A History of Timeless Painter
History
Painter's Servant and Grindstone form one of the most elegant two-card combos in Magic's history. Painter's Servant names a color, causing every card everywhere to become that color in addition to its other colors. Grindstone then mills two cards at a time, but since each pair now shares a color — the one Painter named — the process chains indefinitely until the opponent's library is empty. The combo has been a Legacy fixture for years, where it also enables the one-mana hate pieces Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast to answer any spell in the game by naming blue. With Painter's Servant now available in Timeless, the archetype has found a new home, and multiple color variants have emerged around the same core two cards.
The Printings That Made It Possible
The infrastructure to support a two-card artifact combo has existed in Timeless for some time. We have had Demonic Tutor in its restricted capacity, a variety of medium cost tutors such as Fabricate, and your classic Karn, the Great Creator Karn-boards. What was missing was Painter's Servant itself. Once it got printed into MTG Arena, some of the Legacy variants have become testable. We've tried all 5 mono-colored variants, to figure out what works and what doesn't.
White Painter
White Painter can be built as an artifact synergy or hatebears shell. The latter uses Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Archon of Emeria, and Esper Sentinel to slow opponents down while the deck assembles its two pieces. The former also utilizes Esper Sentinel alongside Oswold Fiddlebender and Enlightened Tutor to provides reliable access to both of our combo pieces. In a metagame full of spell-heavy combo strategies like most of the eternal formats, the hatebears strategy seems to work well, but in our Timeless metagame, we have to contend with fast graveyard combos, meaning that our artifact strategy lets us be a bit more aggressive while searching for our proactive combo.
Blue Painter
Blue Painter leans more into the artifact gameplan, with synergy cards including Emry, Lurker of the Loch and Urza, Lord High Artificier. We can act much faster with the blue affinity shell that exists in Timeless, and the recent card Drix Interlacer can allow us to rip through our deck to find our combo. This deck gives us some game against opposing combo decks, as Force of Negation can stop them and ensure us at least one more turn. Blue Painter rewards technical play and thrives in combo mirrors where its card selection and countermagic can dictate the pace. It is the most interactive of the Painter variants and is additionally well-suited to a controlling metagame.
Black Painter
Black Painter also acknowledges the combo-heavy metagame of the Timeless format, but chooses handhate as its method of controlling the pace of the game. We play a variety of the premier discard spells - Thoughtseize, Inquisition of Kozilek, Grief, while limiting our opponents' graveyard gameplans with Leyline of the Void and Dauthi Voidwalker. Once we disrupt our opponent's gameplan with our aggression, we can find our combo at our leisure, or with the Karnboard or our one-of Demonic Tutor.
Red Painter
Red Painter is the most aggressive variant and the one most directly descended from Legacy Painter. Goblin Engineer tutors either of our combo pieces directly, and Scrap Welder provides an additional body who can reanimate artifacts, albeit with some additional text. We forego Blood Moon effects for having a midgame plan - Fable of the Mirror-Breaker gives us bodies to clog up the board, artifact fodder for our goblin activations, and card draw to dig for the combo. A cool addition is Melded Moxite, another artifact that can act as fodder but gives us some looting based card draw. This deck aims to survive a few attacks of a reanimated threat, then go for its proactive win.
Green Painter
Green Painter is a fun variant that works from within a lands shell. You can assemble Dark Depths + Thespian's Stage if the game calls for it, or go for our namesake gameplan. While this variant doesn't give us much in the way of accelerating the Painter combo, it gives us another axis to work on. It allows us a rewarding play pattern of feigning one combo kill while readying ourselves for another. While opponent strip mines our our lands combo, we can be Exploration-ing out additional lands to hit the 6 mana required to cast and activate our combo. It is a legitimate combo threat capable of going off as early as turn three, and it remains an underexplored corner of the archetype.
Closing Thoughts
Painter's Servant represents another one of the eternal format pillars making its way to Timeless. We are being given more ways to play the game, and additional archetypes we can use to keep the games novel and interesting. This deck is yet another wildcard: powerful enough to threaten any field, but demanding enough in sequencing that will test pilots that want to win with it. Expect Painter variants to remain a fixture of the Timeless metagame as new tutors and artifacts continue to be printed. Two color builds that play a collection of best cards - seemingly Blue-Red if you asked me now, might eventually emerge as the consensus list, but for now, the format is still very open to innovation and deciding which color works best.