The Brawl Project: Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge

Hi everyone, and welcome to this week’s The Brawl Project. Last week I teased the commander of focus for this week, and as many of you may have guessed, we will be looking at Golos seen from above Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge. Thus far on The Brawl Project we have yet to take a lens to an artifact-focused commander, so today we’re going to delve into some of the synergies you can assemble in Standard!

I’ll also be trying something new this week in including a Magic Arena Historic Brawl decklist. While there are no queues for the format (nor do I expect them to be implemented in the future), Historic Brawl is a fun format you can play through direct challenge where all of the cards on Arena are legal. No rotation! If you need to find somebody to play, I’d recommend ArenaBrawl, which provides the Brawl matchmaking services Arena does not.

Before we get too involved, there’s a giveaway!

https://twitter.com/Sunyveil/status/1198355167839567873

All right, let’s take a look at Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge:

Pros:

• High loyalty
• Ultimate likely wins the game on its own
• Grants affinity for artifacts to creatures and planeswalkers

Cons:

• Plus ability does not generate card advantage
• Does not have an ability that directly interacts with the battlefield
• Moderately expensive at six mana

Tezzeret sets himself up to play a controlling game centered on artifact synergies. As a planeswalker, we probably want to base our plan on protecting him to maximize our activations. That means including removal and sweepers while filling out the deck with artifacts that can produce mana or draw cards. We’ll definitely take advantage of the artifact ramp available to us and look for some big plays to accompany Tezzeret. Finally, we’re definitely interested in any creatures or planeswalkers that can benefit from affinity for after we play Tezzeret.

Magic Arena importable decklist

With the cards available to us, we have the tools to build a pretty nice ramp/control deck. A lot of the “good” artifacts we have available to us provide mana, and we’re happy to play Mana Geode, Midnight Clock, Spinning Wheel, and Dimir Locket to supplement the common inclusions of Arcane Signet and Firemind Vessel. Our gameplan is to spend the first few turns to ramp, using removal as necessary, and then land a huge spell ahead of curve. This means we’re soft to counterspells (as ramp decks often are), but we also dodge a fair amount of interaction, as typical creature removal doesn’t bother us too much.

Oh yeah, we’re definitely soft to dedicated artifact removal, but who plays that?

Here we have our big ramp targets. If you’ve played much of the format, you are probably well-acquainted with the power of an early Ugin, the Ineffable or big Mass Manipulation. Our reliance on artifacts makes Ugin even more potent, as we have plenty of colorless spells that are discounted by the oft-forgotten static ability. Our unique composition of the deck also incentivizes us to play some ramp targets that are not quite so common.

Shimmer Dragon cracks my Top 10 list of the best cards in Brawl right now, which may not be immediately apparent if you haven’t had the chance to play with the card. Frequently you will the four artifacts needed to give Shimmer Dragon hexproof (and if not, it’s probably best to hold off casting it) without doing any extra work, and often two of those artifacts remain untapped allowing you to draw a card right away! The card draw gets out of hand very quickly, and I’m thrilled with any opportunity to play the card.

We don’t have a ton of blue instants to abuse Gadwick, the Wizend’s second ability, so we’ll just have to be happy enough drawing a ton of cards. With Tezzeret out, we get to increase the X in Gadwick’s cost by the number of artifacts in play for free, allowing us to draw plenty of cards with triple blue and have mana available for whatever we draw into!

God-Pharaoh’s Statue may look like a head-scratcher, but with so much artifact ramp we can get it out well ahead of schedule. This becomes a huge pain for opponents, and the two-mana tax slows people down a tremendous amount as they try to develop, particularly if they have cards dedicated to drawing more cards.

Pretty standard removal suite for any Dimir deck. We’re a bit light on interaction compared to a true control deck as we don’t have discard or counterspells, so we’ll just focus on dealing with resolved threats that threaten to attack down our Tezzeret.

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Another couple of cards that work really well in dedicated artifact decks that you don’t necessarily see everywhere! We discussed some of the ramp we have available to us earlier; well, Renowned Weaponsmith adds two mana for the price of two mana, which is an insane rate. The catch? It can only be used on artifacts, which we have plenty of.

Forge[/author]“]Mystic [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author] is a cool Future Sight proxy. The dream of playing a ton of cards off the top of the deck in one turn isn’t too realistic as only a third of our cards fit its condition, but with our artifact ramp we should have the mana available to us to be able to take advantage of the option of casting extra cards.

It turns out, Food counts as an artifact as well! These three might be a little clunky on their own, but when they’re powering up affinity with Tezzeret out or helping to draw cards with Shimmer Dragon, the extra investment is well worth it. Of course, being on the defensive we may have to sacrifice the Food for extra life at some point as well.

To be honest, the utility lands aren’t spectacular for us, but the deck has so many colorless spells and so much fixing with its artifact mana we can afford to play so many colorless lands. It does add a little bit of flexibility for us when we don’t otherwise have action to play, and given that our deck is comprised of 50% mana sources that’s a nice bonus.

Now let’s turn back the clock and get Historic! Here’s a Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge list you can play in Friendly Brawl direct challenges on Magic Arena:

Magic Arena importable decklist

The basic concept stays the same, but we have some nice new (old?) tools to work with and streamline the deck! Let’s take a look at notable additions:

The two biggest additions are Karn, Scion of Urza and Tezzeret, Artifice Master. Both are planeswalkers that play well with artifacts (much like Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge), so having additional cards that benefit from our main gameplan of playing a control deck with lots of artifacts is nice. Both protect themselves and draw cards, which has always been a great recipe for good planeswalkers. Of the cards available to us with the expanded card pool, these are the ones I am most excited for.

Between Tezzeret, Artifice Master and Sai, Master Thopterist, we’ll be able to generate artifact tokens repeatedly, something that’s missing from the Standard version of our Brawl deck. This makes the dream of playing Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge and immediately slamming another threat like Ugin, the Ineffable or Meteor Golem for free because of affinity much more realistic!

Our artifacts get some nice upgrades as well. We get two potent mana artifacts in Mind Stone and Gilded Lotus, which are good enough to be Commander staples in the unrestricted card pool.

The flip artifacts from Ixalan (Azor’s Gateway, Thaumatic Compass, and Treasure Map) do a nice job of generating value each turn and eventually turning into additional mana. Treasure Map even provides three Treasure tokens, which (if we don’t need them for their usual purpose of providing mana) can help power up the affinity granted by Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge or be used to draw cards with Shimmer Dragon!

Don’t forget about this one for your blue decks; Search for Azcanta is busted. This deck has plenty of hits for when it transforms to Azcanta, the Sunken Ruin too, as all of the noncreature artifacts can be found with it as well.

If you enjoyed the Historic Brawl feature, be sure to let me know! I’m a little nervous about devoting a ton of effort into writing about Historic Brawl because I don’t know how many people actually play the format, but if it’s something a lot of people want, I’ll definitely keep at it.

The stream is making a return this week, and I look forward to playing these decks against willing individuals. If you’re interested in testing one of your own decks, be sure to drop by the stream where I’ll be playing direct challenges with viewers all week!

Next Up

Twitch Rivals had a big tournament last week, and I was fortunate enough to Top 32 the event with Jeskai Fires! Needless to say, some changes to the Fires power rankings are in order:

To celebrate, we’re going to be taking a look at Kykar, Wind’s Fury, the only Jeskai commander available to us in the format and therefore the only option we have to build an analog to the Standard deck. That’s perfectly fine, however, as Kykar works great with Cavalier of Flame! Tune in next week for “Basically Jeskai Fires,” and until then, have fun battling Brawl!