I am surprised to see very little discussion in this forum on Mishra's Workshop. It has been amazing in my Combo cube, and I always assumed powered cubes ran it. After combing through lists in this forum, I am finding that very few people are running this card. What gives? Is it really so narrow in a traditional powered cube environment?
If I weren't so worried that it'd be completely ridiculous in my list, I'd run it. I imagine even less-powered powered lists (Sol Ring, Twist, Drain, Crypt, no Moxen, etc.) would have a field day with this card. Surely there can't be a better card for supporting artifact.dec than Workshop. Thoughts?
I don't have extensive experience with the card in the cube, but the little I do have wasn't very good. You need a TON of artifacts in your deck for this to be good. And not just a ton of cheap ones and a few expensive ones like the typical artifact deck ...you need a ton of targets that actually benefit from the Workshop. And that just doesn't happen all that often. Even artifact-centric decks are built with the majority of the cards being non-artifact. And the vast majority of those artifacts are cheap.
It was capable of pretty busted plays randomly. T1 Coalition Relic into T2 Wurmcoil ...stuff like that. But it was SO rare. We ended up cutting it because it was too polarizing. I'm okay with cards being randomly broken. This is the cube after all. We were not okay with a card being bad the majority of the time though. And that's what Workshop was. We had the same experience with Bazaar, for the same exact reasons.
If you ran a cube with a higher-than-typical concentration of artifacts in the 3+cc range (enough so that it made a significant difference in the number of them that you could expect to see), Workshop could be a good card for that unique cube build. But in the composition I use, it was underwhelming.
At its best it is comparable to a black lotus. It powers out unbelievably lopsided plays that can end the game very quickly. However at its worst, unlike black lotus, it does nothing and costs you a land. It just to swingy going from auto win openers to auto mull openers.
It looks pretty appetising, but it can be a trap. All the cards you stated (monolith crypt, vault, moxen, ring) don't make workshop good. A lot of people assume that because it is an artifact ritual you need fast mana to make it playable, which couldn't be further from the truth. It's good with artifacts costing 3-6 mana. You need a lot of them for it to be consistent.
I run it in my 360, but I support a strong artifact deck in U/B as well as the standard stax fair.
From what I see, it usually ends up like this-
1. Someone cracks it pack one and then builds around it the rest of the draft.2. Someone cracks it pack two or three and it ends up being a last pick.
3. Its opened and past in either pack one or two and gets picks it up if going in an archetype (usually they let it wheel though).
I find it to be one of the things that pushes artifact strategies over the edge. But its probably on the chopping block considering how modal it is (its either busted or a bust...)
We used it at 450, 540, and now 720. It wasn't that great at 450, but at 540 and 720 it's been awesome. It's incredible with some of the decks you can build with it.
Like any build-around-me card, if you get it early it's likely going to be awesome and if you get it late chances are no one at the table really wants it.
It helps to up the variance in unique deck archetypes, which in my opinion is almost always a good thing.
I'd highly recommend people to try the card out again, chances are it's gotten better since you last played with it. You do need a slightly higher artifact count than in some cubes (ours has a little more artifacts than a lot of cubes because we like a lot of playables in packs).
10+ years later and I think Mishra's Workshop is finally at a good place for me, lol. While I thought that sets like BRO / ONE / MOM would be the sets to get that critical mass for Workshop, it was really 40K where it started looking really viable now.
Here's two Workshop decks that went 3-0 in this month. Prior to recently, it's never really done much all the other times I tried to test it :
If I weren't so worried that it'd be completely ridiculous in my list, I'd run it. I imagine even less-powered powered lists (Sol Ring, Twist, Drain, Crypt, no Moxen, etc.) would have a field day with this card. Surely there can't be a better card for supporting artifact.dec than Workshop. Thoughts?
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It was capable of pretty busted plays randomly. T1 Coalition Relic into T2 Wurmcoil ...stuff like that. But it was SO rare. We ended up cutting it because it was too polarizing. I'm okay with cards being randomly broken. This is the cube after all. We were not okay with a card being bad the majority of the time though. And that's what Workshop was. We had the same experience with Bazaar, for the same exact reasons.
If you ran a cube with a higher-than-typical concentration of artifacts in the 3+cc range (enough so that it made a significant difference in the number of them that you could expect to see), Workshop could be a good card for that unique cube build. But in the composition I use, it was underwhelming.
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It looks pretty appetising, but it can be a trap. All the cards you stated (monolith crypt, vault, moxen, ring) don't make workshop good. A lot of people assume that because it is an artifact ritual you need fast mana to make it playable, which couldn't be further from the truth. It's good with artifacts costing 3-6 mana. You need a lot of them for it to be consistent.
From what I see, it usually ends up like this-
1. Someone cracks it pack one and then builds around it the rest of the draft.2. Someone cracks it pack two or three and it ends up being a last pick.
3. Its opened and past in either pack one or two and gets picks it up if going in an archetype (usually they let it wheel though).
I find it to be one of the things that pushes artifact strategies over the edge. But its probably on the chopping block considering how modal it is (its either busted or a bust...)
My errata'd commons cube
Like any build-around-me card, if you get it early it's likely going to be awesome and if you get it late chances are no one at the table really wants it.
It helps to up the variance in unique deck archetypes, which in my opinion is almost always a good thing.
I'd highly recommend people to try the card out again, chances are it's gotten better since you last played with it. You do need a slightly higher artifact count than in some cubes (ours has a little more artifacts than a lot of cubes because we like a lot of playables in packs).
Blimpy's Aggro-Focused Cube (powered 360)
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Here's two Workshop decks that went 3-0 in this month. Prior to recently, it's never really done much all the other times I tried to test it :
My High Octane Unpowered Cube on CubeCobra