Well Oiled Machine (Tezzeret Brawl) (Brawl)

Tezzeret is such a fantastic commander that it’s almost not even funny. His +1 sets up our game plan so we’re always going to play him right on turn 4, his -2 is an infinite removal engine, meaning we can be more greedy with our deckbuilding and not include as many answers, and he has a self-contained win condition in his -7, which only takes two turns to get to.

The basic game plan is to put artifacts on the board—beyond that, we actually have several reliable win conditions, and the versatility of how we can win the game is actually my favorite part of the deck. The primary thing you’re looking to set up is Paradox Engine+Inspiring Statuary+Torment of Hailfire. We can also win by flooding the board and using Antiquities War to swing in for a million, or Settle the Score to get Tezzeret’s emblem and grind out the game by constantly producing 5/5s and using Tezz to remove our opponents’ biggest stuff, or getting some ridiculous amount of Self-Replicators, or just putting down Herald of Anguish and clocking our opponents in the sky.

That said, we’re not a deck that can win by just playing creatures every round and turning them sideways. We need to find our win conditions, so we have a lot of draw power to churn through our deck to find a way to win the game. We always want to get Inspiring Statuary on the board as fast as possible—it’s not only core component of Tormenting for the win, it lets us Pull from Tomorrow to dig deep in our deck and, most importantly, it lets us replay Tezzeret whenever we want, no matter how many times he gets sent to the command zone, which gives us an incredibly strong inevitability game since Tezz both removes threats and can be his own win condition. I haven’t included graveyard recursion or protection beyond Negate, but if your friends are running artifact destruction, definitely consider cards like Rona or Padeem to protect your Statuary.

Although Antiquities War is one of our win cons, don’t be afraid to throw it out there just because you don’t have a board full of artifacts yet if you don’t have a better play. At its worst, it’s a double Ancient Stirrings for 4 that you can use to intimidate the hell out of your opponents while setting up another way to win.

Note that we do have a minor package for sacrificing artifacts for value. Sage of Lat-Nam and Herald of Anguish both let us sac random artifacts to gain some card advantage over our opponents, so keep that in mind when considering cards like Gleaming Barrier or Servo Schematic. Treasure Map does similar work with treasures specifically once it flips.

I built this deck mostly out of draft cards I already had and some of the cheaper ones I didn’t. Obviously, if you have cards like Karn or Phyrexian Scriptures, you should jam them in, but the deck is fine without them.

I’ve included a “sideboard” of cards you may want to consider slotting in, either because they deal with specific strategies in your playgroup or just because you want to change up the way the deck works. Our main problem cards are River’s Rebuke, The Immortal Sun, and any artifact destruction, mainly Abrade but there are some crazier ones that people might run if they expect to go up against you. The Sun doesn’t completely hose us if we get a respectable board going before it comes down, but we plan a lot of our deck around being able to use Tezzeret. Blue Black doesn’t get any artifact destruction, so you may end up having to play things like Universal Solvent if you tend to go up against the Sun frequently. There’s not much we can do about Rebuke except drawing Negate and holding it up, but if you’re playing at a blue-heavy table, Jace’s Defeat is a fine include. Padeem and Rona are both excellent ways to deal with artifact destruction.