Old School MTG: Mono White Prison Shops

For the second deck of the year (March/April), I'm revisiting Mono White Orb Prison. I'm still working through Shops+Colors this year with a total of six decks planned.

This deck is based entirely on JACO's deck posted at Eternal Central. I'd run the Black Lotus if I had one. A Wrath of God or two would be good, too. I don't have any with the old school artwork, so I swapped in a few cards, like the Forcefield and the Archaeologist. If I'm not going to run those cards in this deck, I'm not sure where I would run them. A part of playing old school is playing the old cards you have, so it's nice to see them show up. I will say that the deck feels land/mana light. I keep feeling like I'm always hoping to draw a mana source off the top.

Prison is not my favorite play style, either playing for or against. Losing to prison feels like bad beats. Winning with prison feels tedious. I have nothing against prison players. The games can be intricate, which is it's own kind of fun. A lot of aggro-on-prison matches come down to one or two key choices by the prison player of when to pull the trigger.

With everything going on in the world (pandemic), I don't anticipate actually getting to use the prison deck in a traditional game of old school. Instead, I'm just using it for games around the house with my family. They play decks with more recent cards. Here are some pictures of us in a three-player game. I ended up coming back from 1 life to win. That's a fairly typical story with these kinds of prison decks. You run your life total down to try to find opportunities for card advantage until you turn the corner. That's what happened here.

Three players!

Looks like Old School to me.

Earlier this month, I tested out an aggro mono white shops build because I love to swing with robots. But it ended up feeling like a worse version of the colorless or blue builds. It was nice to have the Swords and Disenchants for tempo/removal, though. In the few games I played with it, it didn't feel like it came together. Here it is, for reference.