I don’t have a Karn, Silver Golem or Kozilek, Butcher of Truth deck. We got a bunch of new Eldrazi, and I don’t have a deck for them either. It should be fun—I like my Sharuum, the Hegemon deck despite not being able to make it 75%, and having a colorless commander means I can play all the artifacts in the whole world without having to ask myself pesky moral questions like, “Is Empty the Vaults a 75% card,” and, “Do I care?” Artifacts are a personal favorite of mine, and Commander has given me an even greater appreciation of them. Think about it: As a mostly Standard and Legacy and Extended (actual Extended, none of that double-Standard noise) player before Commander was a format, my relationship with cards like Sol Ring could be described by saying, “That card seems like a big turn-one play, but I’ll never be about that life.”

Being able to wield dirty, cheating cards like Skullclamp and durdly stuff like Mindslaver has made me love how versatile and powerful colorless cards can be and how many decks they fit into. I love my Daretti, Scrap Savant deck and my Sharuum deck, but I need to be able to run Mountains or I’ll never be able to put together a mana base, right?

Maybe not.

Is this real? As each day passes, it seems more and more that it is. We’ve not heard official word, but I know everyone has seen this spoiled image. Presumably, this is a basic land, tutorable with cards like Evolving Wilds, that taps for colorless mana—and if you wanted, you could run forty of them and call it the mana base to a Karn deck if you wanted. I won’t predicate an article on this unconfirmed spoiler being definitely authentic, but I won’t pretend it didn’t inspire me to think about a colorless commander. If it ended up being an excellent forgery, I won’t feel silly because it got me thinking, and based on the positive response I have seen to this card as a concept, if it’s not real, it’s something Wizards might want to think about doing in the future.

A 75% Karn deck seems relatively easy to achieve. Our card pool is so limited—by virtue of only being able to play colorless spells like All is Dust and artifacts and artifact creatures—that we can basically build the best Karn deck we can out of our limited card pool. Our 75% guidelines can’t really tell us much about how else to build, but what do they say we shouldn’t do?

I would like to avoid linearity, but since we can’t really tutor that effectively (outside of Kuldotha Forgemaster, which I like), we should be good, and since we don’t eschew combos as a rule, we can run some especially since we’re going to have to raw-dog the combo pieces as they come to us. Synergy is key, and synergy with the commander doubly so. We want to avoid preventing our opponents from doing anything by locking down their mana or blowing it all up, but running a few targeted removal effects via Strip Mine or Liquimetal Coating seems fine. It also seems that we should dust off Metalworker and take him for a spin now that we can. Infinite combos can be a little antisocial, but if we don’t have much tutoring (tuition?), we’re probably fine since without much easy card-draw, we’re unlikely to assemble those combos more often than 1 ÷ X games, which is how often we’re aiming to win anyway. I think we’re limited enough by our card pool that we can build just about as strong a deck as we can and still be firmly in 75% territory.

Karn, Silver Golem ? Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (18)
• 1 Arcbound Reclaimer
• 1 Blightsteel Colossus
• 1 Darksteel Colossus
• 1 Darksteel Sentinel
• 1 Duplicant
• 1 Kuldotha Forgemaster
• 1 Metalworker
• 1 Myr Retriever
• 1 Pentavus
• 1 Platinum Angel
• 1 Platinum Emperion
• 1 Shimmer Myr
• 1 Soul of New Phyrexia
• 1 Steel Hellkite
• 1 Thopter Assembly
• 1 Voltaic Construct
• 1 Wurmcoil Engine
• 1 Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre

• Planeswalkers (0)

• Spells (43)
• 1 All Is Dust
• 1 Batterskull
• 1 Blinkmoth Urn
• 1 Brittle Effigy
• 1 Clock of Omens
• 1 Cloud Key
• 1 Coalition Relic
• 1 Contagion Engine
• 1 Crucible of Worlds
• 1 Crystal Ball
• 1 Darksteel Forge
• 1 Darksteel Ingot
• 1 Darksteel Plate
• 1 Dreamstone Hedron
• 1 Fellwar Stone
• 1 Gilded Lotus
• 1 Goblin Cannon
• 1 Liquimetal Coating
• 1 Lux Cannon
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Mind's Eye
• 1 Mirrorworks
• 1 Mycosynth Lattice
• 1 Nevinyrral's Disk
• 1 Null Brooch
• 1 Oblivion Stone
• 1 Phyrexian Processor
• 1 Planar Portal
• 1 Pristine Talisman
• 1 Prototype Portal
• 1 Serum Tank
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Soul Conduit
• 1 Spine of Ish Sah
• 1 Staff of Nin
• 1 Swiftfoot Boots
• 1 Thran Dynamo
• 1 Trading Post
• 1 Unwinding Clock
• 1 Ward of Bones
• 1 Whispersilk Cloak
• 1 Worn Powerstone
• 1 Mindslaver

• Lands (38)
• 1 Blasted Landscape
• 1 Blinkmoth Nexus
• 1 Blinkmoth Well
• 1 Buried Ruin
• 1 Cloudpost
• 1 Crystal Vein
• 1 Desert
• 1 Dread Statuary
• 1 Gargoyle Castle
• 1 Ghost Quarter
• 1 Ghost Town
• 1 Glimmerpost
• 1 Haunted Fengraf
• 1 High Market
• 1 Inkmoth Nexus
• 1 Maze of Shadows
• 1 Mishra's Factory
• 1 Mystifying Maze
• 1 Quicksand
• 1 Scorched Ruins
• 1 Springjack Pasture
• 1 Stalking Stones
• 1 Strip Mine
• 1 Temple of the False God
• 1 Tower of the Magistrate
• 1 Unstable Frontier
• 1 Urza's Factory
• 1 Urza's Mine
• 1 Urza's Power Plant
• 1 Urza's Tower
• 1 Vesuva
• 1 Winding Canyons
• 1 Zoetic Cavern
• 1 Gods' Eye, Gate to the Reikai
• 1 Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
• 1 Miren, the Moaning Well
• 1 Rath's Edge
• 1 Darksteel Citadel

Buy This Deck

As usual, this is a bit of an amalgam of a few different strategies to make sure we have a clear path to victory. If you see a goal you want to pursue exclusively, shape the deck to fit that aim. You’re not going to take it out of 75% territory that way. As it is, we don’t have a ton of what we would consider “combos” as much as we have some synergy, so I don’t see Forgemaster as too much of a problem, especially considering the cost of his use is pretty high.

EDHREC.com was a huge help in the construction of this and other decks in this project. If you don’t already get inspiration from that site, see that you do. Knowing the cards other people who play the same commander are using is good, and EDHREC is very good for that. They can even help with your mana base, although this one was a ton of fun for me to put together for myself.

That does it for me this week. Let’s get a party started in the comments. Is Ward of Bones something we need to cut? Are Wastes real or fake? Do you use EDHREC already? Did I leave out your favorite utility land or win condition? How should we abuse Metalworker now that it’s legal? Leave it below. Until next week!