Vintage Stax deck

From MTG Salvation Wiki

Stax refers to a number of Vintage archetypes. Common elements include Mishra's Workshop and numerous artifact sources of mana. Stax is often referred to as a prison deck because of artifacts like Smokestack, Tangle Wire, and Sphere of Resistance which restrict the opponent's ability to play spells and keep permanents in play. These permanents, often considered symmetrical, become almost asymmetrical in Stax as it plays a considerably higher number of permanents than many other decks in the format, thereby allowing it to maintain a solid mana base while destroying the opponent's. Common "finishers" for the deck include Karn, Silver Golem.

A common variant of the deck popularized by Robert Vroman, Uba Stax adds Uba Mask as an additional method of limiting the opponent's play options. Uba Mask increases the effectiveness of otherwise problematic draw engines like Bazaar of Baghdad while forcing control decks to use the cards they "draw" during the same turn, thereby greatly reducing the effectiveness of countermagic.