I wrote a little bit about tempo as it relates to Workshops.
Vintage is where Magic theory gets pushed to its most abstract and most extreme. Card advantage is not as obvious as commonly thought, but compared to tempo it is rather simple. Nothing shines a light on what tempo means in the game of Magic like Workshops, a deck that makes a convincing argument that something like Thorn of Amethyst is as fundamental an effect as cards like Lightning Bolt or Ancestral Recall.
Presently, Martello Workshops is the only clearly top tier deck in Vintage. At the most recent NYSE, Martello not only consumed more than 60% of Workshop decks but was the single most popular archetype in the entire field by a large margin. Even more broadly defined archetypes such as Grixis measured up to only half Martello’s numbers. Workshops overall also consumes roughly half of Vintage sideboard slots, and it’s no accident that Ingot Chewer is among the most popular creatures in the format. Martello specifically is so widespread that entire other Workshop strategies have sprung up, designed to win the mono-brown mirror.
I was uneasy not having a confident hold on how the deck operated on a fundamental strategic level. I mean I knew how the deck worked. It has a ton of disruption and inhibits its opponents from casting meaningful spells. But it certainly didn’t seem like a prison deck, at least not purely a prison deck. Because we’ve seen those in Vintage, something like Stax, with Smokestack and maindeck Crucible of Worlds, recurring a single Wasteland turn after turn. Martello just is not like that. It has all these aggro moments. It has these giant robots that steal games.
