In this experiment, we set an alarm to enhance the toys of Fiora’s master tinkerer.

Two weeks ago, I delved into one of Conspiracy’s legendary creatures and built a Commander deck around the combo-fueling Goblin Grenzo. Well, Grenzo, Dungeon Warden isn’t Conspiracy’s only legendary creature that enables combos. While we won’t be building a Commander deck around him today, Muzzio, Visionary Architect will still be putting plenty of artifacts onto the battlefield for us.

First Glance: Infinity

Muzzio has the ability to generate a ton of virtual mana. With even just a single Relic of Progenitus on the battlefield, Muzzio’s activation has the potential to drop a Blightsteel Colossus onto the battlefield. And with a little library manipulation, we could ensure that would be the case. That’s 7 virtual mana. Muzzio can do things like this regularly, generating a steady stream of cards, if not mana as well.

That steady stream of advantage will probably be what Muzzio proves to be best at, but I like to go a little deeper and come out the other end with less consistency and more explosive potential. Thus, I had to ask, Can Muzzio, Visionary Architect go infinite?

At first, I looked for some effect that would untap all artifacts whenever an artifact entered the battlefield. Nothing I found fit that bill. Though there were a few artifacts that untapped themselves when another entered—and they’d surely be strong with Muzzio—they didn’t facilitate the hypothetical engine I was trying to build.

Thinking a little laterally, however, I remembered Intruder Alarm. Muzzio cares that the cards we’re dealing with are artifacts, and Intruder Alarm cares that they’re creatures, but there happen to be quite a few cards in Magic that are both artifacts and creatures. If we have creatures that can collectively tap for at least and we use Muzzio to put another artifact creature onto the battlefield, Intruder Alarm will reset our mana creatures and Muzzio, allowing us to repeat the process.

Once we can repeatedly activate Muzzio, we can put all the artifact creatures in our library onto the battlefield—except in the unfortunate circumstance that we fizzle, which can occur when we reveal cards off the top of our library and none from among them is an artifact creature. Also, we might really want to grab a Lightning Greaves somewhere along the way, and that won’t trigger Intruder Alarm either.

In addition, the more we cycle through our library, the fewer artifact creatures we’ll have remaining, thus increasing the chance we’ll fizzle. To mitigate this and to ensure we can go infinite, we have two copies of Leashling. By putting Leashling Number One in our hand on top of our library, we can return Leashling Number Two from the battlefield to our hand. We can then put Leashling Number One onto the battlefield with Muzzio to trigger Intruder Alarm. After that, put Leashling Number Two from our hand on the top of our library to put Leashling Number One into our hand from the battlefield, and we’ve reset the situation, with our Leashlings in opposite positions. In this way, if we can generate at least with creatures, we can generate infinite mana, and we can benefit from infinite other tap-to-activate abilities as we do so.

Making Mana

Manakin and Silver Myr are both mana-making 2-drops, letting us ramp into a turn-three Muzzio to start sneaking out the artifacts. Palladium Myr does a lot of work as well, bringing a Manakin and Silver Myr’s up to the requisite .

Assuming we do start going off with repeated Muzzio activations, in our deck built around artifact creatures, we’ll have to deal with that pesky summoning sickness. Lightning Greaves makes a strong impact here as a way to circumvent that restriction. Since nothing in the deck necessarily needs to be done at instant speed, we can move the Greaves, one creature at a time as necessary, to benefit from every activated ability in between Intruder Alarm triggers. Thousand-Year Elixir is a reasonable replacement, though it costs instead of and doesn’t enable combat the way Lightning Greaves can. It does, however, require quite a bit less busy work, especially if you’re playing on Magic Online.

Upsides of Infinite

Assuming we have ’s worth of mana creatures, Muzzio, Intruder Alarm, and a couple Leashlings to work with, we can start benefiting by going infinite. In addition to the mana creatures to generate infinite of that useful resource, here are a few more cards to round out the deck.

Steel Overseer – This will allow us to make our creatures (sans Muzzio) as large as we want. Assuming we’re able to put a large portion of our library onto the battlefield, that could be a lot.

Golem Artisan – If we have infinite mana to work with, this is another way to make all our creatures as large as we like. In addition, we can use the Golem to give our guys flying, trample, and haste—since we won’t have sufficient copies of Lightning Greaves to go around.

Colossus of Akros – Dealing 20 damage is often sufficient, so we can use the Colossus to hit our opponent with a satisfying crunch. This is probably an inefficient use of the deck slot, but I do love hitting for huge amounts of damage, and Muzzio can, when we’re a bit lucky, sneak the Colossus in on the cheap in finite scenarios. From there, the Colossus’s cost gives each Muzzio activation more potential. Other options for this slot could be Summoning Station, Clockwork Vorrac, Lodestone Myr, or Kuldotha Forgemaster.

Myr Propagator – This card is a super-interesting one for the weird things we’re able to do with it. I remember playing it in a weird casual Standard deck on Magic Online for its interaction with Clone effects. If you Clone a Myr Propagator, the Clone will obviously have the ability to propagate itself. What’s less obvious is that the token will be a Clone rather than a Propagator, allowing us an endless stream of Clones rather than an endless stream of 1/1s—that’s quite the upgrade. The Clone variant I used in my old casual deck was Quicksilver Gargantuan—7/7!—but for our artifact deck today, Phyrexian Metamorph will fill a more versatile role while still allowing us the potential for infinite whatevers-we-want. May I suggest Colossus of Akros?

Architect?s Alarm ? Casual | Andrew Wilson

• Creatures (32)
• 1 Colossus of Akros
• 1 Golem Artisan
• 2 Leashling
• 2 Myr Enforcer
• 2 Myr Propagator
• 2 Phyrexian Metamorph
• 2 Steel Overseer
• 4 Manakin
• 4 Palladium Myr
• 4 Silver Myr
• 4 Solemn Simulacrum
• 4 Muzzio, Visionary Architect

• Spells (6)
• 4 Intruder Alarm
• 2 Lightning Greaves

• Lands (22)
• 13 Island
• 1 Academy Ruins
• 4 Darksteel Citadel
• 4 Seat of the Synod

Buy This Deck

I didn’t mention Solemn Simulacrum, Myr Enforcer, Darksteel Citadel, Seat of the Synod, or Academy Ruins in any of the sections above, but those are all there to streamline the deck and help it along for draws lacking Muzzio and/or Intruder Alarm.

I hope you enjoyed this look at another of Conspiracy’s powerful, non-Standard-legal legends. If you’ve always wanted to play a combo deck built not around just creatures and not around just artifacts, but around artifact creatures, give this deck a try.

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com