After completing Part 1 of An Articifer’s Tale I turned to my collection of artifacts and pulled out a pile of cards to be considered for use. Most of these seemed to be either mana stones like Sol Ring or smaller pieces of equipment like Lightning Greaves, and I didn’t have much in the way of “game winners”. I did find a Pentavus in my rare folder though.
Also looking through my red spells I had a few direct burn spells such as Devil’s Play and Banefire as well as some mass removal in the form of Earthquake and Blasphemous Act. Whilst I do have a spare Comet Storm I have banned myself from using that card in this deck. It is a fantastic spell, but since my other 3 EDH decks run it already it has become a bit of a repetitive win condition. I also noticed Alpha Brawl and smiled as I threw one of Dark Ascension’s many overcosted junk rares into the pile. In terms of being cool and creative with Slobad though, I honestly didn’t really have a lot to go on.

And then I went to GP Manchester. As it turns out GPs are great places to do loads of trading.. who knew!? Its rare that I have the opportunity to trade with people outside of my usual play group so before going I made sure to stock my trade folder with all the spare rare cards I had laying around as well as some random cards that I have no interest in but I thought others may value for Modern/Legacy decks. To make the most of the opportunity of being somewhere different with so many people I was asking for trades whenever possible. Over the course of one weekend I managed to trade for around 25 new cards, the majority of which were artifacts I got for Slobad. Given at FNM I’m lucky to make just one trade in a night, I think that’s pretty good going!

As you may have read in Part 1, I light-heartedly commented on the fact that should I want an amazing card, such as, say.. Umezawa’s Jitte, that I would have to trade for it. Well as it turns out, the Huntmaster of the Fells I received in my sealed pool makes for great trade fodder at the moment. It’s always nice to open expensive cards which I have no interest in because I can always get so much value from trading them (I have traded away many a Karn Liberated and Batterskull in the recent past, ironically both of which would make nice additions here.. damn).
Over the course of the day I was letting other players now that I had a Huntmaster. I could have traded it to almost anyone but I wanted to hold onto it in case something really special came along. And then, about half way through the day, one guy showed me his binder which contained.. you guessed it, a Jitte! He checked prices online and was adamant that my Huntmaster was worth more. Whilst I’m not fussed at all about tiny value differences when trading, he insisted on making up the difference in card value. I wasn’t going to argue, and so was happy to also receive Venser, the Sojourner (adding a Bloodline Keeper to the trade myself). And so by some stroke of luck I now have my second Jitte, but crucially I have one for Slobad to wield!

Other cards I traded for:
Precursor Golem – 3 artifacts from one card, this seems like decent value. As does..
Myr Battlesphere – 5 in one! If numbers seem good..
Myr Turbine – Then more numbers seems better! Lots of token generation already here, ready to be sacrificed to protect the more crucial deck components.
Lux Cannon – Used normally this might be a bit slow for EDH but I’m hoping to have some sources for proliferation in the deck and I know there are cards that can add charge counters so I will be keeping an eye out for those.
Cloud Key Reducing the cost of nearly all my spells? Yes please!
Darksteel Colossus and Blightsteel Colossus – I traded for DSC first, it was a card I already had a good idea that I wanted. When the opportunity to trade for his newer, meaner brother came along though I was unsure at first. Some people really don’t like seeing BSC in EDH games. My argument is that he is a valid win condition, and it is highly likely that every player will have at least one turn to answer it. And even if not, he can still be blocked! And if you really can’t find any of these solutions then you probably deserve to leave the game. So I made the trade and both will be featuring in my deck.
Kuldotha Forgemaster – I liked the idea of being able to tutor for specific artifacts. Dumping 3 bits of junk for, say, one of the above cards seems decent. I may have to focus on trying to acquire some artifact recursion in the near future though.
Temple Bell – This card makes friends, and also I feel my deck may suffer a little from a lack of tempo so ways for me to draw extra cards seems good.
Platinum Angel – This is one of those cards I’ve never played with before, and I figure maybe being able to flash it into play somehow would be kinda cool. Speaking of which…
Shimmer Myr – Shim-myr!!
Solemn Simulacrum – Surely one of the best EDH cards of all time? It would be rude not to.
Lodestone Golem – A bit of a hate card for all other decks, I wasn’t 100% sure on whether I wanted to run this, but the trade was for a card I really wasn’t bothered about keeping so I took it. One extra mana isn’t too harsh so I hope my opponents find this guy at least acceptable for me to run.
Mimic Vat – Another great EDH card, I hope to be having some fun stealing creatures with this.
Oblivion Stone – This may we be the very same card I traded away a while back. Realising I now wanted it, I traded a copy back from a friend.
Bonehoard and Strata Scythe – Again, I used to have copies of these. Both were cards in my Mirrodin Besieged Pre-Release pool and helped me win the tourney! Slobad is a bit small, but equip one or both of these to him and he could be doing some serious general damage!
Chaos Warp – This is a really fun piece of pseudo-removal in EDH. Only available in the Commander Pre-Cons I made sure to grab one.
Hoard-Smelter Dragon – Whilst being useful to remove opposing artifacts, my favourite thing here is being able to target my own indestructible artifacts to pump him massively!
Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle – The last time I had one of these I traded it to a friend for his Valakut deck, this was one built before Primeval Titan made it popular. I’ve not had the opportunity to acquire another since, so I snapped this up. My multicoloured EDH decks run relatively few basic land, but being mono-coloured Slobad is likely to have a lot of mountains and the extra bit of free damage could be nice to have.

Lastly I made sure to buy some sleeves for the deck. Until very recently I had not sleeved any of my EDH decks. Not only do I prefer playing with unsleeved cards, but also once sleeved they don’t fit in the cardboard boxes any more! To sleeve all my 40-odd decks would be rather costly. However I figured if only to protect some of the higher-value cards in my EDH decks that sleeves would be a good investment. I went with bright green for Ulasht, yellow for Lyzolda and orange for Zedruu. Wanting to also use brightly-coloured sleeves for Slobad, I went with pink, naturally.

In terms of future additions I would like to make I do have a few cards in mind. These include Vulshok Battlemaster to steal all the awesome opposing equipment (now if only I could use Slobad to sacrifice it!). And Voltaic Key, untapping key artifacts seems like a useful thing to be able to do. Other nice cards would be Crystal Ball, or even Sensei’s Divining Top if i can ever get a second one (it took me ages to get my first) and possibly Skullclamp; although with what looks to be few creatures I don’t think this is so important but drawing lots of cards from Myr tokens could prove a great source of card advantage.

From a friends comment on Part 1 I have also had some other card sugestions. As I will most likely have metalcraft Molten Psyche is a card I really like the idea of casting. Slag Fiend was also suggested, although its “just” a creature so didn’t really grab me. Scrapyard Salvo however, did. This innocent little common could prove to be rather lethal! Thopter Assembly is another token producer that could be cool to use, and Myr Propagator could be good to pick up too but again the card itself doesn’t really excite me so I don’t think it will be a priority.

As I come to the end of writing this post, one card that I’ve just remembered I own is Ion Storm. It was originally in my Ulasht deck, but with a +1/+1 counter / charge counter subtheme potentially appearing here this could prove a handy addition.

As ever, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed Part 2 of An Artificer’s Tale. Mostly thanks to my GP attendance the deck looks like it will come together much faster than I expected! Part 3 may even include early playtesting details, I’ll see how it goes.

@EdGuise88