Magic’s eternal formats are, for the most part, slow to change. Modern has become an unofficial rotating format thanks to the Horizons sets, but Legacy and Vintage remain locked mostly in the past. The broken cards from the dawn of Magic are so good that it’s hard for anything new to break in. That said, on rare occasions, a card from a Standard set hits just the right notes to do so. This week, Scrawling Crawler has managed to do just that in Vintage. This looked like a straight-to-Commander card at first glance, but apparently it has the goods to sit alongside the Power Nine in decklists.
Scrawling Crawler In Vintage Worskhops?!
Specifically, Scrawling Crawler has been seeing play in one of the oldest and most popular decks in Vintage: Workshops. Both crK and CrazyDiamond513 have piloted lists including full playsets of this feisty Phyrexian to 5-0 Vintage League finishes over the past couple of weeks. These are pretty crazy numbers all round. Seeing four copies of a new card in Vintage is unusual in itself, but it’s even more unusual for such a list to actually perform well.
That said, Crawler is joining a very powerful deck at a base level. Workshops has been a top-tier deck in the format pretty much since its inception. For the uninitiated, it’s essentially an artifact-based Combo deck. Using untap effects like Manifold Key and Voltaic Key alongside fast mana like the titular Mishra’s Workshop and Grim Monolith, it generates absurd amounts of mana early. It can then leverage that mana to dig for its primary win condition: Time Vault.
With this card and one of your untap keys out, you can take infinite turns, winning the game pretty much any way you see fit. There are many different versions of Workshops out there, each running different sets of threats to capitalize on once the time loop is assembled. Some run Affinity Fliers like Thought Monitor, some prefer the scaling antics of Patchwork Automaton. Scrawling Crawler fills in the role of one of these game-ending threats. It does so surprisingly well, too, given how unassuming it looks on the surface.
Some Surprising Synergies
First of all, Scrawling Crawler is perfectly suited to Vintage Workshops based on its typing and cost alone. As an artifact creature, it synergizes with all the other artifact nonsense the deck is trying to do. It won’t interrupt your Mystic Forge draw chain, for instance, and you can cast it turn one off of a Mishra’s Workshop. This gives it a solid head start in the strategy.
Second, it’s life loss on draw ability is hugely relevant in Vintage. This is a format where you can draw three cards for one blue mana via Ancestral Recall. Card draw is common, in other words, and this card punishes it heavily. Pair it with a Timetwister and you can immediately dome your opponent for seven.
Having Crawler in play not only makes your own draw double as burn in many cases, but also makes your opponent’s draw a lot worse. Since it causes loss of life and not damage, it even gets around The One Ring’s protection, which is often quite relevant.
Crawler is also an incredibly neat win condition alongside Time Vault. Where regular attacking creatures may come up against roadblocks like Ensnaring Bridge, Crawler can kill your opponent just by sitting around since it gives your opponent a draw on your upkeep. This does give them more chances to find interaction, but you’ll get twice as many chances to find responses, so it balances out.
It’s also worth noting how good Crawler is early game, pre-combo. It can come down immediately via your fast colorless mana, then dig you into your combo pieces later. With all of that taken into account, it’s no surprise that Crawler is seeing four-of play in League-winning lists.
