Modern Musings: Forgotten Artifacts Part Two — Surge Node/Coretapper

Hey everyone!  Welcome to another Modern Musings!  This week I’m going to continue my three part series on forgotten or fringe artifacts.  As the title gives away, I’m going to be taking a closer look at both Coretapper and Surge Node.  If you haven’t seen either before, here they are:

If you haven’t caught on, both of these cards care about charge counters.  Why would we care about charge counters you ask?  Well, that would be because of these delicious morsels:

The idea is that we cast these for free into an early Surge Node or Coretapper and get tons of mana really really quickly.  It’s very reminiscent of Tron actually, and though there are a few advantages to playing a deck like this over Tron, Tron is probably the more consistent deck. Though this is definitely the more explosive of the two.

This is the essential core of the deck, and from here there are a few different versions of the deck you can build.  There are two versions however that I think are considerably more competitive than the others.  Let’s take a look at the first one:

Deck #1

I think that this is my personal favorite version of the deck, mostly because I absolutely adore Death Cloud.  But there’s actually a lot going on in this deck.  Voltaic Key allows Astral Cornucopia and Everflowing Chalice to produce even more insane amounts of mana.  Tezzeret’s Gambit draws you cards and adds more charge counters to your things via proliferate.  Paradox Engine allows you to have a combo kill with Otherworld Atlas, as you can force your opponent to deck themselves by drawing out their entire deck, while we avoid the same fate with Elixir of Immortality.  Pretty nifty.  Finally, we have Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas, which gives us an alternate win condition by either making our artifacts into beaters or making our opponent lose a lot of life.  He is also one of the primary ways this deck can win through a Stony Silence without removal.  If you want to run red instead of black, there’s also a version of the deck that runs Wildfire instead of Death Cloud.

The other option for this deck is a bit more controlling:

Deck #2

This deck is a little more nuanced than it’s counterpart and looks all over the place at first glance.  The central cards to pay attention to are Boom // Bust and Ward of Bones.  The idea here is that you cast those two cards to lock your opponent out of playing any more lands for the game.  You still get to play magic because your artifacts produce tons of mana.  After that, you get an Ensnaring Bridge to lock up any creatures that they have left.  Finally, you can win the game through either Tezzeret the Seeker or Thopter Foundry + Sword of the Meek.  Most decks find it pretty hard to win without having any lands in play, so the lockdown aspect of the deck seems pretty good.  The problem that I see with it is its consistency.  It actually seems fairly difficult to get out all the pieces in time to win.

Anyway, that’s all for this week. Let me know what you think in the comments.  Next week will be the final installment of my forgotten artifacts series, so stay tuned for more spiciness!