Magic: The Gathering
MTG Case: Fiend Artisan
Fiend Artisan is one of the most impressive cards from Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. I will take a close look at strategies and synergies which generate the best outcome for his abilities.
Who is Fiend Artisan?
Fiend Artisan comes with a 1/1 body, costs only two black and/or green mana, grows over time for each creature in your graveyard and provides a fair built-in tutor effect.
Build a home for Fiend Artisan
As powerful as Fiend Artisan may be, you need to build a deck around him. Furthermore our deck needs to stay alive without Fiend Artisan.
Fiend Artisan needs to impact the board either to support his static ability which grows his body or using his activated ability to put a creature directly onto the battlefield.
We have to consider two things while building a deck around Fiend Artisan.
- We need to be able to bin enough creatures — from library, hand or battlefield — for a reasonable body in an appropriate amount of time.
- We need to have beneficial sacrifice as well as tutor targets.
Grow the body
We need to be able to bin enough creatures — from library, hand or battlefield — for a reasonable body in an appropriate amount of time.
Fast & unpredictable growth
While self-mill is a valid and fast option it is unpredictable as well. You may get a really big Fiend Artisan very fast and set your opponent’s life total to 0 very quickly. You need to consider trample, flying or similar to guarantee damage. Our opponent is able to trade with any removal or graveyard hate as early as of turn 1. We need to be able to stabilize and pressure or we are left behind with a milled library and will have a hard time coming back.
Slow & predictable growth
It’s even better to bin cards of your choice with effects similar to Discard, Surveil, etc. We may also utilize graveyard interaction with abilities similar to Jump-Start, Flashback, Escape, etc for more value. This allows more consistency and better resource management while using Fiend Artisan’s full potential.
I would play the same way as Tarmogoyf in Modern Jund or green-based Death Shadow.
Tutor to the battlefield
We need to have beneficial sacrifice as well as tutor targets.
I’ll cover detailed synergies with other cards depending on formats in another post. We are able to grow Fiend Artisan’s body in a smart way. Let’s figure out synergies and conditions of creatures which impact the board immediately.
- We want to implement creatures or a toolbox of creatures with useful triggered abilities when they enter or leave the battlefield. This heavily depends on the overall deck strategy.
- We want to bring crazy powerful and payable creatures onto the battlefield as fast as possible.
There are more possible includes which allow advanced interactions with the graveyard and bring back creatures to the battlefield.
I created filters at scryfall.com of cards with triggered abilities for following formats including future cards:
Next steps
I’m really excited about Fiend Artisan and want to build decks around him in Standard and Pioneer format. He seems to be a bit slow for Modern or Legacy. Since I took a long break between 2010 and 2018, I will review previous decks that use a similar Tutoring or Birth Pod strategy or value ETB creatures.
