The Best MTG Artifact Cards In 2023

With all the different types of cards in Magic The Gathering, it's easy to get overwhelmed. One of the very best card types in Magic The Gathering, though, is the artifact. These cards can allow you to flood your field with various types of mana, or deal damage to your opponent over time, and there's a LOT of them. We've got the very best artifacts here for your perusal. 

For obvious reasons, we're skipping over certain cards such as the Black Lotus. While the Black Lotus is without a shadow of a doubt one of the best artifacts in Magic The Gathering history, it's also banned from play, so it's not really applicable to current players.

The Best Artifacts In Magic The Gathering Right Now

The One Ring

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them. One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them. The One Ring is probably the most recently released artifact on this list, having released in the recent Universes Beyond set Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth, but that doesn't make it any less powerful. It's an INCREDIBLE card and one that would be amazing in a lot of decks.

The One Ring has a lot of different effects that are all great. It's completely indestructible, for one, and it allows you to place a 'burden counter' on itself in order to draw a card for every burden counter on it. While you also lose life for each burden counter, which means you will eventually hit lower digits, it's still worth it because of the sheer amount of cards that you can draw.

Nautiloid Ship

The Nautiloid Ship doesn't look like much at the outset. This ship that is primarily piloted by Mind Flayers who are hunting for their next victims is massive, and costs four mana to summon, but has a pretty great effect to balance it all out. It's a flying-type artifact- vehicle and has an attack/defense value of 5/5.

The effect causes the Nautiloid Ship to exile a target graveyard whenever it enters the field, meaning you can completely prevent graveyard recursion effects. Whenever the ship deals combat damage to your opponent you get to take one of their exiled creatures and put it on the field under your control, similar to how a mind flayer infects their target. 

Trinisphere

Trinisphere is a card that might look normal enough at the outset, but in the right hands can completely tip an entire game in your favor. It costs three of any mana to summon, and forces every spell that would usually cost less than three mana to now cost three total mana.

This can destroy certain decks that need their mana for other things such as casting creatures, and can force them to budget their mana a lot more than they usually would while you just continue playing (assuming you're playing a deck that is big on mana, that is, otherwise this will greatly affect you too).

Planar Bridge

Planar Bridge has a MASSIVE casting cost. It takes a total of eight mana in order to cast the spell, but what you get off it is just incredible. By using eight mana and tapping this legendary artifact, you can add any permanent card from your deck to the battlefield.

This means you can search for literally any creature in your deck, any enchantment, any land, any planeswalker, and any artifact. You can then place this on the field, meaning you can grab whatever you want from your deck and use it without having to wait to draw it, which as you can imagine is a HUGE power move.

Sol Ring

Sol Ring is well-known to anybody who has ever played in Commander Format as being an incredibly formidable force that can make or break games easily. The card only costs one mana to cast, making it really easy to get onto the field, and has a great effect that gives you the leg up on your opponent.

By tapping Sol Ring, you get to add 2 mana to your mana pool. That mana can then be spent on absolutely anything in the game, and since everything costs mana you're going to use it. Thanks to the effect you get you can literally pay off the mana you used to cast it on the turn you cast it.