The brand new Marvel Super Heroes set is chock full of heroes across many different series of comics. However, there are also a lot of neat villains popping up in the set to oppose the heroes. One of these villains is none other than Ultron.

Ultron introduces a new Colorless Commander option to the game with a focus around Artifacts. Artifacts is a heavily represented archetype in Commander, however, this villain has a pretty unique scheme up his sleeve.

Assembling Ultron's Robot Army

Ultron, Artificial Malevolence is a three-mana Legendary Artifact Creature that can create copies of your Artifacts when they enter the battlefield. Ultron also turns this copy into a 2/2 robot Creature if the Artifact is not a Creature. It's important to note that if the spell Ultron copies is a Creature it retains its initial stats.

Copying spells is nothing too new when it comes to Magic: the Gathering. We have not seen this effect, however, in a Colorless Legendary Creature that we can put in the Command Zone. The goal of this deck is quite simple: find powerful Artifacts that we can double up on to overwhelm our opponents with a robot army.

Decklist for Ultron, Artificial Malevolence

This is a Bracket Three deck. There are zero Game Changers in this list, but this deck is incredibly optimized and full of powerful cards that can end the game very quickly, especially when you have two of them.

No budget was set when deciding what to include in this particular list, however, a few expensive staples like Mana Vault and The One Ring are not present due to how powerful they are. If you have an extra lying around, this is a good deck to throw it into. If you want to push this deck to even greater heights those cards are a good place to start.

Ultron's Robot Army | Commander | Nigel Kurtz

• Commander (1)
• 1 Ultron, Artificial Malevolence

• Creatures (28)
• 1 Automated Artificer
• 1 Behemoth of Vault 0
• 1 Canoptek Scarab Swarm
• 1 Chief of the Foundry
• 1 Chrome Dome
• 1 Cityscape Leveler
• 1 Crashing Drawbridge
• 1 Cyberman Patrol
• 1 Cybermen Squadron
• 1 Duplicant
• 1 Foundry Inspector
• 1 Giggling Skitterspike
• 1 Glaring Fleshraker
• 1 Graaz, Unstoppable Juggernaut
• 1 Jhoira's Familiar
• 1 Kozilek, the Broken Reality
• 1 Krang, Utrom Warlord
• 1 Myr Battlesphere
• 1 Palladium Myr
• 1 Phyrexian Triniform
• 1 Rug of Smothering
• 1 Scrawling Crawler
• 1 Stuffy Doll
• 1 Thran Spider
• 1 Threefold Thunderhulk
• 1 Weathered Sentinels
• 1 Wurmcoil Engine
• 1 Zenith Chronicler

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 1 Karn, Living Legacy
• 1 Ugin, the Ineffable

• Instants (2)
• 1 Kozilek's Command
• 1 Null Elemental Blast

• Enchantments (1)
• 1 Echoes of Eternity

• Artifacts (31)
• 1 Blitzball
• 1 Cloud Key
• 1 Coin of Mastery
• 1 Conjurer's Closet
• 1 Eye of Vecna
• 1 Golem Foundry
• 1 Hedron Archive
• 1 Howling Mine
• 1 Hylda's Crown of Winter
• 1 Idol of Oblivion
• 1 Knight Paladin
• 1 Mystic Forge
• 1 Nautiloid Ship
• 1 Nexus of Becoming
• 1 Palantir of Orthanc
• 1 Panharmonicon
• 1 Planetarium of Wan Shi Tong
• 1 Portal to Phyrexia
• 1 Reaver Titan
• 1 Sculpting Steel
• 1 Semblance Anvil
• 1 Sisay's Ring
• 1 Smuggler's Copter
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Thran Dynamo
• 1 Thunderhawk Gunship
• 1 Transmutation Font
• 1 Treasure Chest
• 1 Ur-Golem's Eye
• 1 Vexing Puzzlebox
• 1 Worn Powerstone

• Lands (35)
• 3 Wastes
• 1 Abstergo Entertainment
• 1 Arch of Orazca
• 1 Blast Zone
• 1 Bonders' Enclave
• 1 Buried Ruin
• 1 Command Beacon
• 1 Crystal Vein
• 1 Eden, Seat of the Sanctum
• 1 Fomori Vault
• 1 Gallifrey Council Chamber
• 1 Geier Reach Sanitarium
• 1 Ghost Quarter
• 1 Hall of Tagsin
• 1 Horizon of Progress
• 1 Inventors' Fair
• 1 Labyrinth of Skophos
• 1 Mage-Ring Network
• 1 Mirrorpool
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Ominous Cemetery
• 1 Petrified Hamlet
• 1 Roadside Reliquary
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 Rumble Arena
• 1 Scavenger Grounds
• 1 Shrine of the Forsaken Gods
• 1 The Mycosynth Gardens
• 1 Thespian's Stage
• 1 Treasure Vault
• 1 Tyrite Sanctum
• 1 War Room
• 1 Zhalfirin Void

Buy This Deck Export text

First step we need mana

Colorless decks tend to be on the higher end of the curve for spells. This is thanks to highly impactful large Creatures like the Eldrazi. Unfortunately, even though they would be perfect for the villain theme of the deck, they are not Artifact Creatures. However, there are some massive Artifact Creatures that we will want to cast and potentially double with Ultron, so we need lots of mana.

There are 24 cards in this deck that one might label as ramp cards, or cards that produce mana in some way. Sol Ring is of course present in this deck and could potentially be doubled if Ultron sees it enter, an utterly dastardly play. Sol Ring has a lot of relatives that aren't staples in most Commander decks since they only produce Colorless mana, luckily we don't have to worry about that.

Sisay's Ring, Ur-Golem's Eye, Thran Dynamo, Hedron Archive, and Palladium Myr are all great pieces of ramp to push out our late game spells incredibly early. Ultron can also give you the option to double up on any of these when they enter by turning it into a robot clone.

Powerstone tokens are another great way to ramp in an Artifact deck. They also resemble the Infinity Stones with more of the Magic: the Gathering flavor. Karn, Living Legacy, Thran Spider, and Hall of Tagsin are a handful of cards that all create these powerful token Artifacts.

Card type cost reducers are another way we can play more cards for cheaper. Semblance Anvil, Jhoira's Familiar, Foundry Inspector, and Ugin, the Ineffable reduce the cost of Colorless spells or Artifact spells. Ugin also doubles as being a piece of removal, which is pretty hard to come by in Colorless.

The coolest piece of ramp included in this list is Vexing Puzzlebox. If you tap this Artifact and roll a D20, the chances that you will actually get to 100 counters on this card is very low over the course of the game.

Thanks to Ultron, you can create a second copy of this card. This allows you to roll two D20s a turn which could produce much better results. Searching for an Artifact and dropping it right into play also works perfectly with our Commander since we only care about it entering the battlefield and not being cast.

The Heavy Hitters

Once all ramp systems are online it's time to take over the world, or at least the Commander pod to start. There are about 18 cards in this deck labeled as "bombs." These cards are all incredibly impactful and will help you push your plan to win the game.

Wurmcoil Engine deserves a place in every Artifact deck. Being able to stabilize with a Deathtouch and Lifelink blocker is a game changer. Ultron also gives us the option to create a clone of Wurmcoil Engine to have double the amount of presence on the board. Having two engines also gives some insurance against potential board wipes since they will leave you with a small army when they die.

Cybermen Squadron has an insane line of text. All your nontoken Artifact Creatures gain the keyword Myriad. A Creature with Myriad creates token copies of itself when it attacks a player, with each token attacking another opponent (those tokens are exiled at the end of combat). Ultron already wants us to care about playing lots of different Artifacts with abilities that trigger when they enter the battlefield. Cybermen Squadron will allow those enter the battlefield abilities to happen over and over again. If you use some extra mana to create a copy of Cybermen with Ultron, your Creatures gain Myriad twice.

Myr Battlesphere is an iconic card. This card sees play in the Powered Cube on Magic: the Gathering Arena and there's no question why. A giant ball made of Myr rolling toward your opponents in an Indiana Jones fashion paints a hilarious picture in one's mind. Also, this Creature does create a small army of tokens when it enters the battlefield, a trigger that can be doubled with Ultron, or the mentioned above Cybermen Squadron.

Entering into Lots of Value

This deck has a subtheme on "Enter the Battlefield" abilities. So many of the Creatures and Artifacts have them since we have the option to double them with Ultron. It makes sense that there are a few cards in here that help push this gameplan. Let's go over a few of them.

Panharmonicon is a powerful enters-the-battlefield ability doubler (say that five times fast). All of our permanents with enter triggers will happen an additional time. If you have extra mana floating around, using some of it to create a robot copy of Panharmonicon is a wise investment. This will have your enter triggers happening two more times instead of just once.

Conjurer's Closet is a card worth tutoring out of your library with something like Inventors' Fair. Blinking, exiling a permanent and bringing it back into play, an Artifact on your end step allows you to create a token copy with Ultron. Even if you run out of mana and can't create a token copy, you still can get an enters trigger for free at the end of each of your turns.

This last card is often forgotten, and is was released more recently than you might think. Echoes of Eternity goes absolutely insane when combined with Ultron. Echoes of Eternity will copy any Colorless spell we cast (that is all of our spells) and will also double triggers from Colorless sources. This includes Ultron's trigger to create a token copy. It will also double the enter the battlefield ability of any card we play.

Combine any of these cards with Cybermen Squadron or Myr Battlesphere and you will have so many triggers your eyes might go crossed.

The Car Drives Itself

Vehicles are a pretty popular card type nowadays. It seems every set has at least one or two new whips for your favorite characters to hop in. Most vehicles require Creatures to crew them in order to attack and have a trigger that goes off when they are put to use on the battlefield.

Ultron will create 2/2 robot clones of our vehicle spells allowing them to attack without being crewed. This is a really cool interaction and there's a lot of neat cards we can play to take advantage of this.

Nautiloid Ship steals Creatures right out of our opponent's graveyard when it attacks. This card became very popular with Bello, Bard of the Brambles from Bloomburrow. Now we can utilize it in a very similar way, but with a character straight from the Marvel universe.

Thunderhawk Gunship also works really well when it drives itself. Whenever it attacks all your Creatures gain Flying until the end of turn. This will allow you to soar right over your opponent's blockers stuck on the ground. This gunship also comes into play with a small battalion of troops, which will be doubled when you create a copy of it with Ultron.

Also from the Warhammer 40K universe, we have Reaver Titan. Whenever this Creature attacks it deals five damage to each opponent. Now you get to do that twice thanks to Ultron's robot clone of the titan. Even though it is only a low 2/2 Creature, it comes with its own protection thanks to its first line of text: protection from mana value three or less.

Self-driving cars are a pretty neat trick you can do with this Commander. Be careful to watch out for Legendary vehicles since you can't control two of them at the same time.

Time to Win

Once you have all your ramp into play and your engines humming you can start to look for a way to close out the game. Let's wrap up by looking at a few cards that help end the game.

Cyberman Patrol is the first card that can help end the game rather quickly. Afflict deals damage to your opponents even if they block your incoming Creatures. Afflict is an old keyword from our first journey to Amonkhet that makes blocking an even more stressful affair for your opponents. This keyword doesn't see much play in Commander due to the high life totals, however, Cyberman Patrol can be copied thanks to our Commander.

Afflict is a keyword that stacks. Simply put, if you control two Cyberman Patrols your Artifact Creatures will have Afflict six. This turns combat into a heads I win, tails you lose scenario.

Graaz, Unstoppable Juggernaut will turn all of your 2/2 robots from Ultron into 5/3 juggernaut Creatures. Combine this with Chief of the Foundry or Chrome Dome to make your robot army even larger to swing in for lethal.

If that still isn't enough, Kozilek, the Broken Reality or Krang, Utrom Warlord should be the final nail in the coffin. Kozilek's anthem effect and Krang's long list of powerful keywords should boost your forces enough to swing in for lethal on the entire table.

Even without any of these finishers, Cybermen Squadron and Reaver Titan also might be enough to close out a game without any of these buffs or anthems in play. Just keep growing your board turn after turn until you simply overwhelm your opponents.

Conclusion

Ultron, Artificial Malevolence is an awesome new Colorless Commander option from Marvel Super Heroes. Artifact decks are constantly getting new support and most of the powerful cards are Colorless. If you have always wanted to build an Artifact deck and never found the right Commander, maybe this one speaks to you. Enjoy ruling your next game night with your legion of robots if you do decide to put this awesome legend to good use.

See you on the battlefield!

-Nigel