Shops is the tempo/prison deck you're imagining the format is missing. Mishra's Workshop and Ancient Tomb are very obviously what you need to have to facilitate playing 30 creatures.

They can push non-artifact creatures ad infinitum, if the broken mana's not there, they're all just marginal sidegrades over each other and you can't get them into play fast enough. Archetype needs at least Caverns 5-8. The current Survival decks are good evidence of this; they're using Bazaar as mana accelerant broken enough to facilitate a hatebear gameplan. No accident the most successful Thalia decks of late use either Ancient Tomb/Eldrazi Temple or Bazaar of Baghdad.

@stuart Nah that splash is all about Energy Flux

@smmenen As you well know, the issue then becomes that any subsequent printing can undo the effect of the narrow restriction and push Shops back to a problematic place. You then have an unnecessary card on the restricted list (the one you hit to tailor) and the need to add another.

And this is arguably what happened when Walking Ballista (or Fleetwheel Cruiser or Thought-Knot Seer) was printed. The meaning of the Chalice and then Lodestone restrictions was destroyed by new printings. To restore the meaning of those restrictions, you had to narrowly tailor again, by adding Thorn to the list. We now have add three Modern-legal artifacts to the Vintage restricted list in as many years and are discussing adding another.

While I agree the strategy of narrow tailoring can be effective at achieving desired metagame percentages in the short term, it leads to restricted list inflation in the long term, as we have seen.

Can a judge confirm that this does not remove the artifact spell restriction of Workshop mana?

Pitches to Force, a big upside compared to many other Oath fatties.

@bazaarofbaghdad If it's not playable, then it's irrelevant. If it is playable, then doesn't it just make Misstep more important because it stops the T1 mana dork you're using to accelerate this out t2?

I'm talking about Moxen and Mishra's Workshop. You're talking about Hedron Archive. You're correct identifying Chandra and Bloodbraid as belonging to the latter category.

@hierarchnoble No, Bloodbraid is not acceleration the same way Dark Petition and Chandra, Torch of Defiance, are not acceleration.

Every deck in the format needs efficient mana acceleration beyond moxen.

• MUD has Tomb and Workshop
• Dredge has Bazaar
• Storm has Rituals
• Blue decks have Force of Will (turns all blue cards into rituals considering the fair cost of Counterspell is UU)
• Fish/Hatebears have Spirit Guides and DRS/Hierarch

The intrinsic problem of the super-archetype is that its acceleration isn't as good as the other pillars. (All the reason why White Eldrazi was the best Thalia deck the format has seen.) Every designer who has spent time in splashing around with these decks comes to appreciate this fundamental flaw.

Keep on fighting the good fight.