sphere of Resistance, to lock out Force of Will, followed by Chalice of the Void on 0. Lodestone Golem comes into play a few turns on, when more resistors or Tangle Wire, or Wasteland, or Port, ensure he will resolve and end the game quickly. Unlike the Stax days, Workshop decks with Golems don’t need to set up a soft lock, they only need to buy four turns of attacking. Sometimes the aggro versions can blow you out as quickly as turn 4.
Workshop decks are easy to pilot, though, and don’t give players the room to out-play opponents, right? Again, this is a charge leveled at every non-blue deck that exists. People say it about Zoo, and Dredge, and RDW — and yet, throughout the long history of Magic, we see that these decks win tournaments as often as the blue decks. Independent of this, I don’t think Workshop decks are nearly as easy to play as people suggest, and along the same line of thinking, I have won numerous games against Workshop players because they have made play errors.
One error people make with Workshops is in choosing the wrong Workshop deck, and then, tuning that version incorrectly. Another common error people make is that they do not mulligan aggressively enough with these decks, but this is hardly specific to Workshops; I find that Vintage players in general are often too conservative with regard to mulligans (sure, says the guy who’s three card hand is Misty Rainforest, Mana Crypt, Tinker — I know, I know). Even with this, mistakes often relate to in-game decisions. Playing a hand like this one, in the dark, is challenging:
Mishra’s Workshop, Wasteland, Mox Jet, Thorn of Amethyst, Chalice of the Void, Lodestone Golem, Thorn of Amethyst
This hand has the rare first-turn Lodestone that Owen discussed, but would you want to make that play? Lodestone Golem plus Chalice on 0? Would you play Chalice on 1 followed by Thorn, or Sphere? Would you play Chalice on 2 if you knew your opponent was on Oath of Druids? Round one in the dark, what’s your line of play?
Did you know that Two Card Monte is still a viable deck? It won the 24-player late-night event at Gen Con (which was stacked with talent despite the start time), and just made top 4 at NYSE XI, a 46-player tournament with 11 other Workshop decks and 6 Dredge decks (and only 3 Fish decks). Like any other Workshop deck, and any other deck period, it was designed with a purpose in mind and can still function when the metagame is right.
My job here isn’t to tell you to always play Workshops. Most of what Pat and Owen said is true: sometimes Workshop decks, especially the traditional ones, are a poor choice. There were 9 people who played Espresso Stax at NYSE XI, and none made the top 8. 9 people ran Champs-style Jace control, and only 1 made top 8. Of the 3 players who chose Noble Fish, 2 made top 8. The only Landstill player made top 8. The only traditional Tezz player (Chris Pikula) made top 8. The only Bob Tendrils player made top 8. The only Two Card Monte player made top 8.
Traditional Workshop decks are easy to rag on right now because, like Oath of Druids, they became popular and relatively static, so that Tezzeret could adapt and reposition itself to beat those decks — just as MUD and Oath had positioned themselves to beat Tezzeret previously. Vintage is a much deeper format than many people realize, and should have a much more volatile metagame than we usually see precisely because Workshop players don’t want to admit that their deck is not always well-positioned, and non-Workshop players don’t want to admit that sometimes, Workshops ARE the right choice.
“Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful, and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous, and loathed because they impose slavery.”
-Bertrand Russell
I leave you with a warning: beware of absolutes. You should always play Force of Will. You should never play Workshops. You should always play Workshops.
Now, think about the fact that you’re reading this article. How did it get to you? What sequence of events had to occur, what exact combination of events needed to happen for your eyes to read this sentence, for you to have this computer, for there to be a computer, for you to have been free at this moment to read this piece, to think about how it affects your deck choices in Vintage and elsewhere, that Magic even exists, that you have eyes to read, that you exist at all, that there is an earth and a sky and a universe for them to exist in. Then tell me, who is really writing this sentence? Are you even reading it at all?
Alarm Clock
Monday morning, I got an email from… well, if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.
Man. Magic. Machine.
“Unlike his brother, he focused his mind on a single goal.”
I hope you enjoyed the article.
Matt Elias
[email protected]
Voltron00x on SCG, TMD, and The Source