Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas. A black-blue planeswalker who cares about artifacts.
I fell in love with this guy the first time I saw him in the MTG Salvation spoiler page and since he rotated into Standard I’ve tried a number of different builds with him.
First there was the Esper (blue-white-black) build that ran Day of Judgment and Gideon Jura. My initial concerns about this build were about the mana-base, but oddly of all the problems that deck had, getting the right colours at the right time wasn’t one of them. The trick, I found, was to minimise the number of Islands I was running (none) and run a shedload of Scars duals (Seachrome Coast and Darkslick Shores), filling out the rest of the land slots with a handful of Plains, a couple of Swamps and some Worldwake manlands – a 2/3 split between Creeping Tar Pit and Celestial Colonnade. The real problem the deck had lay in trying to do too many things. On one hand Tezzeret wants you to run a goodly number of artifacts so as not to miss on his Impulse ability (look at the top five cards of your library and put an artifact in your hand) and to make his ultimate (drain life based on twice the number of artifacts you control) look like a real threat. On the other hand, it wants to do irritating things with Gideon and mass removal as well as useful things with spot removal.
This was also before the bannings, where Stoneforge Mystic and Jace, the Mind Sculptor became illegal in Standard. It seemed so wrong to have Jace and not run him – the deck actually suffered for that decision, I think, despite the raw power of fateseal, Brainstorm and Unsummon. Once he won me an otherwise stalled game by exiling my opponent’s library, but otherwise is was something of an albatross.
It wasn’t a happy deck.
Next I tried infect. In theory this is a fine but lacks the explosiveness of other infect builds – infect artifact creatures are over-costed for one thing – whilst still having the same problem of running out of gas just as you want Tezz to start being valuable.
I’ve tried other builds that require Tezz to function properly. These mostly involved cards like Vault Skirge. This little chap is fine and dandy as long as you can find a reliable way to make him bigger – say with Tempered Steel or Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas’s second ability. Thing is, Tezz isn’t always around to look after the little guy and even if he is there’s often more value to be had in digging for artifacts.
So, lessons learned so far with this deck are:
- Don’t try to do too many things
- Don’t try to be too explosive – Tezz is a mid-game card.
- Don’t rely on Tezz to make the rest of the deck good – if you don’t draw him you deck will fall flat on its face.
So with all that in mind I’ve updated my Tezzeret deck’s build, removed the parts that need Tezz to work (Vault Skirge and friends), removed parts that offer no synergy (Gideon Jura) and have introduced more parts that enable a longer game (Tumble Magnets, hand disruption, countermagic). Now I have a blue-black artifact midrange-control deck that likes Tezzeret but doesn’t have a codependent relationship with him.