A sphinx loose in Mishra's workshop (Commander / EDH MTG Deck)

A sphinx loose in Mishra's workshop

Commander / EDH Artifact Combo Infinite Combo WUB (Esper)

herpdederp92

Artifact (30)

Land (34)

Instant (12)

Commander (1)

Creature (16)

Sorcery (7)

Maybeboard

Artifact (9)

Creature (7)

Instant (2)

Sorcery (2)

Land (1)

1x Academy Ruins

Hello! I am a longtime casual commander player and I tried building an artifact deck from scratch. This is the result.

My plan was to keep matters cheap and friendly, but then my sphinx friend dragged me over to the workshop and showed me the cute doggy in the display window. "Please, please, pretty please," she begged me, "can I have it? It's so adorable!" She wiped a tear of liquid gallium out of one eye. How could I resist? I gave in, and now I'm stuck buying Sharuum the Hegemon all the shiny new toys she wants, from pretty rings to model helicopters to atomic clocks . She only gets more spoiled every day.

The Sharuum mindset Show

I often joke about Commander's Sphere being the single most powerful card in this deck, which of course it's not. (That honor probably goes to KCI , but feel free to argue about it in the comments.) However, there's an important grain of truth hidden within that idea.

It's no big secret that commander players are addicted to their Sol Rings, their Sad Robots, their Signets. The strength behind playing Sharuum the Hegemon or, for that matter, any artifacts-matter commander - Breya, Etherium Shaper , Padeem, Consul of Innovation , Daretti, Scrap Savant , take your pick - is that they find so many more uses for those ubiquitous cards that get played all the time.

In any deck, Commander's Sphere fixes your mana pool and lets you draw a card once. It's a simple card of moderate value that's easily included or excluded out of practically any decklist in the entire format. But the instant that there's a chance to reanimate the sphere, the card's value skyrockets. Tap Commander's Sphere, use the mana to play Sharuum, sacrifice the sphere to draw, put it back into play untapped, tap it for mana again, cast another spell, sacrifice it again to draw another card. In a few circumstances, the Sphere even becomes a combo piece to generate infinite mana or draw your whole deck.

And that's one generic mana rock. This deck runs 45 or so artifacts, all of which are make each other inherently more powerful simply because you happen to have a junk artifact like Commander's Sphere to sacrifice or copy or flicker or animate.

I'm not going to claim that Sharuum is the best artifact commander or that my deck has all the best cards, because those things are entirely subjective. But I am going to claim that if you're going to play an artifacts-matter deck, you need to have the mindset that your smallest, most generic cards truly are the goodstuff of the archetype. Artifact combos tend to be complicated contraptions rather than simple two-card interactions, but for that exact reason artifact decks can be very sturdy and hard to disrupt.

So you should play this deck if you think that Magic becomes much more elegant when through pure serendipity you realize you possess a complicated 6-card infinite combo on the battlefield that does nothing, but then you suddenly win the game because you happen to have a Commander's Sphere in your hand. But if you're that sort of person, then you probably don't need me to tell you how to build this deck.

Our robust combo toolbox Show

Keeping Control Show

Esper has access to all of the power control spells we could want, and it would be a shame not to run at least a few of them. We've got lots of win conditions and no particular preference, so we're looking to play keep-away until something coheres on our board.

First, we're running some counterspells to protect our field from getting exiled or tucked , and to shut down cheeky spells like Ad Nauseam :

Next, we're looking for a way to snipe early problems like Hermit Druid and Treasonous Ogre that can end the game long before we're ready:

Swords to Plowshares

Path to Exile

Dispatch

Executioner's Capsule because who doesn't love a reusable Doom Blade ?

Nihil Spellbomb as a grave-hate tool.

It's important to recognize that when we have Sharuum the Hegemon in the command zone, dynamiting our own artifacts and artifact creatures isn't a big deal. So we run PLENTY of boardwipes:

Merciless Eviction can be very dangerous if stolen and used against us, so be careful.

Aligned Hedron Network only hits three creatures from this deck (Sharuum being one, and there's a purpose there.)

Nevinyrral's Disk has the downside of blowing up our mana rocks but the upside of being reusable via Sharuum. Notably, I've given up on running Mycosynth Lattice simply because of how awkward it felt alongside Disk effects.

Oblivion Stone requires a larger mana investment but can act as an untapped Disk, which can be a gamechanger.

Scourglass is completely one-sided and also reusable. The downside is the timing restriction (sometimes the next upkeep is too far in the future).

Now, a confession. Esper is great at loading up with stax and I previously was playing this deck with cards like Darksteel Forge , Ethersworn Canonist , and Padeem, Consul of Innovation . Eventually, though, I realized that entire branch of the deck was boring and noninteractive. Our goal isn't to lock our opponents out of the game, our goal is simply to protect our field long enough to dig into a combo, and we can do that more effectively by playing generic control cards than by stalling with stax.

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96% Casual

Competitive

Date added	7 years
Last updated	6 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	3 - 0 Mythic Rares 41 - 0 Rares 29 - 0 Uncommons 13 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.18
Tokens	Bird 2/2 U, Copy Clone, Myr 1/1 C, Servo 1/1 C, Thopter 1/1 C, Thopter 1/1 U
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