When you sit down to build a new Commander deck, the first few slots in your artifact package practically write themselves. You throw in Sol Ring, add an Arcane Signet, and slot in the appropriate talismans or signets for your color identity.
But once your baseline mana acceleration is locked down, many players make the mistake of ignoring the rest of the artifact slot, treating it purely as a dumping ground for generic ramp. In doing so, they miss out on some of the most flexible, game-winning utility pieces in the entire format. Because artifacts are entirely colorless, these cards can slide into absolutely any color identity, providing crucial interaction, protection, and card advantage where your primary colors might fall short.
Here are 5 of the most underrated utility artifacts in Commander that you should add to your TCGplayer cart right now.
1. The Interaction Chameleon: Liquimetal Torque
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Average Market Price: ~$1.50 – $2.00
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Why it’s elite: On its surface, this is a standard two-mana rock that enters untapped and produces colorless mana—a perfectly fine baseline. But its true power lies in its zero-mana activated ability: Tap: Target permanent becomes an artifact in addition to its other types until end of turn.
This text turns your entire deck’s removal package into a flexible, universal answer. If you are playing Mono-Red or Mono-Green, you traditionally have zero ways to destroy a creature or a planeswalker directly. By activating the Torque first, you turn that threatening permanent into an artifact, allowing cards like Abrade or Nature’s Claim to cleanly shatter a massive threat they could never normally touch.
2. The Grave-Hate Multi-Tool: Nautiloid Ship
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Average Market Price: ~$2.00 – $3.00
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Why it’s elite: Graveyard recursion strategies are incredibly popular in multiplayer pods. If you aren’t running interaction to clean out opposing graveyards, you will eventually be buried under a mountain of value. While Relic of Progenitus or Tormod’s Crypt are fine, they are entirely reactive.
Nautiloid Ship is an aggressive, proactive solution. When this Vehicle enters the battlefield, it completely exiles a target opponent’s graveyard. Then, whenever it crews up and attacks, you can put a creature card exiled with it straight onto your battlefield under your control. It solves a massive table problem while simultaneously turning your opponent’s best threats against them.
3. The Clunky Combat Buster: The Reaver Cleaver
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Average Market Price: ~$12.00 – $15.00
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Why it’s elite: While slightly higher on the financial spectrum due to its raw power, this equipment does not get nearly enough credit outside of dedicated Voltron archetypes. It grants the equipped creature , Trample, and an incredible combat trigger: Whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player, create that many Treasure tokens.
In any deck running high-power creatures, The Reaver Cleaver completely breaks the game’s resource scaling wide open. Sending a 6-power creature across the board with Trample means you are virtually guaranteed to generate 4 to 6 untapped Treasures straight into your pool, instantly funding your entire hand for your second main phase.
4. The Value Copycat: Sculpting Steel
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Average Market Price: ~$1.00 – $1.50
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Why it’s elite: The biggest strength of a card like Sculpting Steel is its ability to seamlessly adapt to the maximum power level of your current multiplayer pod. For just three generic mana, it enters the battlefield as an exact duplicate of any artifact on the table.
Did an opponent drop an early The Great Henge, a Bolas’s Citadel, or a high-value mana engine? Sculpting Steel copies it for a fraction of the original mana cost. If the board state is relatively quiet, it can simply copy your own best mana rock to keep you moving along your curve ahead of schedule.
5. The Top-Deck Filter: Mystic Forge
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Average Market Price: ~$3.00 – $4.00
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Why it’s elite: If your Commander strategy runs a heavy concentration of artifacts or colorless spells (such as an Eldrazi sub-theme), Mystic Forge acts as a secondary hand that your opponents cannot interact with. It allows you to look at the top card of your library at any time and cast it directly if it is an artifact or colorless card.
Combined with its secondary ability to pay 1 life and exile the top card of your deck once per turn, it allows you to aggressively dig past land pockets, essentially letting you cast 4, 5, or 6 cards straight off the top of your deck in a single explosive turn cycle.
PreconForge Verdict: Fill the Cracks in Your Strategy
When you are tuning your latest Commander brew, stop settling for generic utility cards that don’t push your game plan forward. Slotting in flexible, high-utility options like Liquimetal Torque or Sculpting Steel fixes structural weaknesses in your color identity, keeps your resource counts high, and ensures you always have a relevant mechanical response to whatever the rest of the table throws at you.
Are you running universal interaction like Liquimetal Torque to help your non-black decks answer problematic permanents, or do you prefer using copy clones like Sculpting Steel to steal your opponents‘ best value engines? Let’s keep the strategy and deckbuilding discussion moving forward!
