It’s been many years since Smokestack has been a playable card in Legacy. This card has been a powerhouse in Vintage, providing the ability to aggressively prevent your opponents from accumulating enough permanents to mount a substantive offense. It’s possible the mana in Legacy isn’t quite fast enough to power out expensive lock pieces, or Legacy decks are more likely to deploy permanents too quickly rather than casting powerful spells. Despite Stax being a weaker archetype in Legacy than in Vintage, there will always be players who relish the idea of making sure their opponents can’t do anything:

Metalworker Stax ? Legacy | SaffronOlive

• Creatures (4)
• 4 Metalworker

• Artifacts (31)
• 1 Powder Keg
• 1 Staff of Domination
• 2 Bottled Cloister
• 2 Mind Stone
• 3 Ratchet Bomb
• 3 Smokestack
• 3 Trinisphere
• 4 Chalice of the Void
• 4 Crucible of Worlds
• 4 Ensnaring Bridge
• 4 Mox Diamond

• Lands (25)
• 1 Drownyard Temple
• 1 Gods' Eye, Gate to the Reikai
• 1 Karakas
• 3 Buried Ruin
• 3 Inventors' Fair
• 4 Ancient Tomb
• 4 City of Traitors
• 4 Mishra's Factory
• 4 Wasteland

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Coercive Portal
• 1 Tormod's Crypt
• 1 The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
• 2 Pithing Needle
• 3 Phyrexian Revoker
• 3 Faerie Macabre
• 4 Lodestone Golem

Buy This Deck

It’s been a long time since this archetype has been seriously considered, and things have changed substantially in that time. The addition of Metalworker to the format fundamentally change how this deck can play out. Metalworker gives you the ability to play multiple lock pieces in a single turn, or to activate expensive abilities like Inventors' Fair and Buried Ruin and still cast your follow-up play. Given you’ll often be playing from behind, this ability to generate either multiple pieces of interaction or one particularly high-impact lock piece is of critical importance. The inclusion of Ensnaring Bridge also means you want the ability to consistently empty your hand to lock your opponent out of combat.

Another huge change is the inclusion of Buried Ruin and Inventors' Fair. These spell lands combine with Crucible of Worlds to ensure you never run out of gas; a clean solution to a problem Smokestack decks have struggled with since their inception. In the absence of Metalworker, this engine is merely cute and inefficient. With Metalworker in the mix though, it becomes a powerful way to ensure your opponent can never break out of your lock.

Looming over all of this is the card Smokestack. This card plays many roles in this deck. It can be the final nail in the coffin against an opponent who has struggled to assemble 3 mana sources to fight through Trinisphere. It can slowly eat away at the boards of creature decks locked under Ensnaring Bridge. Or you can run out Smokestack when you’re behind and just crank up the counters and hope your ability to break the symmetry of Smokestack means your opponent runs out of resources first. Drownyard Temple and Gods' Eye, Gate to the Reikai are the best two ways to make sure you get multiple permanents out of a single card for the purposes of Smokestack.

If you’re looking to play protracted games where your goal is to make sure your opponent can do absolutely nothing while you wait to draw your Mishra's Factory, this seems like an exciting shell to do it in. You have the tools to steal games against every deck in the format, and the inclusion of Inventors' Fair means you can do a fair amount of customizing and toolboxing for your particular metagame with things like Torpor Orb, Spellskite, and much more.