Saturday, January 25, 2020

Old School MTG: Colorless Colossus Tron Shops

Robot Factory!


My plan is to build and play six different (but similar) decks this year. Near the end of last year, I traded a bunch of cards to get some Mishra's Workshops. I've been pulling cards from my collection early this year to build up more trades, but we'll see how that goes. At this point, I have 3x Mishra's Workshop. One more to go!

For the first deck of the year, I wanted to revisit the colorless deck with Colossus at the top end of the curve. So far, I've only gotten to play one game with it. But! It was an actual Old School game against Ben's Erhnamgeddon deck.

Ben facing down the last few points of damage.


I won, but just barely. It ended up coming down to dodging both Armageddon AND Disenchant for multiple turns so that I could swap life totals with Ben using the Mirror Universe and then shoot him down with Triskelion. If at any point he was a able to disenchant the Mirror before I made the swap, I would not have won that game. I used a combination of Mazes, Icys, and Coffins to keep the Angels and Djinns from killing me, but let just enough damage through to get my life total low enough for a profitable swap with the Mirror. It was a fun game!

A couple of notes on the deck:

1) If I had another Mishra's Workshop, I would run it. The same goes for Black Lotus, of course. Both cards are bonkers.

2) The Time Vault is questionable. I have used it in decks like this before where there is no "trick" to untap it. Skipping a turn early to be able to take two super-effective turns later is a powerful gamble. When this deck gets rolling on Howling Mines and tons of mana, two later turns in a row are almost always game-winning. With that said, this slot should probably just be a main-deck City in a Bottle.

3) Su-Chi is good, but risky with Mana Burn. This comes up over and over. Yes, there are situations where when it dies, you can put the mana into your Mishra's Factory or Tome. But there are plenty of times that it's just eating four damage on top of losing a creature. This slot could be Juggernaut. There are other trade-offs with that creature, though.

4) The Library of Alexandria is sometimes a trap. There are plenty of early hands that want to be played out quickly, but where the Library will naturally make you hold back to draw more cards. This feels especially bad when you are punished by an opposing Mind Twist. With that said, there are plenty of mid-game situations where a Wheel or Timetwister will refill your hand and tapping a single land to rip another card off the top is that-much-better. It does allow me to keep borderline opening hands knowing that I will get a redraw.