Mirrodin Besieged is well and truly upon us, at least in paper land—by the time you've read this, we will have begun to see the impact of the new set in Standard and Legacy at the SCG Open in Indianapolis. And next weekend is the colossal Magic Weekend: Paris—whatever new Standard technology the pro players held back in Indianapolis will be revealed there. The germ of this article began to gnaw at me before we saw any results, and it was all down to the most talked-about card in the set: Blightsteel Colossus.

Now, Old Blighty initially drew the ire of some prominent community members—Patrick Chapin and Geordie Tait most vocally. Mark Rosewater came out to defend the big guy on Twitter, nobody's opinion was altered in the subsequent debate, and everyone moved on with their lives. Following this early slap-fight, people accepted that the card was being printed and started to figure out how they could make use of a prohibitively expensive "I win" spell. It quickly became clear that if your deck can muster that much mana, you would probably rather cast Ulamog, but then some clever cookie thought, "Say, we just had a Polymorph variant printed in Shape Anew, and now we have an artifact worth cheating out! I'm going to put Shape Anew and Blightsteel Colossus in a deck together." About twenty seconds after you thought of this interaction, so did everybody else in the world.

A small subset of those recognizing this interaction (everybody else in the world) actually knocked up some possible deck lists. Here is one that I saw on Facebook from a Wesley Mitchell, and I hope he won't mind my sharing it here:

"U/W Shape Anew"

• Creatures (7)
• 4 Stoneforge Mystic
• 2 Trinket Mage
• 1 Blightsteel Colossus

• Spells (28)
• 4 Master's Call
• 4 Shape Anew
• 1 Darksteel Axe
• 4 Spell Pierce
• 4 Negate
• 3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
• 4 Preordain
• 3 See Beyond
• 1 Jace's Ingenuity

• Lands (25)
• 4 Inkmoth Nexus
• 4 Glacial Fortress
• 4 Celestial Colonnade
• 4 Seachrome Coast
• 6 Island
• 3 Plains

Buy This Deck Export text format

This list is heavily focused on the combo, having four Master's Call, four Inkmoth Nexus, and six tutors to get the one Darksteel Axe out of your deck as targets for Shape Anew, which is also a four-of, as well as four Preordain, three Jace, the Mind Sculptor, three See Beyond, and a singleton Jace's Ingenuity to help you find the combo. My problem with this deck is precisely that it is so combo-focused—without Blightsteel Colossus, most of your cards don't do anything at all. Your opponents can just sandbag their artifact-exiling/bouncing/stealing cards until you go off, and then you are just dead in the water. The other major weakness of this deck is that once you grab your Darksteel Axe, you are possibly top-decking up to six of what might as well be Gray Ogre or Squire. This form of the combo takes up so much space in the deck that there is no real room for a plan B.

Following early brainstorms of this nature, there was a Magic league tournament that was won by a Shape Anew deck. This was sharply different from the above, being U/B first of all, and also being quite close to the U/B control deck that is currently sitting atop the standard heap. Take a look at mr_thompson's list:

"U/B Shape Anew"

• Creatures (7)
• 4 Trinket Mage
• 1 Blightsteel Colossus
• 2 Grave Titan

• Spells (27)
• 1 See Beyond
• 1 Everflowing Chalice
• 2 Go for the Throat
• 4 Shape Anew
• 2 Inquisition of Kozilek
• 3 Duress
• 4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
• 4 Preordain
• 2 Jace Beleren
• 4 Mana Leak

• Lands (26)
• 3 Swamp
• 4 Island
• 3 Inkmoth Nexus
• 4 Creeping Tar Pit
• 4 Drowned Catacomb
• 4 Darkslick Shores
• 3 Tectonic Edge
• 1 Misty Rainforest

Buy This Deck Export text format

This is much closer to a real deck. Here we have just four Trinket Mage finding a single Everflowing Chalice as well as three Inkmoth Nexus as targets, plus the obvious four-of Shape Anew. Apart from that we have the ubiquitous Jace in both flavors, Creeping Tar Pit, Grave Titan, and a hefty disruption suite. I like that it has a lot of ways to protect a resolved Colossus through its targeted discard and cheap counterspells, and that the deck isn't completely dependent on Colossus to win—there is also the old-fashioned Grave Titan to close out games as he always has done.

Running Interference

While Shape Anew has been getting a lot of buzz, I think this strategy has some general weaknesses that will become glaringly obvious if the deck becomes such a factor in the metagame that people start playing specific hate cards. Essentially, for an indestructible, 11-toughness dude, Blightsteel Colossus is surprisingly answerable. Think of any spell that exiles a creature or an artifact, or bounces a creature or an artifact. Think Oust. Think Brittle Effigy. Think Into the Roil. Think Jace, the Mind Sculptor.

Now, think about Mark of Mutiny. Yeah.

These are not fringe answers; these are cards that are already in the main decks and sideboards of popular, existing decks that easily answer your game plan. Disruption cards can certainly help protect your Colossus, but keep in mind that people are going to be trying to disrupt you and enact their own game plans at the same time, and throwing this out there on turn four with your "nut draw" is a massive risk. If you can't combo off quickly and trust in your Colossus to go all the way, is it really worth the trouble when you can just get to six and lay a Titan?

The other problem with Shape Anew is that it really discourages you from running any artifacts besides Colossus, while we are making our way through an artifact block. Check out the incredible artifact tools we have available to us that Shape Anew decks largely have to give up: Sphere of the Suns, Everflowing Chalice, Ratchet Bomb, Phyrexian Revoker, Mox Opal, Brittle Effigy, Contagion Clasp, Prophetic Prism, Crystal Ball, Wall of Tanglecord, Mimic Vat, Palladium Myr, Wurmcoil Engine, Swords of X and Y, Tumble Magnet, Bonehoard, Molten-Tail Masticore, Eldrazi Monument, Precursor Golem, Contagion Engine, Dreamstone Hedron, Mindslaver, Myr Battlesphere . . . and the list goes on.

The Sound Alternative

All of this has convinced me that there is another way to cheat out Blightsteel Colossus that deserves investigation. It both dodges the problems of the Shape Anew plan identified above and is a comparatively compact* combo. This plan is dependent on the premise that an end-of-turn, uncounterable Blightsteel Colossus will result in a significant percentage of game wins.

The key card of this alternative plan is Kuldotha Forgemaster.

First of all, let's consider this card's nuts and bolts in some detail. Starting at the top, it has a mana cost of 5 colorless. This means it can be played in any color deck, which is very important when it comes time to find a home for the combo. Five mana is not an insignificant cost, but the expectation is if we untap with Forgemaster we will win the game, which puts it in a similar position to Baneslayer Angel. Moving down the card, we can see on the type line it's an Artifact Creature—Construct. While being a Construct doesn't have much in the way of advantages or disadvantages, being an artifact is significant—Forgemaster can be killed by cards like Shatter—as is being a creature, which makes Forgemaster vulnerable to creature removal like Doom Blade. There are benefits offsetting these vulnerabilities: Being an artifact he can be used for any artifact-sacrificing abilities we may have in our deck (hint, hint), and being a creature he can attack and block, among many other things.

Skipping to the bottom, Forgemaster's power/toughness is 3/5. Three power is pretty hefty on a utility guy, letting Forgemaster kill a lot of small creatures in combat, and 5 toughness is basically 1,000 toughness considering the damage-based removal that is commonly played—it dodges Lightning Bolt, Flame Slash, Slagstorm, and Pyroclasm, and it will take a supercharged Black Sun's Zenith to kill him. Of course, we aren't playing a 5-mana 3/5 dude for his body, useful though it may be. The real reason we want to play Forgemaster is for his ability: Tap, sacrifice three artifacts: Search your library for an artifact card and put it onto the battlefield. Then shuffle your library.

Check it out: You get to shuffle every turn! Even more than that, though, for the low cost of sacrificing three artifacts—possibly including your fearless Forgemaster—you get to search your library for any artifact card and put it straight into play. The card we will generally be searching for is, of course, none other than Blightsteel Colossus.

The advantage of doing this at instant speed at the end of your opponent's turn should be self-evident: It dodges sorcery-speed answers, and any instant-speed answers they can't pay for without an untap step, or that may be their top card. Of course, they can generally use those same answers on the Forgemaster himself, but they are much less effective. A Forgemaster in our hand is merely a delay, while a Blightsteel Colossus in the hand of our Shape Anew deck is a dead card and turns off half of our other cards. A Mark-of-Mutinied Forgemaster is 4 damage, as opposed to instant death.

The answers to an instant-speed Blightsteel Colossus are few and far between—Condemn, Dispense Justice, Blinding Mage, or Brittle Effigy in play—and if we have a second in our deck and they do survive the first, we can just tap the Forgemaster next turn and do it over again. This might not be necessary, but it is certainly an option. The best part is that once you've untapped with Forgemaster, you've untapped with Forgemaster—on the turn you activate him, you have full access to your mana for counterspells, removal, or anything else you like.

On the Shoulders of Signets

I hear you: "Hold on a cotton-pickin' minute, we need three artifacts! You said this combo was compact!" Well, it's true, we do need at least two other artifacts in addition to our Forgemaster to use his ability. He isn't terribly picky about what artifacts we're using, however. People are playing artifacts in their decks already simply because they're good cards—Everflowing Chalice, Mox Opal, Tumble Magnet, Ratchet Bomb, and Wurmcoil Engine have all seen notable success in Standard tournaments, and this is bound to increase with a bunch of interesting new artifacts joining the format. Sphere of the Suns leaps out as a useful partner to Chalice, accelerating us into Forgemaster a turn early. Peace Strider is a potential option for holding off the hyperaggressive decks. Phyrexian Revoker can play disruption bear until the Forgemaster needs his components elsewhere. Inkmoth Nexus will happily transform into an artifact on command, while filling a land slot. If at any point you find yourself putting a bunch of artifacts in your deck just because they're good cards, keep Forgemaster in mind. I'm not sure what this threshold is, but with four Forgemasters and four Inkmoth Nexus to be added for sure, I don't expect it will be terribly high. Perhaps it's a Metalcraft beat-down deck, or a control deck with artifact accelerators, Nexus, and Revoker. Keep an eye on U/B Tezzeret control decks, which are playing more and more artifacts to take advantage of the excellent new Planeswalker—for those of you who like to fool around with decks, it might be possible to staple the Forgemaster combo right onto this already solid control deck. Mike Flores wrote about "mashup decks" a few weeks back—things like Thopter/Depths or R/U/G Pester/Twin, where a combo is basically grafted on to an existing deck—and I think this is where Forgemaster could potentially have an impact.

Of course, if one were so inclined, one could make a much more combo-focused deck around Forgemaster. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but there are plenty of tools that are useful to the combo that aren't so good in a vacuum. Shimmer Myr helps you play around counter magic and sorcery-speed answers (i.e., Jace) by end-of-turning your Forgemaster, and he will happily fuel the Colossus-searching. Master's Call gives you the two required artifacts at instant speed for the cost of a single card. Ichor Wellspring is very cute—possibly too cute? Myr Welder is even cuter, but worth keeping in mind as another enabler.

The notable thing about all of the enablers above, excepting Master's Call, is that they are entirely colorless. This combo can be slotted into a Green deck, a Red deck, or even a White/Blue/Black deck, as long as it has the inclination to play a few artifacts! Block is the obvious format where people are playing a lot of artifacts. I have tried Forgemaster in my Grand Architect Blue deck, and he was nice, but the biggest thing you can grab in Scars is Myr Battlesphere, and with a Grand Architect deck, you don't have much trouble getting to 7 mana in the first place. The big problem with block is that people are also expecting other people to play a lot of artifacts, and so they've stacked their own decks with artifact removal.

This is why I think Standard may be the best place to fit our duo, as the removal there—especially with all the excitement around Go For the Throat—is poorly equipped to deal with Forgemaster. I am actually a bit excited about trying him in extended because of Thousand-Year Elixir. Turn two, Chalice; turn three, Elixir; turn four, Forgemaster with pseudo-haste—gives you a potential Blightsteel Colossus attacking on turn five! This is probably too cute with all the Cryptic Commands running around, but it's fun to think about at least. No deck lists yet as I won't be able to test until we see Besieged online, but I wanted to get this idea out there as I think it is at least as good as Shape Anew, which is getting quite a lot of undue buzz. It may not be as good as, you know, just getting to 6 and laying a Titan, but I certainly want to try it out. Let me know what you think of the combo in the comments or on Twitter; any suggestions or constructive criticism are most welcome.

Further Reading

If your interest has been piqued, there are a couple of other articles that you might like to follow up on. First is Geordie Tait's discussion of his own pre-Besieged Forgemaster deck, which he had some success with in the two-man queues. Second is Mike Flores How to Make a Mashup, which should just be emerging from StarCity Premium as you're reading this.