Summary
Artifact decks are some of the most popular inMagic: The Gathering’sCommander format. There’s nothing better than amassing a huge horde of artifacts, doohickies, and thingumabobs and using them to turn your opponents into a fine paste.
But there are lots of different ways you could build an artifact deck, and artifact decks can be found in a huge number of colours. Before picking your commander, you should think about which colours you’d most like to play.
10Jeskai (Blue/Red/White)
Tokens, Prowess, And Noncreature Spells
Blue, red, and white are, individually, three of the most popular colours for artifacts, but curiously, when they come together, they can take your deck in a very different direction.
By borrowing from white’slove of tokens, you tend to get commanders like Cayth, Famed Mechanist and Tetzin, Gnome Champion who like to pump out large numbers of artifact token creatures. Alternatively, you could get a focus on energy with Dr. Madison Li and Liberty Prime, Recharged.
Because these colours are the three that care the most about noncreature spells, you’ll also often find commanders who aren’t explicitly artifact commanders working nicely. This is why you’ll sometimes see Elsha of the Infinite or Kykar, Wind’s Fury pilot artifact decks.
White is the only one of these three colours to not see more play in a mono-coloured deck. That’s because its go-to cards, like Esper Sentinel, Oswald Fiddlebender and Ethersworn Canonist all fit better when supporting decks with better artifact synergies, rather than being the primary focus.
9Mono-Red
Steal Them, Sacrifice Them
Red loves to be reckless with artifacts, and you’ll often find it sacrificing them for profit, like with Bosh, Iron Golem turning them into direct damage or Slobad, Iron Goblin into mana. Farid, Enterprising Salvager is one of the most versatile of these kinds of commanders, as sacrificing can let goad, buff Farid, or draw cards.
Even outside of the commanders you’ll be doing lots of sacrifice. Trash for Treasure, Goblin Engineer, and Goblin Welder all sacrifice and return artifacts to the battlefield for an element of recursion, and Crime Novelist turns them into +1/+1 counters and red mana.
Of course, red has lost a huge part of its artifact repertoire withthe banning of Dockside Extortionist. But it’s still so easy to play artifacts, or make artifact tokens, that mono-red is likely going to stick around for quite some time.
8Mono-Black
This Is Just The Warhammer 40,000 Necron Deck
Cold, heartless creatures are a big part of black’s identity, which makes its no surprise mono-black artifact decks often focus on artifact creatures.
TheWarhammer 40,000 Necron Commander deckalmost single-handedly catapulted mono-black artifact decks into prominence, with the utterly amazing Imotekh the Stormlord, Szarekh, the Silent King, Trazyn the Infinite and Arakyr the Traveller all being good enough to lead their own decks. They all tend to play with the graveyard or your life total in some way, encouraging sacrifice, self-mill, and recursion to a big degree.
Outside of 40K, almost every black card that sees play in artifact decks is more about creature recursion. This is why these decks like artifact creatures so much; artifact synergy is powerful, creatures powerful, why not combine the two with a Dread Return or Noxious Gearhulk?
7Izzet (Red/Blue)
Cheerio, Old Chap
Curiously, red and blue has a much more straightforward taken on artifacts when white isn’t also involved. Most blue/red decks love playing artifacts, copying them, or drawing cards off them to keep things going, which is why cheerios is such a popular archetype here.
Cheeriosis a deck that uses zero-cost spells to great effect, and Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain is the go-to commander for it. Casting a Chrome Mox, Mox Amber, Mox Opal, or Everflowing Chalice for zero mana and drawing cards can get you major advantage. Alternatively, you may use Shao Jun to tap them for direct damage, Brudiclad to make tokens and turn them into something scary.
These colours also have Enthusiastic Mechanaut, a way to turn one-mana artifacts into cheerios, and Third Path Iconoclast for that hint of noncreature spellslinging that makes Izzet so popular.
6Not-Green (White/Blue/Black/Red)
For When You Have To Have It All
Green is the one colour that hates artifacts, so it’s often kept out of the party. Four-colour commanders are already rare, so your choices for this smattering of colour are slim.
You’re likely going to be playing Breya, Etherium Shaper, which does it all. It makes artifacts on entering, gives you a way to sacrifice them, and gives you access to the four colours that most care about artifacts. While you could opt for Akiri and Silas Renn, or Bjorna and Wenrog Friends Forever, neither of them are as terrifyingly efficient as Breya.
It isn’t a clever or nuanced way of building a deck, as you are just smushing together a pile of everything each individual colour can do on their own. But you do have a few multicolour options that aren’t as common anywhere else, like Jan Jenson, Chaos Crafter.
5Boros (Red/White)
The Classic Voltron Colours
Red and white are a curious colour pair for artifacts, because there are two main ways to build it.
The first is the one everyone knows and loves: Voltron. Building up a huge number of equipment pieces, attaching them all to one creature, and swinging in with a gigantic, game-ending commander always feels great. Throw in cards like Puresteel Paladin, Embercleave, Sram, Senior Edificer; Reyav, Master Smith; and Akiri, Fearless Voyager, and you’ll be going incredibly tall very quickly.
The second, less well-known way of building Boros was introduced in Strixhaven’s Commander decks: recursion. Osgir, the Reconstructor is still the best commander for this style, but it fits in nicely with red’s sacrifice cards to fill up your graveyard with artifacts and pluck them back. Copy them with Oltec Matterweaver or Cursed Mirror, and you can go much wider than in Voltron decks.
4Grixis (Blue/Black/Red)
Move Over 40K, Doctor Who Reigns Supreme Here
Unlike not-green, Grixis actually has its own identity for artifact decks, and isn’t just a big pile of black, blue, and red cards. That theme, in true Grixis fashion, is ‘massive amounts of value’.
Most Grixis artifact commanders have heaving textboxes of things you may do. Mishra, Eminent One copies them and turns them into creatures, Ashad, the Lone Cyberman copies them through casualty, and Davros, Dalek Creator makes you an artifact token and forces your opponent to choose between you drawing a card or them discarding one if they’ve lost enough life.
Interestingly, Grixis decks don’t tend to use much of the Warhammer 40,000 deck that mono-black does. While it still has red’s Goblin Welder, Audacious Reshapers, and Slobad sacrifice packages, black tends to use more cards like Marionette Master and Dalek Squadron.
It also uses the blue/black Dimir cards, like Baleful Strix and The Cyber-Controller for added value.
3WUBRG (White/Blue/Black/Red/Green)
Throw It All Together
Why make a decision when you could just use everything instead? Five-colour decks are rare for artifacts, as green adds almost nothing to the strategy, but there is one place where they shine: Myr.
Myr are artifact creatures that often have tap abilities, like producing mana. And the best commander for Myr decks is Urtet, Remnant of Memnarch, who rewards you for casting a Myr spell by making another Myr as well.
I once considered making an Urtet Combo deck that only used double-sided lines to combo off of Goblin Charbelcher. It was too much of a glass cannon, so I decided against it.
On top of a critical mass of Myr, like Alloy Myr, Myr Retriever, Hovermyr, and Myr Turbine, green does add a few tools to the deck. It’s mostly the generic good green cards like Heroic Intervention and Beast Within, but Duskmourn also introduced Enduring Vitality, which allows all those Myr to tap for any colour.
2Mono-Blue
Simply The Best
Blue is by far the best single colour for an artifact deck, and some of the scariest artifact commanders are mono-blue. Emry, Lurker of the Loch gives you near-permanent artifact recursion by casting them out of your graveyard, and anybody who has been in a pod with Urza, Lord High Artificer knows how out of hand that deck can get.
Blue is the colour best-equipped to tutor for artifacts, with Whir of Invention, Fabricate, and Trinket Mage. It investigates with Forensic Gadgeteer, or draw cards with, among others, Vedalken Archmage. It can copy artifacts with Phyrexian Metamorph, cheat them into play with Master Transmuter, or go wide with Sharding Sphinx.
Blue is the backbone of most artifact decks, and leaning into it as the only colour in your deck allows you to really go in on its many, many strengths.
1Esper (White/Blue/Black)
As mentioned, blue is an incredibly powerful colour for artifact decks, and backed up by the support of white and blue is taken to a whole other level.
Some of the game’s most iconic artifact commanders are Esper, like Sydri, Galvanic Genius; Alela, Artful Provocateur; Sharuum the Hegemon; and the Silas Renn/Rebbec partner pairing. But regardless of who you pick, they all follow a similar pattern of letting blue do the heavy lifting.
You’ll still be using Etherium Sculptors and Thopter Sky Networks to crank out artifacts, but now you also have access to cards like Losheel, Clockwork Scholar; or Bronze Guardian to protect and recur your artifacts if your opponent somehow gets through your wall of interaction. You also can’t forget about Esper Sentinel, which is one of the best turn-one plays you can make in the entire format.
Magic: The Gathering
Created by Richard Garfield in 1993, Magic: The Gathering (MTG) has become one of the biggest tabletop collectible card games in the world. Taking on the role of a Planeswalker, players build decks of cards and do battle with other players. In excess of 100 additional sets have added new cards to the library, while the brand has expanded into video games, comics, and more.
