‘I’m playing Urza’. This is the declaration that has sunk many Commander pods before the game’s even started, as Urza, Lord High Artificer is revealed in the Command Zone and all are led to shudder. As one of only two Commanders currently sitting squarely on the Game Changer list while not being technically banned, both Wizards of the Coast and the playerbase at large are aware of his power, on top of the slog of stax gameplay that comes from Urza’s proper utilization. Still, based on power and relevance to the lore, MH1 Urza is the most popular Monoblue Commander, by a margin of nearly 7000 decks on EDHREC—nothing short of a banning would come close to toppling the king from his seat.
Yet, in The Brothers’ War, we got a chance to see everyone’s favorite eugenicist war criminal throughout many stages in his life, and the earliest depiction of the man who would be Urza is also a Monoblue Artifact-matters Commander, and one that leads to absurdly fun play sequences without the whole of your play group feeling bad. This is Urza, Powerstone Prodigy, bringing discard and ramp to a color sorely lacking representation in those themes. If your aim is to have more mana than the Green player, and churn through cards faster than the Red player, kid Urza might just be your guy. In order to actually get there though, we’ll need to set up reusable discard outlets, find ways to untap our Powerstone Tokens, and even just make sure we’re always able to pitch an artifact. So that we can do so, this strategy makes use of a subset Blue is getting better at tutoring with every set release: Mana Value 1 Artifacts. With Tezzeret, Cruel Captain newly released in Edge of Eternities, on top of other Artifact synergies from the set, now’s the perfect time to assemble our cabinet of gizmos and doodads looting our way to victory. Here’s a deck to hand to the one person at your FNM who refuses to drop Lord High Artificer: It’s time to dive into Urza, Powerstone Prodigy.
“Discard One or More Artifact Cards…”
Unlike a lot of artifacts-matter Commanders, lil Urza is more concerned with them leaving your hand than entering the battlefield. When you do discard an artifact for the first time each turn, however, you’re rewarded in the form of a Powerstone Token; unlike Treasure, these stick around as functionally just vanilla mana rocks, with one big caveat. The mana they produce is limited from being used for non-Artifact Spells…oh the horror. This of course means we can use it to pay for abilities, cast artifacts, and more, but notably without a means of translating it like Basalt Monolith this spare mana cannot be pumped into things like your interactive suite of Instants & Sorceries, barring the Improvise on cards like Archway of Innovation or Whir of Invention. Still, when about half our deck is Artifacts, we’ll not have issues using this extra mana, nor getting plenty of triggers from Urza.
That being said, while the ceiling on Urza is getting 2 Sol Rings’ worth of mana rocks every turn cycle, we still need to find a way to discard an Artifact per turn, across a 4-player round. Our Commander can help, being able to pay {1} to loot by tapping, but that’s just a single Instant-speed discard trigger—we need far more than that. Enter, your suite of discard enablers. The obvious suspects are here, with Ledger Shredder and Teferi, Master of Time, but we’re on a great number of more niche options as well. None are as perfectly primed for this strategy as Lumengrid Augur, who literally does exactly what we want (and for whom newly created Powerstones can pay for, if they get untapped), but Ghostly Pilferer is quietly just as good if not better. In Commander, you’re basically guaranteed to draw from each player for Pilferer, given your opponents are bound to cast their Commanders, and while the discard doesn’t do anything, if used on opposing turns, it’s at least free.
Immobilizing Ink is on the verge of being too cute, but if you squint, it turns our Commander into a slipshod Lumengrid Augur. Tap to loot by paying {1}, then untap by discarding the next turn, tap to loot, you get the idea. In spite of not being a +1/+1 Counter deck, Mindless Automaton gets a slot as well, as it has an unlimited discard outlet that requires we pay {1}, is an Artifact, and can cash out as needed. In order to pay for all these cards, however, we need to find a way to generate that single pip of generic mana each turn, and as Urza the kid makes tapped Powerstone Tokens, he’s no help without another piece to the puzzle. With that in mind, let’s dip into our mana value 1 toolbox, and talk about a card already familiar to the Modern players in the audience: Amulet of Vigor.
No Ability Like Repeatability
The only way baby Urza accrues enough value to be worthwhile as a Commander is by getting at least 2-3 triggers each turn cycle. Without accessing additional mana on each players’ turn, that often means you’re spending mana that could be used to develop your board state at Sorcery-speed on Instant speed looting, which only impacts the gamestate insofar as creating a mana rock. That has decent value in the early game, where you’d welcome paying 2 mana for a Signet-like, but quickly becomes something you’d much prefer to do for free after the point where those mana rocks are woven between haymakers, if at all. With that said, we do have a few ways of unlocking the delicious nectar of mana within the Powerstones generated each turn, the most alluring of which is Amulet of Vigor. For a single mana, this means every single one of your looting effects that costs {1} is now mana-neutral across the turn cycle, and the vast majority are card advantage-neutral as well. This can also be achieved, to even greater effect, with Unwinding Clock, which allows you to go mana-positive and quickly get out of hand if left unchecked. My favorite effect for this purpose, however, is a bit more humble. Not many Mana Value 3 rocks are playable, especially with a 3 mana Commander, but Victory Chimes does exactly what we need it to do, while not being as menacing as Unwinding Clock. Moreover, that mild political aspect should not be forgotten in EDH, as the phrase ‘If I only had one more mana’ is an open invitation to a Faustian bargain. There’s even the new card Moonlit Meditation from Edge of Eternities, which turns your Powerstone generation into something else, often making your value loop far spookier. This is a fairly fragile card, and I’m still in the early stages of testing with it, but when it goes off, it goes off 4 times per turn cycle. Each of these options functionally scale to game size, meaning young Urza is far more likely to live out his dream of 4 Powerstones each rotation of the table.
We don’t just want to see the engine humming, however—we want to hear it roaring. Once our core gameplan is established, it’s time to kick things into gear and begin to spiral our advantage towards a winning board state. Two fairly new cards supplement this beautifully, being Stridehangar Automaton and Worldwalker Helm. When we make specifically an Artifact Token, which we aim to do at least 4 times per cycle, these cards add hangers-on of Thopters and/or Maps, helping us block or dig for lands, all while increasing our count of Artifacts ever higher. Given we aim to make an Artifact each turn, not just our own, this is also a perfect deck for the normally-underwhelming Akal Pakal, First Among Equals; I had tried brewing around him for a while, but he’s far better in the 99 here. For actually using our extra Powerstone mana though, what about Endbringer? Much like Victory Chimes or Unwinding Clock, we get a tap out of the Eldrazi every turn, and whether that’s a gentle ping, protection from a big threat, or a card draw, it’s rare to be unhappy there.
On the topic of rarely being unhappy, I’d like to highlight one of our midrangey win conditions, Monument to Endurance, and to a far lesser extent, Esoteric Duplicator. I bundle these cards together because, much like Endbringer, they help us go card advantage-positive turn over turn, and in the case of Monument, it can be a shockingly solid clock once you really get going. My first game with this deck ended with turning all of my Artifacts into Monument by way of Masterful Replication, and doming the table for ~30 damage. Duplicator meanwhile is a bit weirder. Not unlike Endbringer, it allows you to pay 2 Powerstone mana to draw a card each turn, but by creating a Token Copy of itself. This means we also get to trigger the riders on things like Worldwalker Helm and Stridehangar, and coupling the card with Krark-Clan Ironworks, which we’ll cover with our win conditions, you can functionally just sacrifice and recur your entire board each turn, 4 times per turn cycle.
Nuts & Bolts of Discarding
While it is an obvious truth that we want to be discarding Artifacts, and we play a ton of them, that runs up against the reality that oftentimes we’ll not have an Artifact that’s happy to be discarded. If we only have combo pieces or Artifact lands in hand, and need to hold on, there’s a tension between ramping with our Commander versus playing conservatively, and that’s where our ability to ‘bank’ cards comes in. Both Bag of Holding and Currency Converter help us make the most of our discards, and potentially get them back or into the yard for future use. These are also Mana Value 1, a running theme, and can be used whether the card we’re discarding gets pitched for cost or effect. In contrast, Library of Leng only helps if we discard for effect, meaning tools like the Transmute on Muddle the Mixture and Cycling on Sojourner’s Companion cannot see them placed on the top of the deck. For discards like Urza though? Fair game, and it ensures when we next draw, it’s also an Artifact, giving us a potentially 100% hit rate on our Commander’s ability.
While Library of Leng doesn’t read especially easily, especially given how clear text is on modern cards, the important differentiation for whether it can or cannot be used comes down to the placement of the effect’s colon: Prior to the colon and it’s a cost, and cannot be put on the top of the deck, but after, and it can safely spin to the top your library. That being said, this rollercoaster has one final twist, as in spite of its seeming synergies there’s a rule that clarifies Leng isn’t as much of a help as we’d hope. Per 701.8c. “If a card is discarded, but an effect causes it to be put into a hidden zone instead of into its owner’s graveyard without being revealed, all values of that card’s characteristics are considered to be undefined.”…what this means is that Urza never sees a card discarded to the top of our library as an Artifact or not, truly a Schrödinger’s card type. Is Leng still worth it, given it triggers things like Monument to Endurance? Difficult to say, but sorting through its intricacies gave even me a headache. On another note, there’s luckily more means of ensuring we hit on our Commander is Metalwork Colossus, which for the low low price of 2 random artifacts can put itself back in our hand. This can be costly if we’re behind on the board, but if even one of our extra token producers or Esoteric Duplicator are around, this has massive upside for little real cost.
Channeling and Top
We don’t necessarily want to just loot however, as digging through the library only goes so far unless you have a clear route to a combo kill. There are also a few Artifacts which discard themselves, and fit in this version of Urza better than nearly any other Commander: Channel Artifacts. Being all printed in Kamigawa Neon Dynasty. Mirrorshell Crab, Mnemonic Sphere, and Moonsnare Prototype are fantastic here, with two of them providing interaction that’s difficult to counter, and Sphere being a truly obscene cantrip. Much like Cycling or Transmute, these do discard for cost, meaning we cannot loop them with Library, but our other Artifact recursion gets them back with ease. If you want to go even further with this package, Saiba Trespassers was in the list til the last few cuts, and is like the above a reasonable way to both interact and trigger Urza. In future versions, who knows, it might just pop back in! This list looks light on interaction at first, but by way of flexing these pieces instead of just looting to trigger Urza, we can still play the role of the Monoblue control player at the table, to some extent.
Given we’re flipping through cards rather often though, it’s time to talk about a portion of the deck that’s half control, and half a win condition, hinging on Sensei’s Divining Top. Top is a mainstay of the format, famous for making your least favorite player at the table take longer turns than anyone’d like, but here it’s yet another Mana Value 1 Artifact that helps tune our hand and topdeck. Top has immense synergy with Counterbalance, given we have such a wide range of mana values, and between our looting and ability to pay {1} at basically any time we can jam like a control deck in that way. Moreover, don’t discount the synergy of our looters and Library of Leng with Counterbalance, as we can often discard the perfect Artifact with the Mana Value of a card on the stack, placing it on top to counter and redraw. This is backbreaking on its own, but it gets even better once you realize Top can win you the game.
Actually Winning
Combining Top and Reality Chip alongside a cost reducer like Etherium Sculptor draws the deck, and from there we can access one of our kill conditions. This can also be achieved by way of looting with the classic, too-slow-for-cEDH Dramatic Reversal+Isochron Scepter, which is good enough here with the fact that Urza both makes mana rocks for the loop’s requirements, and himself loots through the deck when performing the combo. Both of these combos are accessed primarily through Artifacts, although ‘Dramatic Scepter’ is a bit harder, requiring an Instant.
Actually killing our opponents once we have our library in our hand and infinite mana at our disposal could be easy in Blue, a simple Thassa’s Oracle could do the job. That being said, I do my very best to make sure to find alternate paths when I can, and if you squint, there’s no need for a win off an empty library. In my testing, one of the ways I pulled off wins most often was by combining Masterful Replication with a Monument of Endurance, as stated, but giving Gogo, Master of Mimicry haste and copying the trigger from Monument does just as well. If we’re going off via Isochron loops, we can also make our opponents draw themselves to death by way of Lumengrid Augur—gotta love old cards saying ‘target player’. There’s also looping Endbringer via Isochron untaps, and pinging everyone to death (which secured another victory for me).
Because a few of these miscellaneous wincons involve non-Artifact Creatures, I feel it necessary to include The Underworld Cookbook as a card that not only makes Artifact Tokens via discarding, which is already something we enjoy doing, but also can pivot us from Artifact recursion to Creature recursion. Like a lot of the decks I build, being able to find these ‘pivot points’ allow you to use what one color is best at to find tools you couldn’t otherwise tutor; the same is true in finding Creatures in Red by way of polymorph effects and a limited suite. The deck’s grind game is supplemented by the classic Krark-Clan Ironworks+Myr Retriever+Scrap Trawler line, all just good cards that coincidentally loop any and every colorless Artifact from your graveyard. Oh, and Mechanized Production on a Powerstone wins on upkeep, if your opponents lack an answer; don’t count on this one though, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Production’s win condition resolve without an extra turn spell. In total, this list is flexible but a bit old fashioned in terms of its lines to victory, which is a great spot to be in when it comes to Bracket 3.
Example Decklist: Go Go Powerstone Rangers
I would be lying if I said this list wasn’t a little greedy. We’re on a shockingly low amount of actual Blue-producing sources outside of our lands, meaning the major stopgap for this strategy is often your ratio of Powerstone mana to real, available Blue mana. With a 3 mana Commander that doesn’t pose much of a threat, however, I’d deigned to include cards like Sapphire Medallion or other commonly-played 2 cost rocks, as our core line is generally quite happy casting Urza on 3. The kid is not a frightening Commander, and given he scales linearly our opponents shouldn’t be shotgunning removal against him.
Decklists are kept updated, and may change with set releases.
A lot of what makes Urza a powerful Commander comes from his reliability, as once your engine comes online you’re going to be churning through cards and making more mana than you know what to do with, siphoning it into even more value as you approach a win. While Urza certainly is central to the deck’s strategy, even without him this is just a competent Monoblue Artifacts deck. The worst feeling gameplay-wise is that his own Powerstones can’t be used to help cast him after a wipe, without taking into account Basalt or Grim Monolith (which would pair nicely with Rings of Brighthearth if you were building for a bracket that allows faster 2-card combos). One thing we eschew is the countless cards which allow you loot when an Artifact enters, something the EDHREC would recommend in droves; getting an Artifact to enter on our opponent’s turn isn’t the easiest, and by the time a Powerstone is created, we’ll have already performed our discard for the turn. This is a misunderstanding of what Urza wants you to do, and why I’m far more bullish on cards like Ghostly Pilferer over those like Rook Turret.
The Other Guy
With Edge of Eternities changing up the game, and a host of new synergies likely to emerge, I’m hopeful that Urza, Powerstone Prodigy can carve out a niche of his own amidst the field of Artifact-matters Commanders. After all, outside of his utterly worthless brother, Mishra, Excavation Prodigy, there’s not a ton of Urza’s peers that care specifically about discarding Artifacts, and fewer still that reward you with ample mana that sticks around. The new Tezzeret is just the next in a line of ways to make small Artifacts matter, tracing back to cards like Artificer’s Intuition, and there’s not a lot of decks where you can play this many absolute bombs at Mana Value 1. Rare is it to see such a niche Commander receive this much love that was clearly unintended in set design. When you can build a Commander to feel unlike their color identity might suggest, that’s always a big win in my book, and here we borrow themes of play from both Red and Green.
Like with every deck I design, Urza is a Commander defined by micro-synergies that result in a gameplan that ‘just works’. I am drawn to Commanders with a degree of repeatability, and have unique enough text to unlock specific combos or value loops which wouldn’t otherwise see play—how many decks do you see running things like Lumengrid Augur or Immobilizing Ink? While this version of Urza is by no means going to stand up to his future self, in terms of popularity or power, there’s a satisfaction in being able to play some simulacra of the man and not receive the stink eye from across your playmat. Urza is arguably the Magic character, especially for players who have been around long enough, and potency in gameplay aside, of course there’s a ton of interest in playing a Commander for whom countless lore YouTubers have made hours of content. You know Urza, we know Urza, and with this version, he needs not be as divisive in-game as he is narratively.
Until next time, don’t explode your mentor and start a multiversal conflict.
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