Urza, Lord High Artificer
Urza, Lord High Artificer
When Urza, Lord High Artificer enters the battlefield, create a 0/0 colorless Construct artifact creature token with "This creature gets +1/+1 for each artifact you control."
Tap an untapped artifact you control: Add
.: Shuffle your library, then exile the top card. Until end of turn, you may play that card without paying its mana cost.
illus. Grzegorz Rutkowski # 75/254
Oracle Text
When Urza, Lord High Artificer enters the battlefield, create a 0/0 colorless Construct artifact creature token with "This creature gets +1/+1 for each artifact you control."
Tap an untapped artifact you control: Add
.: Shuffle your library, then exile the top card. Until end of turn, you may play that card without paying its mana cost.
This is the pre-planeswalker/war of the brother's Urza.
That construct calls back to the history of how he impressed the king of (I think) Kjeldor in a contest of "strengh".
The legend himself appears, and lo, he did not disappoint.
Urza ETB, creates your fifth artifact.
Tap five artifacts: add UUUUU. Activate Urza. If you hit a spell, cast it for free, untap engine, repeat.
It isn't fully game, because you whiff when you hit land, but it is pretty abusable.
I think Urza is definitely cool, but I can't see him being abused anywhere except at commander tables.
There could be some applications in Modern? He seems too slow to be meaningfully powerful, although there is Mox Amber and Sai, Master Thopterist to consider.
1. This card can produce a ton of mana very quickly (especially with token producers), which is a dangerous thing to have in the command zone. Unlike most mana producing commanders, however, this ability can be used the moment the card comes out (possibly negating the cost paid for him)
2. The second activated ability encourages players to shuffle their giant libraries several times per turn, actively gumming up gameplay.
3. The raw power of that second activated ability... and the fact that it only needs colorless mana... risks warping the game around this card. While Bribery and reanimation aren't concerns when this guy is in the command zone, this guy would still be a prime target whenever it appears in the 99 and the sort of copying/stealing shenanigans we saw with cards like Primeval Titan may still be present. The fact that this guy gives you a free body and turns your equipment and plain old artifacts into free mana rocks doesn't help things on that front, either.
4. The synergy that this card has with Static Orb and Winter Orb is frankly a little bit sickening.
To be clear, we have seen pretty crazy commanders in the past. The mono green Selvala ramps like mad and Arjun shuffles libraries like nobody's business, for example. When you mix all of these factors together into a single card, however... I could imagine a ban.
If Urza gets banned, I would immediately question why Thrasios isn't. Thrasios is a similar card in power level and is ubiquitous in cEDH play; indeed, a majority of the established cEDH archetypes are Thrasios + Tymna variants. But he's still alive and kicking, as is Paradox Engine.
And that's precisely why I really don't want to ever see an Urza Planeswalker card. They will have to massively cut his power which does not in any way do justice to his legacy. That, or they'll make it virtually impossible to cast like Progenitus or something.
Only justification I can make for Lord Windgrace and Freyalise is that their cards are from immediately after they failed to defeat Yawgmoth in Phyrexia and they're severely weakened at the time.