One of my favorite types of commanders is one that looks unassuming at first glance but turns out to be powerful when combined with the right cards. Magic's newest set, a crossover with Final Fantasy, has a lot of cards like this, and my favorite is definitely Golbez, Crystal Collector. For a Blue and a Black mana, you get a 1/4 human wizard with two abilities. The first lets you surveil 1 whenever an artifact enters under your control and the second lets you return a creature from your graveyard to your hand if you control four or more artifacts, with each opponent losing life equal to that creature's power if you control eight or more artifacts. These abilities make for an interesting Dimir deck that cares about playing as many artifacts as possible and filling your graveyard with big creatures to burn your opponents with. If that type of gameplay suits you, here are ten suggestions for cards that pair well with Golbez.

Forensic Gadgeteer

For a deck that wants to make as many artifacts as possible, there are few other token generation engines as efficient as Forensic Gadgeteer. This card does everything we want: it makes a clue whenever we cast an artifact spell, essentially doubling our artifact production, and lets us cash those clues in for one less mana when we need to draw cards. It also reduces the activation costs of our artifacts by one, which will come in handy with some of the later cards on this list.

Master of Etherium

Master of Etherium serves two purposes in a deck like this. The anthem It provides for our other artifact creatures, like myr and servo tokens, is nice and helps us go wide. It is much more useful as a target for Golbez's second ability, however. Thanks to the way its power/toughness ability is worded, it will have power equal to the number of artifacts we control while it's in the graveyard, allowing it to deal massive amounts of damage and potentially one-shot opponents.

Mirrorshell Crab

While Master of Etherium and similar big-power creatures are great ways to close out a game, Mirrorshell Crab is the perfect Golbez target if you need to play a longer game. It's not a complicated card, being a 5/7 artifact creature for seven mana with Ward 3, but the channel ability is what makes it so strong in this deck. It is a soft counter spell, only working if our opponents don't have three mana lying around, but because it is an ability and not a spell it can't be interacted with by most traditional countermagic. This means that if you target it with Golbez, you can pass each turn with a counter up while dealing five damage to each opponent once you get down eight artifacts.

Shardless Outlander

Like Mirrorshell Crab, Shardless Outlander is a card that you'll likely never cast, yet it plays a vital role in the deck's strategy. It is a seven mana 6/5 with trample, but the important part is that it's an artifact creature with basic landcycling. With enough artifacts to trigger Golbez's second ability, you can cycle it each turn to guarantee land drops and thin your deck, and once you get to eight artifacts it also burns each opponent for six damage. It's not splashy or particularly powerful on its own, but it's a great early-game engine that synergizes well with our commander.

Collector's Vault

Surveiling whenever an artifact enters under our control is a great way to filter through our deck and make sure that we get the card we want into our graveyard, but sometimes we're going to end up drawing cards we don't want. That's where Collector's Vault comes in, letting us draw a card, discard a card and make a treasure token for just two mana. It lets us loop creature cards like Master of Etherium more effectively while giving us temporary ramp and upping our artifact count, making it solid value for a small mana investment.

Imotekh the Stormlord

There is a three-year gap between the release of Imotekh and Golbez, but I swear these cards were designed to be besties. Hailing from the Warhammer Necron precon, Imotekh creates two 2/2 Necron artifact creature tokens whenever an artifact leaves your graveyard and gives one of your artifact creatures +2/+2 and menace at the beginning of each of your combats. Given that our two main goals with this deck are to make a bunch of artifacts and trigger Golbez, Imotekh serves as both an enabler and a payoff, letting us build a wide board and push through damage.

Mirrodin Besieged

Mirrodin Besieged is another card that does just about everything our deck wants to do, although we'll need to choose carefully and plan ahead to get maximum value. This three mana enchantment either makes a 1/1 myr token whenever we cast an artifact spell or allows us to draw and discard a card on our end step before making an opponent lose the game if we have 15 or more artifacts in our graveyard. Both modes are great, creating more artifacts to feed Golbez's abilities or letting us fill our graveyard and maybe killing our opponents on our end step.

Matoya, Archon Elder

Most of the cards on this list so far have focused on maximizing value from Golbez's second ability, but this one might be the strongest card in the deck when combined with Golbez's first ability. Matoya, Archon Elder simply draws you a card whenever you scry or surveil after you've decided where your top card will go. This ability is not limited to once per turn, so with Golbez out you'll be drawing a card every time an artifact enters under your control, and because you draw after you surveil you can still put cards into the graveyard if you want.

Monumental Corruption

Burst card draw is good, but burst card draw that can kill your opponents is even better. Monumental Corruption is essentially a big Sign in Blood, making a target player draw cards and lose life equal to your artifact count. It can draw you a bunch of cards if you have the life to spare or kill an opponent if you have more artifacts than they have life.

Strionic Resonator

While Golbez's ability to bring a creature back and deal damage to your opponents is powerful, its biggest limiting factor is that it only triggers once per turn cycle. The best way to combat this downside is to either take extra turns or play cards that copy triggered abilities, and I think the latter is the more interesting option. Strionic Resonator is a classic EDH card that does just that, letting you get an extra Golbez trigger for just two mana while also contributing to your artifact count.

That's it for this 10 for 10, hopefully it has given you a good starting point for building around Golbez. Dimir artifacts isn't a new archetype, but it's not very common either, so I'm looking forward to seeing new cards in this space going forward.