Artifacts are one ofMagic: The Gathering’soriginal card types, with 30 years of iteration to get where they are today. While modern card design has pushed more powerful artifacts into specific colors, the majority are still colorless, making them the most universally playable non-land cards in Commander. Sol Ring is an artifact, after all.
Ubiquitous as they may be, they’re just as fragile as any real-world relic or piece of equipment. For every player who covets artifacts, there’s some vandal out there looking to smash them to pieces. Any Commander deck worth its weight inTreasure tokensneeds to have at least a few answers to deal with opposing artifacts.
This list will cover only cards that interact with artifacts, ignoring ones that interact with enchantments too. Farewell and Bane of Progress are great cards, but not what we’re looking at here.
10Rakdos Charm
Totally Modally Great
This is more of an excellent card that can destroy an artifact, rather than a complete artifact hoser. If you’re looking to up your artifact interaction count without playing a rigid removal spell, look no further than Rakdos Charm.
Charms highlight the power of modality; three variable effects for different highly relevant situations all occupying the same card slot is well worth it. Truth be told, thegraveyard hatemode is probably the most important, and the damage mode sometimes ends games. When those aren’t relevant, there’s always an artifact worth taking out.
9The Null Rod Effects
“It Does Nothing”
You could completely eschew artifact ramp in your deck for a chance to run Null Rod without repercussions. This and Stony Silence completely shut down activated abilities from artifacts, including most mana rocks,Treasures, Clues, and other small artifact tokens.
8Red Sun’s Twilight
Sunset For Multiple Artifacts
It used to be that Release the Gremlins felt like an underrated, scalable artifact sweeper that could take out multiple permanents at once. Then Red Sun’s Twilight was printed and became the better “destroy X target artifacts” sorcery.
Twilight can take out all problematic artifacts at once, mana permitting, and there’s a sizable bonus for sinking five or more mana into X. Doing so gives you temporary copies of everything you destroyed, which can be fed to other sacrifice effects, or thrown into combat if they’re artifact creatures.
You can pay as much as you want for X even if there aren’t that many artifacts in play to target. This lets Red Sun’s Twilight make copies even with just a few artifacts on board.
7Dack Fayden
The Greatest Thief In The Multiverse
Dack Fayden provides one of the easiest ways to pick up a troublesome artifact and plop it onto your side of the battlefield instead. It just asks for three mana and a target worth stealing, and it even leaves Dack sitting on one loyalty for future turns.
For the uninitiated, Dack Fayden was the lead protagonist of a series of Magic: The Gathering comics, where he was dubbed ‘The Greatest Thief in the Multiverse.’ Befitting of his card, then, to literally steal artifacts, and that’s without mention of his equally useful +1 and rarely-achieved -6, which steals everything.
6Fiery Confluence
Burn It All Down
The cards from Commander 2015’s ‘Confluence cycle’ are all largely decent, providing modal spells that let you repeat modes additional times if need be. Fiery Confluence, for example, can shatter up to three artifacts on resolution, or you can mix-and-match artifact destruction with one of its other modes.
The alternate options let it function as an adjustablemini sweeperor a straightforward burn spell. That last mode helps it transition into 20-life formats exceptionally well, where it can send six damage directly at an opponent’s face.
5Scrap Mastery
One Man’s Trash…
Tempest’s Living Death essentially swapped the creatures each player controlled with the ones in their graveyard, in so many words. Fastforward to Commander 2014, which saw the printing of Scrap Mastery, a red version that did the same thing for artifacts instead.
Scrap Mastery is mass artifact removal for artifact decks. Fill your graveyard with haymaker artifacts, then freerole them all into play while wiping any opposing trinkets off the board. Sure, your opponents recur any artifacts from their graveyards, but you get to plan around this, and the result is normally disproportionately in your favor.
4Artifact Mutation
Saprolingification
One-for-one artifact removal isn’t usually the best use of a slot in your Commander decks, but Artifact Mutation makes the cut by converting the artifact you destroy into 1/1 tokens. You’re already aiming for a mana advantage by hitting a higher-cost artifact, but Mutation throws in a small army of creatures too.
Artifact Mutation is justifiable in any deck running red and green, but it’s also synergistic in the right builds. If your deckcares about creating tokens, having creatures enter the battlefield, or producing sacrifice fodder, Mutation’s stock goes way up in value.
3Sword Of Sinew And Steel
Just Don’t Target Itself
Remember inIron Manwhen Tony Stark said: “I prefer the weapon you only have to fire once”? Well, clearly Mr. Stark never played Sword of Sinew and Steel, because this equipment fires off turn after turn.
As long as you can connect in combat, it’s good for one shatter per turn, and even pops random planeswalker floating around.
As with all the ‘Mirran Swords’ half the power lies in the protection from multiple colors. Red and black are primary removal colors, meaning the Sword will often shut off an opponent’s avenues for dealing with your equipped threat.
2Thieving Skydiver
Sticky Merfolk Fingers
‘Destruction is a form of creation.’ Or so say the literary analysts who take Graham Greene’s The Destructors as gospel. But some people aren’t cut out for wanton destruction. Cards like Thieving Skydiver ask: “Why destroy something when you can take it for yourself.”
Permanently taking control of an artifact is even better than simply removing it from the field. Imagine ‘borrowing’ an early-game mana rock; now you’re ahead on mana and your opponent’s back at parity. Bonus points for nabbing an equipment, and a literal lottery jackpot if it happens to be Sword of Sinew and Steel.
1Vandalblast
Artifact Destruction Overload
Vandalblast is, without question, the best way to clear enemy artifacts off the battlefield, and it does so while leaving your artifacts completely intact.Overloadwas a mechanic designed before the height of Commander popularity, but it translates into multiplayer matches beautifully.
Red has access to plenty of mass artifact destruction spells, like Shatterstorm or Brotherhood’s End, but being able to break symmetry on an effect like this is a huge boon in Commander games, since it doesn’t punish you for running out your own artifacts early and often.
