COMMANDER: ULTRON, ARTIFICAL MALEVOLENCE
Crew This!
Deck Brew by Commander Labs
Ultron copies vehicles and helps crew them too — that’s one efficient engine!
The most popular way builders are looking at Ultron, Artificial Malevolence is as an artifact copy engine, which is a great idea. But, when we saw this commander we immediately thought this could be the new Vehicles matter commander we’d been looking for. Here’s why:
When Ultron copies a vehicle entering the battlefield it comes in as a 2/2 Robot Villain with all of the vehicle’s abilities. That copy does two things we care about:
1) It becomes a vehicle that doesn’t need to be crewed to attack – insane payoff.
2) It can serve as crew member the turn it comes in for any vehicles that were already on the battlefield from a previous turn. Crew costs ask you to tap creatures, and tapping a creature to pay a cost is not the same as the creature using its own activated ability, so summoning sickness doesn't apply.
Ultron’s ability seriously speeds up the challenge with piloting a vehicle deck – they’re slow and take lots of resources. Crew is generally the tax vehicles pay to be worth their slot and this deck gets away with not always paying it.
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Who is this deck for?
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You like vehicles but find the crew tax slow, clunky, and not worth the effort
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You like turning a card's apparent limitation into its strongest feature
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You prefer a misdirecting board state over an imposing one
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DECK PROFILE
Play Pattern
Engine / Control / Chaos / Political / Combo
Experience
Watching opponents misread the threat and generating a mech army
Table Politics
Manipulative / Neutral / Aggressive / Invisible
Win Style
Incremental / Explosive / Inevitable / Unexpected
Piloting Difficulty
Threat Profile
Very low early, then catastrophic
Opponent's Reactions
Wait, the tokens don't need to be crewed?
Fun to Power Ratio
4:3
Piloting Difficulty
Threat Profile
Quiet through turn six, then several closing lines at once
Opponent's Reactions
Wait, the tokens don't need to be crewed?
Fun to Power Ratio
4:3
EARLY GAME
Fill the Tank
Opening turns are quiet while we focus on getting out mana rocks or cost reducers like Arc Reactor, Hedron Crawler, Cloud Key to get Ultron on the table by turn three. Once Ultron is on the table, you start casting cheap vehicles and paying 2 to activate the copy clause. Smuggler's Copter, Reckoner Bankbuster, Unlicensed Hearse. The first 2/2 tokens start landing alongside their originals.
None of this looks scary yet. The board reads as mostly artifact ramp with some early vehicles. The table largely files you under "artifact ramp player who hasn't done much" and develops their own boards.
What's actually happening is that every artifact during this, and all future phases will be two artifacts hitting the board instead of one. Two Mind Stones. Two Decoction Modules dripping energy in parallel to run the small energy package. Two Smuggler's Copters, one of which is a 2/2 flying looter that needs no crew and will be attacking next turn. Those next few turns are going to show the table the meaning of “fast lap”.
Piloting Tip
Maximize the colorless mana available. You want as many copy triggers as you can get once Ultron is out.
MID GAME
Stack the Pilots
By turn five or six you’re starting to develop a significant board state. And, unlike many vehicle decks, this one is equipped to crew in response to threats and/or chump block as necessary.
Iron Spider, Stark Upgrade is a real engine piece at this point. Tap it, every artifact creature and vehicle you control gets a +1/+1 counter — including the 2/2 token army. A weakness in colorless decks is card advantage. Iron Spider’s second ability can also come in handy as you sink the counters into needed card draw. The deck's hand-refill engine and its board-pump engine are the same card.
Meanwhile, the Robot typal package pumps the tokens. Adaptive Automaton names Robot. Metallic Mimic names Robot. Patchwork Automaton scales with each artifact ETB. Steel Overseer taps to spread +1/+1 counters. None of these is doing anything game-ending on its own, but together they turn 2/2s into 4/4s and 5/5s that opponents stopped tracking three turns ago.
Vibranium Mining Mech is the mid-game engine card worth singling out. Every ETB and every attack creates a Vibranium token — artifact mana for artifact spells. Ultron copies it, so one cast gives you two Vibranium tokens on ETB and two more if both vehicles survive a swing. That's four artifact mana off one mid-game vehicle cast, which fuels the next round of casting and copying.
Canoptek Spyder is a real value add at this juncture as well, allowing a card draw on every artifact entering the battlefield. At this point, that’s 2 to 4 cards per turn.
Also, the energy mini-engine ticks along in parallel. Aetherworks Marvel, Gonti's Aether Heart, and Decoction Module accumulate counters quietly. Aethersphere Harvester sits on the board as a vehicle that's also a credible threat through energy spending. None of these will close a game on its own. They're staged for Aetherflux Conduit later.
Piloting Tip
The 2/2 tokens are blockers, pilots, and attackers at the same time. Use them defensively as much as offensively.
END GAME
Where the Rubber Meets the Road
The deck has three distinct closing lines, and which one fires depends on what the table allows.
The Thanos-Copter is the cleanest finish. Six mana for a 5/5 flying haste vehicle whose ETB animates every vehicle you control until end of turn AND gives you card draw whenever any vehicle deals combat damage to a player. One cast turns a slow board into a coordinated army with a draw engine attached. If you happen to have Glaring Spotlight out, now is the time to sac it and give that army hexproof and unblockable for the turn.
Thunderhawk Gunship is the second line. Copy it with Ultron to create four 2/2 Warrior tokens itching to crew a vehicle. Tap Crashing Drawbridge to give all your creatures haste and swing with Gunship and your crewed, now flying, vehicle army.
Aetherflux Conduit or Gonti’s Aether Heart are the long-game closers. By turn nine or ten the energy counters you've been accumulating since turn three become a resource you can finally spend. These are the answers when nothing flashier resolves.
Piloting Tip
Don't commit to a kill line until you see the table's interaction. The deck has redundancy that most builders don't read into it — pivot between lines based on what gets targeted.
The Moment
The defining turn isn't when Ultron lands. It's the first time an opponent fully processes that the tokens that don’t need to be crewed are a problem.
Turn seven: Ultron has been on the table for four turns, copying cheap artifacts. Your board: Ultron, Iron Spider with two counters distributed across the army, Smuggler's Copter (original) crewed last turn by a 2/2 token, and three more token vehicle copies in various states. Your life total is healthy. Nobody at the table sees a kill on the horizon.
You cast The Thanos-Copter for {6}. The opponent to your right doesn't crack interaction — they've been reading your board as robot typal that hasn't done much yet.
The Thanos-Copter transforms every vehicle you control into a creature for the turn. Iron Spider's counters are still distributed. Adaptive Automaton's anthem is still pumping the tokens. You declare attackers and the card draw triggers fire as combat damage lands. Two opponents die that turn.
THE CARDS
Building the Shell
Every card in this list answers one question: does this card pay off either the 2/2 token clause or the copy trigger?
The Auto-Pilots
This deck runs a lot of vehicles. Copying each of those vehicles will give you the much needed pilot in addition to a crewless vehicle. Standouts include: Surgehacker Mech, Nautiloid Ship, and Vibranium Mining Mech.
The Robot Typal Multipliers
The Energy Mini-Engine
Closing thoughts
This deck takes a downside, the crew mechanic, and exploits it for maximum acceleration. What many Ultron lists dismissed as a quirky side effect of the card text is the load-bearing wall of this deck. The 2/2 token isn't a consolation prize when you copy a vehicle. It's the whole reason to copy the vehicle in the first place. Players not paying attention to the loophole this deck exploits are going to get left in the dust.
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