How to Build an Artifact Deck in "Magic: The Gathering"

Anybody who's tried a dual-color deck and failed to get enough land knows the woes of failing to get the correct land types. With a powerful artifact deck, you'll never need to worry about that scenario. For the most part, these cards act the same as any others; they just aren't tied to a specific type of land. Colorless creatures still have to wait a turn to attack due to summon sickness, for example.

The benefits of building an artifact deck include not having to be bound to any specific kind of land; they're colorless cards, so any type of land adds to their pool of eligible mana. Because they're colorless, artifact creatures won't be affected by most color protection spells; spells that grant protection from a group of creatures or spells usually do so by color. For example, if someone casts a spell to get protection from red, they cannot be targeted by red spells or red attacking creatures. Even though they have no color association, they aren't affected by Intimidate either; normally, a creature with Intimidate can only be blocked by another creature of that color, but artifact creatures may also block against this mechanic.

Myr function similarly to Slivers in that they tend to help increase each other's stats the more you have out, but there's one other benefit to using them: more mana. You can tap certain Myr to add even more land to your mana pool for the turn, giving you that extra boost when you haven't been drawing enough land with each turn. If your opponent is aggressive and keeps defeating your creatures, however, it can be difficult to recover due to the slow build-up the deck requires.

Certain artifact cards allow you to tap for powerful effects, such as forcing the other player to discard cards from his or her draw pile. Take it a step further by mixing some blue cards into your artifact deck; because blue cards largely try to prevent combat and other undesired events from occurring, such a deck easily gives you a major advantage to control and shape the battlefield as you wish.

Artifact creatures do a good job increasing each other's attack and toughness, but you don't have much opportunity to increase your own life in the meantime. With white cards in your deck, you have access to several spells that directly increase your own health while further increasing the toughness of your artifact creatures. Once you get into a cycle of healing and adding new life every turn, you eventually become too powerful to ever destroy while you whittle away each opponent's health pool.