Much Abrew: Teaching Arena Zoomers about Painter's Servant (Timeless)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! Painter's Servant is an incredibly cool card. The two-drop turns everything into a color of our choice, which looks pretty useless at first glance but actually opens up some super-powerful combos! The card just came to Magic Arena for the first time as a Lorwyn Eclipsed Special Guest, so today, we're heading to Timeless to teach some Arena Zoomers the power of Painter! What crazy things can the artifact creature do? Is it actually strong enough for the super-degenerate Timeless format? Will Arena Zoomers even know what we're trying to do? Let's get to the video and find out!
Much Abrew: Painter
Discussion
- Record-wise, we finished 8-6 with Painter, good for a solid 57% match-win percentage.
- So, what are we actually trying to do with Painter's Servant in Timeless? The deck's goal is simple: get Painter's Servant on the battlefield alongside Grindstone, a weird old artifact that mills someone two cards for three mana. But if those cards share a color, we get to repeat the process. With a Painter's Servant on the battlefield making everything a color of our choice, a single Grindstone activation wins us the game on the spot by milling our opponent's entire deck!
- The biggest challenge of building around Painter's Servant was figuring out what color the deck wanted to be. Since both of our combo pieces are colorless, the possibilities are literally endless. My first attempt was mono-red since there's an old Mono-Red Painter deck in Legacy, but I ran into two problems. First, some of the coolest Legacy tricks (like Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast being able to blow up or counter anything with a Painter's Servant on the battlefield) don't exist in Timeless. Second, the mono-red version of the deck was really bad at protecting Painter's Servant, which led to several games where we assembled the combo only to have it fizzled by a Fatal Push or Swords to Plowshares. It also seems possible to put the combo into some sort of blue-based artifact deck, but it isn't as appealing without Urza's Saga to tutor up Grindstone. Eventually, I realized that mono-black offered a ton of potential for a few reasons. So, why Mono-Black Painter?
- First, mono-black is great at protecting the combo, thanks to discard from cards like Thoughtseize and Grief.
- Second, black is really good at finding the combo, thanks to tutors like Wishclaw Talisman, Demonic Tutor, and Tezzeret, Cruel Captain (which I know is colorless, but it's especially good in black decks because of Dark Ritual letting you cast it on Turn 1). It also offers Necropotence alongside The One Ring, so if we can't tutor up our combo pieces directly, we can just spam card draw until we find them.
- Third, black has the best fast mana. Dark Ritual allows us to play Tezzeret on Turn 1, and we also get Chrome Mox and Ancient Tomb as backup fast mana. With an absolutely nutty draw, it's possible for us to win the game on Turn 1! If you think about how Painter's Servant and Grindstone work, we need six mana to win the game all in one turn: two for Painter's Servant, one for Grindstone, and then three to activate Grindstone. In theory, a hand of two Dark Rituals, a Swamp, Chrome Mox, Painter's Servant, Grindstone, and any black card to pitch to Chrome Mox offers exactly enough mana for the Turn 1 win! While this isn't especially likely in practice, it does show just how explosive the fast mana makes the deck, and winning by Turn 2 or 3 isn't that difficult.
- The end result is a combo deck that is fast, explosive, and—thanks to all of the tutors and card draw—pretty consistent too!
- As far as changes I'd make to the deck now that I've played it a bunch, I'm not really sold on Necropotence in the deck, as strange as that sounds. We don't really have a way to gain back life, which means Necro sometimes leads to some awkward situations where we play it, draw a bunch of cards, and lose a bunch of life, but still can't combo and essentially lock ourselves out of being able to draw more in the future. On the other hand, Tezzeret, Cruel Captain really, really impressed me. The ability to untap an artifact is actually pretty busted in a deck with artifact lands and Chrome Mox. Plus, being able to double-activate The One Ring each turn is bonkers, and it can always tutor up Grindstone when we need it. If I were building the deck today, I'd cut the two Necros for two more copies of Tezzeret. The card felt that good.
- So, should you play Painter in Timeless? I think the answer is yes. While I don't think the deck is the new best deck in the format or anything like that, I do think it has the power to be a real deck in the format. It's fast enough to keep up with the brokenness of Timeless, can disrupt the opponent with discard, and draws a ton of cards. I'd probably put it in the Dark Depths tier of Timeless, as another new combo deck that is strong and worth building around. But Timeless has so many of these decks that it's hard for one to really stand out above the rest of the field.
- Oh yeah, one last thing: I hope Wizards adds some of the cool old color hosers to Arena. While the combo is sweet, there are so many weird shenanigans for Painter's Servant (like the Pyroblast / Hydroblast trick we talked about before), but they just don't exist on Arena at the moment. Hopefully, we get some of them in upcoming Anthologies because once we do, Painter's Servant will be even funnier (and likely stronger too!).
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
