Exploring Sewer Technology in Vintage MTG

Howdy folks! It's time yet again for another edition of Vintage 101! I'm your host, and this week we're going to be taking a look at how well Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is shaping up in Vintage the first week, and we're going to be trying something new with Challenge recaps to see how it looks.

Sewer Tech One of the cards I was ultimately very curious if people would try out this week in the first week of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being legal on MTGO was none other than Sewer-veillance Cam. This card, when combined with Goblin Welder and a third artifact does some really goofy things. Basically, all you have to do to get started is either sacrifice an artifact with Goblin Welder to get back the Cam, or vice-versa. Cam's triggered ability will untap Goblin Welder, which allows you to keep swapping artifacts. At this point, you basically have infinite mana with any Mox, infinite draws with cards like Arcum's Astrolabe or Melded Moxite, and the ability to just end the game with Legion Extruder. You can even go a step further with some lists and play Chaos Defiler and blow up all of your opponent's nonland permanents (even if that permanent has hexproof/shroud).

It's a pretty groovy setup, and I was not disappointed to see a few results already from these types of decks. It's incredibly interesting to see how things might evolve for this card going forward. Goblin Welder tends to lend people towards Painter as a combo, but I actually sort of love having an artifact-centric combo deck in the format that doesn't actually need to push a Null Rod off the table in order to win, and it's also super sweet to have Goblin Welder as a card again in Vintage in a capacity where this could actually be pretty good. I especially am thrilled to see how good this makes Hexing Squelcher, and I would absolutely say at bare minimum play two copies in any deck with this kind of combo.

Another thing that might be worth exploring, too, is looking at cards like Meteor Sword as a way to just destroy all of your opponent's permanents and then be able to just go off and demolish your opponent however you like. It's a fun idea to think about for sure. I certainly hope to see more of how this combo might look in the next few weeks, because I do think it's something really worth looking into, and it's also superb to see a deck that doesn't automatically need to play Lurrus to be good, but it can if it really wants to.

Weekly MTGO Recap We're going to keep doing the data recap each week like we started in last week's article. This week I am going to try something a little different in that I'm only going to look at an event in more detail if it looks interesting to cover. This is a bit of a trial so if this is something you find you like or don't like, please let me know in the comments. The overall goal of this is to test whether this makes things feel like it's less "decklist-dumpy" and more of an opportunity for more discussion and less repetition.

As always, thanks to Justin Gennari for his community supported data and weekly recaps. We had the following events this past week:

• Vintage Challenge 32 3/5/2026 - 40 Players
• Vintage Challenge 32 3/6/2026 - 36 Players
• Vintage Challenge 32 3/7/2026 - 42 Players
• Vintage Challenge 32 3/8/2026 - 37 Players

Overall, this means that there were around 155 total decklist entries for this past week. This is generally within the range of events that I see week to week. With that said, let's look at some graphical data for the past week.

As we kind of expected, a good majority of the past week's format was mostly Lurrus-based. This week was up a little from 58 copies to 63 copies of a Lurrus deck. The top played deck of the past week was Lurrus PO at 27 copies (down from 30 copies last week). Its overall win rate was fairly poor at about 46.8% non-mirror. Last week, this deck did okay enough at around 50.8% non-mirror, but slipped down this past week. I think players have figured out appropriate ways of beating this deck and how to sideboard against it.

Raker Shops was pretty popular at 26 copies (up from 21 copies last week), and its overall non-mirror win rate was around 58.6% for the week, which is incredibly solid. Esper Lurrus came next at 19 copies (up from 11 copies last week), and it too had a pretty solid-looking week at a 56.9% non-mirror win rate.

There were definitely some shifts from last week, so we will have to continue to see how it holds or whether it holds at all into the next week and beyond.