@daniel-worobec

I think the main issue is that this dude might as well cost 10 to cast within the context of your shops deck, and to use a spot in the 75 on it is probably irresponsible. If it had a tax effect instead of a reducing effect I would be more inclined to give it a chance.

@neo_altoid recommended that I move this post over here so that more people can see it.

Using Hope of Ghirapur in KarnForge

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Karn Shops is one of the top performing decks in the Vintage format but is often defenceless. In the N.Y.S.E. Open VI there were five Karn Shops decks in the top nine that seemed to rely on just 3-4 coppies of Defense Grid in the deck for protection. I propose that adding copies of Hope of Ghirapur would improve upon an already powerful Karn Shops.

I do say that Defense Grid is better to defend Karn Shops is than Hope of Ghirapur. My argument is that four Defense Grid is not enough to defend Karn Shops with and that multiple Hope of Ghirapur would help.
Hope of Ghirapur denies your opponent from casting non-creature spells on the second phase of a turn. Often is that all you need to win the game is to have a Karn, the Great Creator or Mystic Forge on the battlefield and Hope of Ghirapur can deny the opponent from using counter magic or other interaction that would stop a Karn or Mystic Forge.

Hope of Ghirapur is cheap to cast and is free with Foundry Inspector.

Manifold Key’s secondary ability can be useful to make Hope of Ghirapur unblockable if your opponent has a flyer to block with.

Hope of Ghirapur can make Karn Shops faster by slowing the opponent. It can take away half of an opponent’s turn by denying them the ability to cast sorceries, enchantments, planeswalkers, and non-creature artifacts for a turn. This is very helpful in slowing down fast combo decks such as Paradoxical Outcome, Dark Petition Storm and Karn Shops mirror-match.

Because Mystic Forge lets you draw many cards per turn, you can cast multiple Hope of Ghirapur turn after turn, preventing your opponent from counter your spells and casting non-creature spells during their turn for multiple turns. This could give you enough turns to assemble a Time Vault/Key or Karn/Mycosynth Lattice combination and lock your opponent out for the rest of the game.

Let’s take a look at the final match between Joe Brennen and Vasu Balakrishnan in the N.Y.S.E. Open VI. Vasu was playing Karn Shops combo with Mystic Forge and Joe was playing BUG Control. In game one Joe had a hand full of counterspells. If Vasu had a Hope of Ghirapur on the battlefield at the time, Joe would have been unable to cast most of his hand. In round two, Joe countered a Mystic Forge. If Hope of Ghirapur had attacked, Joe could not have played his Force of Will to counter Vasu’s Mystic Forge and Joe would have been unable to cast his Narset, Parter of Veils on his turn. The game may have turned out differently but these are just examples.

Thank you for considering using Hope of Ghirapur in Karn Shops. I look forward to seeing how Karn Shops evolves over the next couple of months and how it will perform at Eternal Weekend.

Daniel Worobec

You ought to cross post this to the Karn Forge thread, where I think you'll get more traction.

For your idea....I don't think it's bad idea, in that it's a legitimately castable spell that (1) the academy didn't even discuss and (2) is an effect that Karn Forge actually wants. However, it has a few problems. The biggest of which is that it's grid with suspend. Giving people a turn isn't the best idea in Vintage right now. While I'll freely admit to starting a lot of games with "grid, go", you also want the ability hit 6 mana on 1 (not the craziest thing in a Workshop+Grim Monolith deck!) and Grid+Threat your opponent. What I do think makes more sense is a single Hope of Ghirapur out of the board, if we're playing one at all, as a wishable Grid effect, which more-or-less ensures that you can set up for the follow-up wish for Lattice to end the game.

Also, re: the finals against Joe--I'm pretty sure I'm a big favorite if I hit mana off my top 3 draws, instead of more Karns. The problem there wasn't that I didn't have a grid effect, it was that Joe (very wisely) cut me off mana instead of trying to fight threats.

@serracollector said in Tiny Forgebots:

If you removed all the disruption from the original list shown above in post 1 and went with say:

-4 revoker
-1 chalice
-1 thorn
-1 skull clamp

And added:
+4 frogmite
+2 Helm of Awakening
+1 Mox Opal

How much would it speed it up?
Just theory crafting here, but dropping a helm shouldn't be an issue since you "should" win that turn most of the time, right? Or is it too much a liability?

I'm not actually sure removing the disruption would make it faster by any measurable stat. Most of the disruption already makes the deck faster by virtue of being an artifact in play and contributing as ravager food.

There are also some other interesting cost reduction cards that could be used other than cloud key and Helm of awakening:

Locket of Yesterdays - The deck has a lot of 4 ofs and does bin a lot of cards
Mycosynth Golem - It does not seem unreasonable that this could come into play on turn 2 if you start to combo off
Semblance Anvil - I Believe this was in a few artifact combo decks in the past.

That being said I'm not sure its worth dropping disruption to play them in the least, because the deck is already so low on CMC that I don't think they do that much more to reduce cost than just having another rock in play.

i would check the builds from Montolio, Rich Shay, and Nam Tran from Champs this 2018 and 2017. Those are sort of the current aggro-shops builds, and their lists only differ by 2-3 cards.

I used to be firmly in the Energy Flux camp on this one. (I still think Flux is just crushing, and at least in Control Oath, which runs a bit mana dense, it's pretty good. They can make all the thopter tokens they like.) However, watching Rich Shay, and also my wife as they run Xerox, the 1for1 cheap removal game is viable at least. Shattering Spree is probably the best in that vein, since it can be, but isn't limited to being a 1for1. As a passive observer, it does seem that blunting, and finally taking apart their board with spot removal is viable.

Ancient Grudge bears a mention here.

I really just completely missed the PW:) I don't think we can run Workshop and then try to cast things that don't abuse it. If they ever print a PW that is "artifact PW" then I'll test it, until then I don't think its worth it. You get awkward hands when you mix mana types and doing it in a deck that can't fix its top decks, can't manipulate its library, can't fetch its lands, there are a lot of design constraints that really hamper those plans.

I wonder if cutting 1 Traxos for something like Weatherlight or Karn to test it out seems good. They're both great in the mirror too but are excellent vs control.

There was a lot of good theory there. Thanks.

I played against Vintage KCI in a league a few weeks ago, right after Matt Nass’s first top 8. Here's an album of the board state after all three games.

Did you consider Slash Panther?

If we're going to get REAL pedantic about this ... it should be 1 [[Polluted Delta]], 1 [[Scalding Tarn]], 1 [[Misty Rainforest]] because of the possible appearance of Spyglass/[[Pithing Needle]] 😄

But if you end up running [[Mountain]] in the board the on-color fetches are probably a lot better!

I wouldn't discount the increased importance of the workshop mirror. A deck that cuts 4 Wires for 4 threats is going to have a big edge against a Workshop deck that doesn't. Even if Wire was better against, say, Mentor and Outcome (and I'm not sure it is), it might still be the least-risky card to cut in order to get an edge in the mirror.

I suspect this has been correct for years, and is just being discovered now, rather than a reaction to some new card pool or metagame change.

After more testing, I have come to this updated list. The disclaimer is that I admit that mono-brown stax is probably a much better deck. However, once I again, i'm challenging myself to optimize Red Shops.

Some things i've noticed:

I took out Tangle Wire. In the current meta, I feel like it's not good enough. The beauty of shops is that because we are a hate deck, we can tailor our hate pieces to the meta. Eventually, I may put Tangle Wire back in but right now, I think Ensnaring Bridge gets the nod.

I've replaced Shattering Spree in the SB with By Force. By Force is an amazing card hold cow.

I'm currently testing Karn. I really like Sundering Titan, but I feel like he's too unreliable without a Welder. Some other fatties I want to test are Razormane Masticore, Triskelion, or Wurmcoil Engine.

Most shop decks have 1 piece of card advantage. This is usually Coercive Portal or Bottled Cloister. I chose Uba Mask, due to it's synergy with Welders and Bazaar.

I really want to find room for either 1 Buried Ruins or 1 Inventor's Fair. The cuts are hard though. I also want to do -1 Goblin Welder and +1 Phyrexian Revoker. Revoker is REALLY good.

So, here is the list:

// Vintage Red Shops 2.0

// 60 Maindeck
// 30 Artifact
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Sol Ring
1 Trinisphere
1 Chalice of the Void
4 Sphere of Resistance
2 Null Rod
3 Crucible of Worlds
3 Smokestack
1 Mana Crypt
4 Thorn of Amethyst
3 Ensnaring Bridge
1 Uba Mask

// 8 Creature
3 Goblin Welder
1 Lodestone Golem
3 Phyrexian Revoker
1 Karn, Silver Golem

// 22 Land
4 Mishra's Workshop
3 Bazaar of Baghdad
3 Barbarian Ring
3 Mountain
4 Wasteland
1 Strip Mine
1 Tolarian Academy
3 Ancient Tomb

// 15 Sideboard
// 7 Artifact
SB: 2 Tormod's Crypt
SB: 4 Grafdigger's Cage
SB: 1 Null Rod

// 2 Creature
SB: 2 Wurmcoil Engine

// 3 Land
SB: 3 The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale

// 3 Sorcery
SB: 3 By Force

Any concern about the presence of Animation Module turning on your opponent's Mental Missteps game one, when they would otherwise be dead?

@vaughnbros that actually makes a lot of sense. Maybe thorn is the better choice.

@Winterstar

I don't really see the purpose of it. You have a really lose, almost unwinable matchup va dredge because of it.

Switching roles is cool if you juke your opponent into playing stuff that is bad when you switch. But changing from control to Agro shops doesn't have many advantages to it except maybe in the Oath of druids matchup.

Here are the two lists I would consider playing right now, and they are completely different decks:

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/vintage-mud-3/

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/ensnaring-vintage/

You are right, I didn't expressed me well. I meant that for any successful deck, there is another that can win it, so there is an equilibrium that prevents having an absolute dominant archetype. On the other hand the point of equilibrium shifts depending on how people prepare their decks against others. If people want to punish blue decks, non-blue decks will improve. Same for other cases.