Hello all, and welcome to “If it’s broken…” a new semi-weekly column where, if it’s broken, then you are probably playing the right formats.

I am a teacher and grad student who grew up in and recently moved back to Ohio. This was a lucky break for me, not just on account of my employment, but because Ohio is still one of the bastions of Vintage in the United States and has a burgeoning Legacy scene. I have played Eternal formats since Extended stopped letting me play with the original dual lands and [card]Force of Will[/card]. (Interesting fact #1: These actually left the format at the same time through a weird quirk in tournament structure.) This was broken up by the occasional foray into Standard and Extended when no other options were available, but I have been playing and developing decks in Eternal formats for years.

Now that you know a little about me, I want to tell you about my current favorite deck in Legacy. I also want to highlight a handful of underutilized cards that don’t deserve their outsider status in that format.

First, the deck:

[deck title=Painter’s Servant Combo by Jacob Hilty]
[Combo]
4 Painter’s Servant
4 Grindstone
[/Combo]
[Protection]
4 Goblin Welder
4 Force of Will
3 Red Elemental Blast
[/Protection]
[Tutors and Draw]
4 Transmute Artifact
4 Intuition
4 Brainstorm
[/Tutors and Draw]
[Insurance]
2 Wurmcoil Engine
1 Tormod’s Crypt
[/Insurance]
[Mana]
3 Grim Monolith
2 Mox Opal
1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
[/Mana]
[Lands]
4 Scalding Tarn
1 Polluted Delta
1 Flooded Strand
2 Great Furnace
2 Seat of the Synod
1 Mountain
3 Island
1 City of Traitors
3 Ancient Tomb
2 Volcanic Island
[/Lands]
[Sideboard]
3 Flusterstorm
3 Tormod’s Crypt
2 Blood Moon
3 Spellskite
1 Venser, Shaper Savant
1 Karakas
1 Ensnaring Bridge
1 Llawan, Cephalid Empress
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

The fundamental purpose of this deck is to get [card]Painter’s Servant[/card] in play while Grindstone’s ability is resolving, thus forcing your opponent to mill their entire library. To ensure that we can do this, we get to pack free counter spells, one mana [card]Vindicate[/card]s, instant speed [card]Demonic Tutor[/card]s, some of the fastest mana this side of [card]Goblin Charbelcher[/card], and our very own Vintage staple, [card]Goblin Welder[/card].

This deck, in addition to having many of the features of a traditional linear combo deck, has an especially strong backup plan: [card]Wurmcoil Engine[/card]. If you look at the decks that are popular right now in Legacy, especially the aggro-control decks, you will notice most of them are ill-suited to deal with a large, powerful creature. For the most part this makes sense; after all, most decks don’t ever get enough mana to cast a big creature anyway against RUG or BUG Tempo decks. They have no need to eschew their [card]Lightning Bolt[/card]s and [card]Abrupt Decay[/card]s to deal with a threat that isn’t out there for the most part.

Our deck, however, can easily have six mana on turn three or four. That means we can cast a 6/6 that turns almost any race around on its own. Furthermore, if our opponent does manage to kill it (usually as the result of a two-for-one against themselves) they still have to deal with two awesome blockers clogging up the ground. [card]Wurmcoil Engine[/card] is not great in every match up, but while Legacy is still a diverse format, you are almost guaranteed to meet some version of UGx Tempo in a tournament.

Despite the amazing power of [card]Wurmcoil Engine[/card], I don’t know how playable he is without the underutilized duo of [card]Transmute Artifact[/card] and [card]Grim Monolith[/card]. [card]Grim Monolith[/card], which was taken off the banned list in 2010, has seen moderate play in various combo and MUD decks in Legacy; however, as far as I know, no one else is combining its power with four [card]Transmute Artifact[/card]. This seems positively bonkers to me. Transmute is the closest thing we have to Tinker in this format, and while I am not claiming that it is as good as Tinker by any means, even a bad Tinker needs to be considered.

In this deck where our primary goal is getting a one- or two-mana artifact combo piece into play, Transmute really is very close to Tinker. When you combine it with [card]Grim Monolith[/card], which costs more than or equal to both of these combo pieces, you suddenly have a card that tutors an artifact to play, with the added benefit of the sacrifice being an effect of the card rather than part of the cost. That’s right; if [card]Transmute Artifact[/card] gets countered, you don’t have to sacrifice a thing. You also don’t have to let your opponent know what you are sacrificing until the spell begins to resolve.

There are a couple more important things to realize about Transmute. First, and this is for all the new Eternal players out there, know the Oracle text of your cards. Take a quick moment to look at the text of [card]Transmute Artifact[/card] as written on the card.

That’s right, this card actually contains the phrase, “or [card]Transmute Artifact[/card] fails.” You almost expect it to include “lol!!1! n00b” on it with rules text like this. Since the text on the actual card was written before Magic had standard templates, here is the Oracle text:

[card]Sacrifice[/card] an artifact. If you do, search your library for an artifact card. If that card’s converted mana cost is less than or equal to the sacrificed artifact’s converted mana cost, put it onto the battlefield. If it’s greater, you may pay {X},where X is the difference. If you do, put it onto the battlefield. If you don’t, put it into its owner’s graveyard. Then shuffle your library.

That is a mouthful, but it illustrates a few things. First, though the printed text may imply that the artifact enters play then leaves play if you can’t pay, the Oracle text is explicit: the artifact doesn’t touch the battlefield if you don’t pay the difference in mana. No free Wurmcoil tokens for you. While that may or may not be a fair interpretation of the card, the proper translation of old card text to current rules is an article onto itself, so I will leave that aside for today.

Secondly, if your opponent destroys an artifact in response to you casting this spell and you have another artifact in play, you must sacrifice one of the remaining artifacts. On the flip side, the same interaction this also means that you are not targeting an artifact to sacrifice, so your opponent can’t make [card]Transmute Artifact[/card] fizzle by destroying a specific artifact.

Also, you don’t have to pay the difference in mana until the spell resolves (though often times you will already be floating mana from a Monolith that is going to be sacrificed), so your plan can change. If, for example, you were expecting to put out a [card]Wurmcoil Engine[/card], but your opponent had a [card]Spell Pierce[/card] that you had to pay for, and now you only have four available mana to cover the difference in casting cost, you can tutor for a [card]Painter’s Servant[/card] instead.

Last, but certainly not least, when playing a deck with [card]Goblin Welder[/card] like this one, or really any deck with graveyard recursion, sometimes a two-mana Entomb is good enough, and Transmute artifact can be cast with no intention of paying the difference in cost.

This brings me to perhaps the most underrated card in Legacy at the moment: [card]Goblin Welder[/card]. I understand that when the ban lists for Legacy and Vintage split for the first time Welder might not have been the best choice. After all, Legacy then was defined by needing a solution to turn-one [card]Goblin Lackey[/card], a creature with stats surprisingly similar to the creature currently being discussed. However, the format has changed. No longer is stopping a turn-one 1/1 the main concern of Legacy spell-slingers.

Goblin Welder, if you are not aware, was for years considered one of the more powerful, if not the flat-out number-one creature in Magic. His ability to laugh in the face of any number of opposing pieces of counter magic, while simultaneously cheating mana on a vast scale should not be disregarded. Yet, this amazing piece of cardboard was repeatedly allowed to resolve on turn one and then go on to dominate the game in almost every round of my top-16 run at SCG: Columbus.

To illustrate his power, let me describe a scenario to you: [card]Intuition[/card] is resolving on our opponent’s end step and we have an active Welder and an artifact in play. Unless our opponent has a way to kill this Welder before our upkeep or we have fewer than three mana available next turn (unlikely given the [card]Intuition[/card] on the stack) we have, in all likelihood, won this game. We can simply search for [card]Lion’s Eye Diamond[/card], [card]Painter’s Servant[/card], and [card]Grindstone[/card]. No matter which card our opponent gives us we can win.*

Welder also lets us reuse mana from [card]Grim Monolith[/card]s and makes Wurmcoil almost insurmountable. If we ever get to weld one Wurmcoil for another we achieve a practically insurmountable board state. The absolute worst-case scenario for our goblin friend is that he acts as a [card]Duress[/card] (or [card]Hymn to Tourach[/card] if they Force) in our combo deck by drawing out a counter or critical removal. Don’t even let me talk about what happens when you side in [card]Spellskite[/card] against [card]Abrupt Decay[/card] with Welder. Let me just say that uncounterable seems to be an adjective best applied to other decks. This is just a small sampling of the many things that [card]Goblin Welder[/card] can do, but these interactions deserve an article spotlight all their own.

Now to a discussion of how this deck interacts with the rest of the current Legacy format in the form of matchups, and why I think you should play this deck right now. Let’s get the bad news out of the way: this deck does not have a great matchup against the various [card]Show and Tell[/card] variants floating around, especially game one. I am not saying it is unwinnable, but when your main win condition is stopped by cards that just have to be in your opponents deck (namely Emrakul and his reshuffle ability), it makes it a little more difficult to win.

That being said, I did beat OmniTell along the way to my top 16, and you can beat them too; you just have to play tight and know what you have to do to win the game. Therefore, it is critical to know that if you ever mill a deck playing Emrakul or any creature that triggers when it enters the graveyard, that trigger does not resolve until after [card]Grindstone[/card] is done resolving. That means you have an opportunity, with all the triggers on the stack, to remove those cards from the game before they are whisked back into the deck. That is the reason for the singleton [card]Tormod’s Crypt[/card] in the main-though it should be noted that there are many matchups, like Dredge, where a single [card]Tormod’s Crypt[/card] is a welcome addition.

Furthermore, you will note three more Crypts out of the sideboard, and if you decide to play this deck I would suggest you follow that convention despite that any sideboard should be carefully considered for your tournament and not just copied from the Internet. That being said, one bad matchup does not make a deck unviable, and we have reached the end of our bad news.

There is good news on the combo front, however; we are a fast combo deck that gets to run [card]Force of Will[/card]. That means that, while we can race almost any non-Belcher deck in the format, we can also win most fights against those decks with our counters, especially if we run [card]Flusterstorm[/card]s out of the sideboard, which I would strongly encourage. [card]Flusterstorm[/card] is one of my favorite recent printings and is underplayed in Legacy.

The other main combo decks that we need to think about are: Elf combo, an almost unloseable matchup unless their kill is Emrakul, which is thankfully out of vogue; various flavors of storm, which is pretty even because, while we have counters, they have a faster clock and discard spells; [card]High Tide[/card], which is glacially slow and doesn’t run enough counters to really slow us down; and Dredge, which hates seeing any deck with maindeck [card]Tormod’s Crypt[/card], especially with a clock as fast as ours. As far as I can remember, I have never lost a match to Dredge playing any form of Painter combo in Legacy.

Let’s move onto RUG and BUG Tempo decks and other similar aggro-control decks. When Threshold dropped white as its preferred splash color several years ago, we gained a ton of points in this matchup. In general, as we have already talked about, Wurmcoil is tough to for these decks to beat and gives us lots of time to combo. That said, these decks make it hurt if you stumble at all, and if I were to suggest any other deck in this format right now, it would be a tempo deck because they have game against everybody. This matchup is by no means a walk, but one bonus is that after a few tournaments you will almost certainly have more experience playing the matchup than your opponent does. Painter isn’t that common so your opponent will not understand all the interactions of your deck and will play sub-optimally, but with experience you will come to understand their deck quite well.

Finally, the randomness factor is something I think you should always consider when picking a deck for Legacy and is why I think the so-called “fair decks”-all other things being equal-are not good choices for the format. At a given Legacy tournament, there are upwards of 30 decks you could run into that would be reasonable and more that most people would think are unreasonable but that have some game. A deck in Legacy, especially for a big tournament, needs to have raw power in addition to decent matchups so that it doesn’t lose to the person who hasn’t been paying attention and thinks Lands is still an awesome deck to play. You might know that, in this metagame, deck X isn’t good, but that doesn’t stop deck X when they are beating you with [card]Hive Mind[/card] or MUD. Playing powerful cards (if the deck is reasonable) helps to mitigate this problem because your cards are good and win quickly in addition to being able to hang with the rest of the format. That doesn’t mean attacking with creatures is always wrong, but it is a point in favor of the deck that can win without giving its opponent a turn.

So [card]Painter’s Servant[/card] Combo could be a good choice for your next Legacy event. It has several powerful, underutilized cards, including [card]Transmute Artifact[/card] and [card]Goblin Welder[/card], and can play around or through hate with those, [card]Force of Will[/card]s, and diverse threats like [card]Wurmcoil Engine[/card]. My top-16 performance at SCG: Columbus is hopefully one of many examples of this deck’s prowess.

* The [card]Intuition[/card] scenario: Assume they give us Grindstone; we weld our one artifact for [card]Lion’s Eye Diamond[/card] on endstep, untap, cast and activate [card]Grindstone[/card], and weld [card]Grindstone[/card] for Painter with the ability on the stack. If they give us Painter it takes a little bit longer to win (unless we have 5 mana), but we can still weld [card]Grindstone[/card] in, cast Painter, and pass knowing that if our opponent tries to remove Painter, we just Weld in LED in response and can deck our opponent when we untap. Lastly, if they give us LED we weld in Painter on the end step, untap, play LED, weld LED for [card]Grindstone[/card], and kill them with our mana.

Jake Hilty
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