Serious Vintage Episode 42: Heating Up M20’s Mystic Forge

For episode 42, Geoff Moes (@ThallidTosser on Twitter), Nat Moes (@GrandpaBelcher), and Josh Chapple (@joshchapple) welcome back Andy Probasco (@tmdBrassMan) to talk about Mystic Forge, a free preview card from Core Set 2020, provided by Wizards of the Coast!

Podcast (seriousvintage): Download (Duration: 33:05 — 15.2MB)

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Here’s the timestamped table of contents for your listening ease and enjoyment:
00:28 – Surprise! It’s Mystic Forge
Total runtime: 33:05

“I Can Build ANY Machine.”

There are a lot of exciting cards in Core Set 2020 (better known as M20), but there are two I left design notes for that specifically mentioned Vintage. Scheming Symmetry I was intrigued in because a combo deck could potentially exist built around the now six available one-black-mana topdeck tutors. And my note on our preview card was that “If this hits Vintage, it will do something new and fun.”

We brought Andy “The Brass Man” Probasco back to the show to help us figure out what those new and fun things might be. He’s the owner of The Mana Drain and has been a participant on the Vintage Super League, and as winner of the most recent Team Serious Invitational with Death’s Shadow Survival, is one of the Vintage format’s more creative players and deck builders.

Mystic Forge has a lot of potential as a card-advantage engine in Mishra’s Workshop decks of all kinds. The question, as always, is what do you cut from an existing list to make room for a card that doesn’t do anything to your opponent on its own? You could trade one turn in the early game to play Mystic Forge and potentially accelerate all of your future plays, but that gives your opponent an undisrupted turn either free of disruption (like Sphere of Resistance or Phyrexian Revoker) or free of threat (like Arcbound Ravager or Walking Ballista). It’s a risk.

In today’s metagame, Mystic Forge also competes directly at mana cost and some utility with Karn, the Great Creator, who not only disrupts the opponent but also serves as card advantage.

But Mystic Forge has so many exciting benefits. Many Workshop decks and Eldrazi decks are built with fairly low mana costs relative to the amount of mana they can produce between Workshop itself, Ancient Tomb, Eldrazi lands, as well as Moxes, Sol Ring, and Mana Crypt. If you get Mystic Forge into play, your next turn might include casting three or four cards from the top of your library, and you can exile a card you can’t or don’t want to cast. With enough mana, you can cast cards even through Karn or Collector Ouphe, potentially allowing you to overwhelm your opponent. This is helpful whether you’re playing more lock pieces or attacking with creatures or trying to combo off.

After we talked, Andy proposed this list, which is based on current Karn Workshops builds and is happy to play whatever role its opening hand and the game situation gives it (of course, none of the lists presented here are tested, and your metagame may vary, so good luck!).

Karn's Forge

If you can use Sensei’s Divining Top or a similar effect to further manipulate the top card of your library, you can easily get around lands blocking the top of your deck. Top also goes infinite with Foundry Inspector to draw your library. Together with the variety of mana producing artifacts, including Grim Monolith and Voltaic Key, there might be a Mystic Forge combo deck that aims to play most of its library on turn one to some great effect. Potentially this deck wins with Aetheflux Reservoir or, my favorite, Goblin Charbelcher.

This could be the basis for a Krark Clan Ironworks-type deck in Vintage and potentially other formats.

Aetherflux Forge

But maybe you just try to run Mystic Forge in a Tiny Robots list and try to cast a bunch of tiny creatures that will attack anything in sight. You can cast Walking Ballista and Hangarback Walker for 0 to move them off the top of your library, and it might be better to have Chief of the Foundry main deck to get some value out of that play.

Tiny Forgebots

One last thing to notice is that these decks will all benefit greatly from M20’s other gift to Vintage, the London mulligan. Touring London will help players find a quality turn one: a hand with Mishra’s Workshop, or an early Mystic Forge or Karn, or both. Seeing seven cards at a time and picking your favorites will make a big difference in these kinds of decks, which are so reliant on opening hands and won’t be able to as easily fix their situation as a blue deck with multiple Preordains and other cheap cantrips. When it comes to this new era of colorless decks, mulligan often and mulligan with intention.

And the Hi-Res

For our free preview this time, I also had the time and forethought to ask Wizards about the high-resolution art from Titus Lunter. And they provided! So here’s the hi-res version of Mystic Forge from M20 for your eyeballs to enjoy (and click to download wallpaper).

Questions for Discussion

Will Mystic Forge be a hit in Vintage? What about in another format? It’s definitely legal in a bunch of them, and Legacy has a bunch of Sol lands to help play it. Did any of you play X-Men Legends games, where the character Forge is played by Lou Diamond Phillips? And you’d interact with him and he’d say lines like “I can build ANY machine” like he’s real smug about it? That was great. He was right too. He built a lot of really useful stuff in that series of games.

Conclusion

Thanks for listening! And thanks to The Brass Man for joining us on this special episode. If you found this show because of our free Wizards preview card for M20, welcome. We hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. Usually we talk a lot more about food. We’ll look forward to any questions or comments here or The Mana Drain or on Twitter. You can also email us at seriousvintagepodcast@gmail.com.