Rank by destination, not by mana cost
Almost every list of artifact tutors sorts them by mana value. That is the wrong axis, and it leads people to play the cheapest tutor rather than the best one.
What actually determines a tutor’s power is where it puts the card. There are four destinations, and the gap between them is far larger than the gap between one mana and three.
| # | Card | Type | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Onto the battlefield | Tutor, tier 1 | The artifact arrives in play, ready. You skip the cast entirely, which means you skip the mana and you skip counterspells aimed at the artifact spell. Worth two to three extra mana over a fetch to hand. |
| 2 | To hand | Tutor, tier 2 | The standard. You get the exact card but still have to pay for it, so the real cost is the tutor plus the artifact. Fine for cheap targets, expensive for large ones. |
| 3 | To the top of the library | Tutor, tier 3 | Costs you your draw step as well as the tutor. Usually cheap in mana and in price. Perfectly playable in a deck that is not in a hurry. |
| 4 | To the graveyard | Tutor, tier 4 or tier 1 | Worthless in most decks and outstanding in a deck built to reanimate or recur artifacts from the yard. The only tier whose rank depends entirely on your deck. |
The tutors worth playing
Grouped by destination, which is the ranking that matters. Commander legal, prices from the daily snapshot.
| Card | Cost | Type | Price | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Urza's Saga | Enchantment Land - Urza's Saga | $42.45 | Battlefield tier, and the best of them. A land that becomes a creature factory and then tutors an artifact costing one or less directly into play. Free to include, since it is a land. | |
| Inventors' Fair | Legendary Land | $16.09 | Battlefield tier on a land. Tutors to hand rather than play, but it costs no card slot and gains you life while it sits there. | |
| Enlightened Tutor | Instant | $34.16 | To the top of the library, for one mana at instant speed. Also finds enchantments, which makes it far more flexible than its tier suggests. | |
| Fabricate | Sorcery | $22.33 | To hand, three mana, no restriction. The plain vanilla artifact tutor and the reference point for the tier. | |
| Goblin Engineer | Creature - Goblin Artificer | $9.95 | To the graveyard, plus a body. Worthless in most decks and excellent in one that reanimates artifacts, which is exactly the tier-four split. | |
| Magda, Brazen Outlaw | Legendary Creature - Dwarf Berserker | $12.04 | Battlefield tier with a Treasure condition attached. In a Dwarf or Treasure deck it finds an artifact and puts it into play for free. |
Prices are the market price for the most representative paper printing, from the daily Scryfall snapshot. They move constantly, so treat them as a guide rather than a quote.
The real cost of a tutor to hand
Work through what a fetch-to-hand tutor actually costs, because the printed mana value hides most of it.
You cast a two mana tutor and find a five mana artifact. That artifact is not in play. You have spent two mana, you have one fewer card in hand than before you started counting the artifact, and you still owe five mana.
Total to get the artifact into play: seven mana, across at least two turns.
Now take a four mana tutor that puts the artifact onto the battlefield. Total cost: four mana, one turn, and the opponent gets no window to counter the artifact.
The four mana tutor is dramatically better, despite costing twice as much on its own. This is why destination beats cost, and it is the single most common evaluation mistake in this category.
The fetch-to-hand tutor becomes correct when the target is cheap. Tutoring for a two mana artifact costs two plus two, which is fine. The gap only opens up as the target gets expensive.
The colorless tier, and why it exists
Most tutors in Magic are black or blue. Artifact tutors are unusual in that a meaningful number are colorless, and that fact carries real deckbuilding weight.
A colorless artifact tutor can go in:
- Mono-red, mono-green, and mono-white decks, which otherwise have almost no tutoring at all
- Eldrazi and colorless-matters decks, which cannot run colored cards
- Any deck at all, since colorless costs are payable by everyone
Colorless tutors are also usually artifacts themselves, which produces a small compounding benefit: they count toward artifact thresholds, they trigger artifact-entering effects, and they can themselves be found by other artifact tutors.
For a green deck that wants a specific mana rock, or a red deck that needs a particular Equipment, this tier is the only tutoring available. That scarcity makes these cards better in those decks than their raw rate suggests.
When tutors are worth a slot, and when they are not
The deciding question is not “are tutors good”, it is “is there a card I want badly enough to spend a card and mana finding?”
Tutors are excellent when:
- Your deck has one or two artifacts that are dramatically better than the rest, such as a combo piece or a card that wins on resolution
- You are in a singleton format, where you cannot simply run four copies
- The target is cheap, so the total cost stays reasonable
- You need a specific answer, such as an artifact that handles a problem your deck otherwise cannot
Tutors are a trap when:
- Your artifacts are all roughly interchangeable, in which case a tutor is a worse draw spell that costs mana
- You are in a sixty card format and could just play more copies
- Your curve is already high and you cannot afford tutor plus target in one turn
That first trap is the common one. A Commander deck with twelve mana rocks does not want a tutor to find a mana rock. It already has twelve. The tutor is strictly worse than a card that draws.
The hidden upside: consistency and redundancy
There is a second, less obvious argument for tutors that applies even when no single target is overwhelming.
A tutor makes your deck effectively smaller. If you run three tutors and one key artifact, you have four ways to find that artifact rather than one, which changes the odds of seeing it by a game-deciding margin. In a 99 card singleton deck, going from one out to four is close to quadrupling your access.
This is why combo decks in Commander run tutor packages that look excessive. They are not searching for value, they are converting a 99 card deck into something closer to a 30 card deck that reliably assembles the same two pieces.
The cost of that consistency is real: every tutor slot is a slot not spent on something that affects the board. A deck that is all tutors and one payoff is fragile to the payoff being answered, which is why tutor-heavy decks also need protection.
What counts as an artifact tutor is wider than you think
Restricting yourself to cards that say “search your library for an artifact card” leaves a lot of effects on the table. Several other categories do the same job and are frequently cheaper, because they are not competing for the same demand.
Equipment tutors. Equipment is a subtype of artifact, so any card that searches for Equipment is an artifact tutor with a restriction. In a deck whose key artifact is a piece of Equipment, these are strictly better value than a generic tutor, because they cost less and nobody is bidding them up.
Type-specific searches. Cards that find a Vehicle, or a mana rock by name, or an artifact with a specific mana value all narrow the search in exchange for a better rate. If your target fits the restriction, take the discount.
Transmute and similar mechanics. Any mechanic that lets you discard or cycle a card to find something with a matching mana value functions as a tutor for whatever fits. These are slow, cheap to acquire, and perfectly serviceable in a deck that is not racing.
Wish effects. Cards that fetch from outside the game or from exile can retrieve artifacts in formats that allow it, and in Commander they interact with your sideboard rules as agreed at the table.
Impulse draw off the top. Effects that exile the top several cards and let you play artifacts among them are not tutors in the strict sense, but in an artifact-dense deck they hit often enough to function as one, and they generate card advantage rather than merely selection.
The practical point: define your search by what your deck needs to find, not by the phrasing on the card. A deck looking for one specific Equipment has far more options, at far lower prices, than a deck that insists on generic artifact tutors.
Protecting what you found
A tutor package has a structural weakness worth planning around: it announces your plan.
When you spend a card and mana searching, every opponent now knows you found something worth searching for, and the card you fetched becomes the obvious removal target. In a multiplayer game you have also just told three people to hold their interaction for you.
Two responses, and good decks run both:
Tutor at instant speed where possible, or on the turn you can deploy and use the card immediately. A tutored artifact that sits in hand for two turns is an invitation.
Run protection, not just tutors. A deck with six tutors and no way to protect the piece they find is a deck that loses to one removal spell. Counterspells, protective artifacts, and recursion all serve. This is the reason tutor-heavy Commander decks look combo-shaped even when they are not: the tutors force the deck to defend its payoff.
Budget approach
Artifact tutors are one of the more affordable tutor categories, because the format-warping expensive ones are mostly in other card types.
Start with the top-of-library tier. These are almost always cheap to buy, they work perfectly well, and the only cost is a turn of tempo. In a Commander deck that is not racing, losing your draw step to guarantee the right card next turn is a fine trade.
Add colorless tier-two tutors next, since they are reusable across every deck you build, which makes them better value than a color-locked card even at a similar price.
Save the battlefield-tier tutors for last. They are the best cards in the category and priced accordingly, and a deck that already has three working tutors gains far less from a fourth than a deck with none gains from its first.