Much Abrew: Weapons Manufacturing Control (Modern)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week, we're playing one of the coolest cards from Edge of Eternities—Weapons Manufacturing—but in Modern! The idea is pretty interesting. It's almost a Weapons Manufacturing prison deck where we play Weapons Manufacturing, chain together a bunch of cheap artifacts to make Munitions tokens, and then sacrifice them to keep our opponent's board in check and eventually burn their face! The deck also has some hilariously janky cards, like Reinforced Ronin to trigger Weapons Manufacturing every turn! Can the plan work? Let's get to the video and find out!
Much Abrew: Weapons Manufacturing Control
Discussion
- Record-wise, we finished our league 3-2 with the deck, which is fine but somewhat disappointing considering we started off 3-0 before dropping our last two rounds.
- Weapons Manufacturing is the card that drives the deck; in fact, we don't really have a realistic backup plan for winning without Weapons Manufacturing. The enchantment is that important to our plan.
- Once we get the enchantment on the battlefield, our deck is very good at making Munitions. We've got a bunch of cheap artifacts, like Mishra's Bauble, Mox Opal, Claws of Gix, and Cryogen Relic, all of which make a Munition when they enter. But we got even deeper than that. We're playing a full playset of Reinforced Ronin, a one-mana 2/2 with haste that happens to be an artifact creature and bounces itself back to our hand on our end step, which allows us to make a Munitions token for one mana each turn, whether it can actually attack for damage or not!
- Of course, just making Munitions isn't enough because they don't do anything until they leave the battlefield. We have multiple plans for this. The most consistent is probably Claws of Gix, which can sacrifice a permanent for one mana and can be found by Urza's Saga. But we also have one Greater Gargadon, which can sacrifice an entire board of Munitions for free once it is suspended, and Retract.
- Retract is super interesting in the deck. For one mana, it bounces all of our artifacts back to our hand, which does a couple of important things. First, if we have built up a lethal board of Munitions, Retract can trigger them all for one mana at instant speed, which is great, but it's also a way to make Munitions. You might remember the Puresteel Paladin Combo deck from Modern's yesteryear. Retract was an important piece of it since it would allow you to pick up all of your free equipment and recast them to trigger Puresteel Paladin a bunch more times. Retract can do something similar in our deck, letting us play a Weapons Manufacturing, dump our hand of cheap and free artifacts to make a bunch of Munitions, and then pick up all of our artifacts to play them again to make even more Munitions.
- A brief aside: after playing this deck, I really want to try jamming Weapons Manufacturing into the Puresteel Paladin deck. It actually seems like it could be a solid finisher, and it already works with all of the free equipment and Retracts the deck plays. Will it be good? Who knows, but it seems like it should be fun, at least!
- As for the prison part of the deck, we're playing a full playset of Magus of the Moon in the main deck, which, combined with Weapons Manufacturing's ability to control the board, lets the deck play like a weird control deck in some matchups, where we can disrupt our opponent's mana with Magus of the Moon, shoot down all their creatures with Munitions, and then eventually win the game with direct damage.
- Speaking of direct damage, we've also got both Lightning Bolt and Galvanic Blast, which can let the deck play like a weird burn deck where we can use our Munitions to get our opponent's life total low and then finish our opponent off with a flurry of burn spells. Galvanic Blast is especially strong since all of our artifacts mean it's usually four damage for one mana at instant speed, which is still very far above the curve.
- One note on the mana base. This deck was originally from an infamous small Japanese tournament. I just entered a league with the original version, and while the plan was sweet, the mana base was very wrong. The deck has zero fetch lands and six basic Mountains (along with a bunch of Steam Vents and Spirebluff Canals, alongside Urza's Saga). While a no-fetch basic-heavy mana base can work in Modern, it doesn't work in a Blood Moon deck. If you are playing Blood Moon, you really need fetch lands to fetch up your splash color before the Blood Moon hits the battlefield. And you generally want few Mountains because once the Blood Moon comes down, everything is going to be a Mountain anyway. While fixing the mana did make the deck a bit more expensive, considering that the list is over $1,000 anyway because of Mox Opal, I'm not sure this actually matters in practice.
- As far as changes I'd make to the deck now that we've played it a bunch, I do wonder if it wants more ways to sacrifice Munitions. Technically, we only have four cards that can do it, although we can find Claws of Gix with Urza's Saga. In some games, I felt like I really wanted a second copy of Claws of Gix because our opponent was able to figure out what we were up to and blow up the Claws of Gix before we could sacrifice all of our Munitions, leaving us drawing for two Retracts and a single Greater Gargadon to be able to close out the game.
- So, should you play Weapons Manufacturing Control in Modern? Maybe. In some games, the deck felt incredible; in others, not so much. The biggest issue with the deck is consistency since there's not really a backup for Weapons Manufacturing. The deck was great in games where we drew our namesake enchantment. The deck was much worse in games where we needed to spin our wheels for a few turns while looking for it. It's basically the Heartless Summoning problem, where you build around a card that doesn't have any redundancy and do broken things when you draw it and not much when you don't. While I think the deck is more than strong enough to 5-0 a league or win a FNM, I could see it going the other way as well if you happen to get unlucky and not draw Weapons Manufacturing very often. Still, I found the deck super fun to play, we had some pretty epic matches with it, and we ended up with a winning record. So, consistency issues aside, the deck is a blast and felt pretty competitive!
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.
