Modern Horizons has brought a new challenger into the Commander arena: Urza, Lord High Artificer. Here are the facts about the Lord High Artificer.
He costs . This is a pretty reasonable price for a Commander, he's likely to come down on or ahead of curve and isn't too painful to recast once or twice (even if you can't float his cheating mana to do it)
When he enters the battlefield, he makes a Construct token that gets +1/+1 for each of your artifacts. This is a wincon. Not a great wincon since it has no evasion or removal resistance, but at least it gives you an option, and removal pointed at the big token body is removal not pointed at Urza.
He lets you tap an untapped artifact you control to add . It's worth noting this isn't granting the ability to tap for mana, so tapping summoning sick tokens is a-ok.
Lastly, if you pay you'll get to shuffle your library and exile the top card, getting the ability to play it for free until end of turn.
This is amazing. Urza provides the two most critical elements of EDH in one: Ramp and Card Advantage. I'm fairly confident that throwing him together with any pile of artifacts will do wonders. That said, there are some important synergies, or at least cards worth noting. Here are a couple of the hits:
Mana Severance allows you to turn Urza's last ability into a guaranteed hit, no more lands getting in the way!
Mishra's Self-Replicator is insane. True, it's a 2/2 for 5. And then, the next time you drop an artifact, it's 2. Then it's 4. Then 8. Since Urza can tap a Replicator for , they can essentially pay for their own copies, leaving you swimming in mana and replicators for future turns.
It should come as no surprise that Mechanized Production is a clear winner -- Depending on your setup it's pretty trivial to get 8 tokens with the same name, whether they're Myr, Thopter, or Mishra's Self-Replicator, resulting in an instant win. In the meantime, the enchantment can hang out on a Darksteel Citadel or other difficult to remove artifact providing security and inevitability.
Beyond that, let me tell you of what I call the Sinister Six: six artifacts that Urza can abuse because they share the classic trait of turning off when tapped -- meaning, of course, that Urza can tap them for mana to disable them whenever he sees fit. Three give and three take. Together, their symmetry more broken than the timestreams of Tolaria, they will leave you light-years ahead.
Howling Mine: Tapped during your turn, after your draw step, extra cards are denied to all opponents.
Genesis Chamber: Similar to Howling mine, but provides you myr tokens!
Blinkmoth Urn: A deck like Urza's is already poised to break parity on this card, but what if you were to simply give your opponents nothing at all?
Winter Orb: An Alpha favorite. You don't need your lands, per say, since Urza lets you use artifacts for mana, but if you want them, you can have them when no one else does
Static Orb: The second piece of untap-denial, Static Orb will let all your foes untap only two permanents in total, crippling most turns from most of your rivals. Shutting it down on your last opponent's end step, of course, means you'll untap everything as normal
Storage Matrix: While the weakest untap denier on its own, it's still decently brutal, allowing only a single type to be untapped. If your opponents want their creatures back, they'll have to forego their lands; if they want their lands, their mana rocks stay down; and so on. Disabling it for your own turn means you essentially take three turns to the rest of the table's one, at least where recovery is concerned.
M20 Mystic Forge was added, in place of Reshape. Mystic Forge basically acts as a second copy of Vedalken Archmage, except that the forge is, itself, an artifact and thus benefits from all the deck's artifact synergies. Especially if Mana Severance comes out, the Forge/Archmage effect is one of the most powerful, able to play disgusting numbers of cards with cost reducers and token-on-artifact-play effects adding mana access. The cost, for this deck, is that the virtual draws from forge are, during an Urza chain, "use it or lose it": if you see an artifact, you have to choose between casting it or activating Urza again, while Archmage will draw the card to be used later. On the other hand, an Urza activation can shuffle away a land or blue card letting you restart a Forge chain that will usually be cheaper than spamming Urza's activation. Using both cards wisely will be key. Reshape was chosen for the cut because, oddly enough, the general artifact tutors are some of the weakest and least reliable cards in the deck. Reshape and Whir are basically useless if Urza flips them up (One can fetch Jeweled Amulet or Everflowing Chalice), and in general there isn't any particular artifact that is so critical to the deck's function that you need it every time. The untap-denial artifacts are nice but don't really need the extra slots, Darksteel Forge is painfully expensive to tutor with Reshape, and Mishra's Self-Replicator can be found with its own assembly-worker tutor still. Reshape was cut, rather than Whir, because Whir is better in the "Urza is dead right now" scenario (since it can still use artifacts as 'mana'), doesn't require having an expendable artifact (again, better when we're behind when both are fairly pointless when Urza is ahead), and is a somewhat cheaper card to acquire.
Master Transmuter is on thin ice. While a great card, Urza doesn't typically need her ability to cheat expensive artifacts into play; even Darksteel Forge can be trivially hardcast in fairly short order. What she is good for is helping artifacts dodge removal, and resetting Prototype Portal if it comes out of an Urza activation at an inopportune time and didn't get an imprint. Jhoira's Familiar is the main competition; it's a cost-reducer, which with Mystic Forge now alongside Vedalken Archmage is even more hugely important and relevant. Previously, the familiar was left out for costing 4 (as opposed to 2 or 3 for Etherium Sculptor or Foundry Inspector) for an irrelevant flying body and largely pointless reduction to nonartifact historic spells as well as the critical reduction to artifacts, but now might be the time to consider whether the additional possible stability during a draw-chain might not be worth the loss of Transmuter's versatility.
