I really like this card for all the reasons you said. The inevitability it provides you once resolving is massive and could make it very impactful. I wish this card were printed back in the heyday of Turbo Tezz, it would have been a great addition there. I would try something with even more artifact mana, like Grim Monolith, Voltaic Key, and maybe even a Chrome Mox or two.
I’m looking forward to playing with this card. Glad it’s an uncommon too.
@vaughnbros said in Mishra's Self-Replicator [DOM]:
Isn't this just better than Precursor in a lot of scenarios?
Precursor’s strength is that it’s 9 power for 5 mana. You need to spend 9 mana to get 10 power out of this card.
My friend, Bryan Manolakos and I just recorded the following podcast:
@womba said in Math and Max: A statistical analysis of "100 Matches with the Best Deck in Magic":
@maxtortion said in Math and Max: A statistical analysis of "100 Matches with the Best Deck in Magic":
I'm curious if anyone has been Game 1 Mulliganing against you, thinking you were on Dredge. I know I've done that against you once. I threw away a totally reasonable 7 because it couldn't beat Dredge, and you opened up with Blue spells! Learned my lesson.
@Maxtortion this is a common occurrence, more so in paper but to an extent in MTGO haha.
One day someone will get blown out against me by doing this, but if the last 9 years are any indication, it won’t happen any time soon unless the DCI has something to say about it.
Thank you so much for putting this together. It brought me back to my econometrics days in college when I read this. A somewhat random aside and I may be mistaken, but I think that Max was running Steel Overseers while many of the “Shops Mirrors” he played in may have been against Ravager decks that did not run Overseer. If that’s the case, Max had a huge leg up on his opponent’s from a deck design standpoint as Overseer is one of the best cards in the mirror. Similarly, Phyrexian Metamorph if played correctly can be one of the best cards in the mirror, preventing you from falling behind to your opponent’s best plays. There is a lot more I could say about the Workshop mirror, but the main takeaway I have which was mentioned is that a Ravager mirror is more similar to a game of limited than Vintage in the traditional sense. Combat math rules the roost and generally a PTQ player does more combat math than a Vintage only player and thus should be better at that, vital aspect to Ravager mirrors.
Thank you for taking the time to undertake this experiment and write this piece. Overall I greatly enjoyed this and for once don’t feel alone as a Workshop pilot who takes copious notes and tracks their results.
It felt like you slightly undersold the challenges and difficulties of running Shops. I’m not sure if that was done deliberately or if this was just a byproduct of your results which were obviously quite strong.
I enjoyed the way that you framed the Vintage Metagame with regards to 70% Blue 20% Shops 10% Dredge, but I disagree that restricting Mental Misstep solves this problem. If it’s not Mental Misstep it will be Red Elemental Blast or Spell Pierce, this problem will persist.
My take on the underlying problem is that Workshops has never actually reached the proportional Metagame percentage that it should given its power level. If the meta were 50% Blue, 40% Shops and 10% Dredge then card’s like Ancient Grudge, Dack Fayden, Hurkyl’s Recall etc would replace some of the Missteps/Pyroblasts and Workshops would thus be weakened.
I think economically something like this could only happen on Magic Online because of paper card availability in a tournament like Eternal Weekend and we would almost certainly see Mishra’s Workshop restricted before this happened, probably before the Metagame fully adjusted to this because the restrictions of Chalice, Lodestone and Thorn has by and large eliminated the strategic diversity of the Workshop archetype. This has gotten to the point where the big argument amongst Shop pilots is what you want your 7 main deck “flex slots” to be because everything is “Workshop Aggro”. The Blue decks have been homogenized, but to a much lesser degree as there are certainly more than 7 cards separating Oath, Xerox Control, Delver, Outcome, BUG etc despite all of these decks sporting Force of Will, Ancestral Recall and Time Walk. This is a long way of saying that I don’t think this problem is easy to solve and that Mental Misstep being restricted would do little to change the calculus.