Based on my list it doesn't like it, but I do love me some combo's so that's always something I'll be looking into. For 0 costs artifacts I guess you mean cards like Ornithoper and Memnite?
Those, any Mox, Astral Cornucopia/Everflowing Chalice, and any 1 cost artifact with one of your cost reducers out all work. I'd go with the mana rocks myself since they're useful outside the combo.
You can also go a more dedicated combo route but I assumed that wasn't what you wanted to do based on most of the card choices. But just in case you want the combo option, Banishing Knack or Retraction Helix on Battered golem or Traxos, Scourge of Kroog plus any 0 cost artifact gives you infinite ETB triggers and cast triggers. With Sai out you have infinite thopters. Aetherflux kills the table, Altar of the Brood mills the table, and I'm sure there's a couple I forgot. It definitely works and you can easily tutor for all the pieces; it's just a question of how you want the deck to play.
Expedition Map and Tolaria West are both good land tutors you can use to assemble Urzatron more regularly. They can also grab your other utility lands, so you're not giving up a whole lot by adding them.
Master Transmuter and Phyrexian Metamorph are a bit generic goodstuff but they're great in pretty much any blue artifact shell. You can do stuff with Transmuter like pick up and put down Spine of Ish Sah repeatedly for 1 blue mana.
As for cuts, the Clock of Omens doesn't look like it's doing a whole lot. Retrofitter Foundry doesn't look good without an infinite mana combo to close out the game. Gravitational Shift costs a lot for what it does, especially since you have so many other anthem effects. Aetherflux Reservoir similarly looks like it'll underperform without some kind of infinite to make it wipe out the table.
Hope some of these help. I like the deck a lot and most changes i'd make would be more personal preference than objective improvement.
Any thought given to Electrodominance? It effectively gives Flash to your whole deck for RR, serves as a decent X finisher, probably lets you do something insane when copied enough with Zada, and also opens up the possibility of all the easy ways Red has to generate red mana that you couldn't use on your white cantrips. Runaway Steam-Kin, Treasonous Ogre, and Priest of Urabrask all look pretty good with it.
Hex Parasite can actually be quite useful if you build around it though. Specifically, Sagas. The Eldest Reborn and Phyrexian Scriptures both become permanent threats when you can remove counters from them at will to continuously get the effect you want. I also highly recommend Thrull Parasite, which performs as a Horobi enabler, a Saga fixer, and a nice source of incidental life drain via Extort. My other preferred Horobi activators are Scuttlemutt, Shadow Alley Denizen, and Profane Command due to their standalone utility.
Also, Fated Return is a great spell to cast on Horobi so he/she isn't quite as fragile. Indestructible isn't total protection but it makes sure Horobi doesn't die to a random Pyroblast.
I'm surprised this thread is still going on. If Teferi is a real problem, then he would have been banned long ago like the Rampaging Ferocidon in Standard. In Modern there are so many answers for him.
Wasn't Rampaging Ferocidon banned before it ever showed up in competitive decks because the development team thought it would be too good with the Ramunap Red decks running around? It never once got a chance to see competitive play.
Of course, on top of that there are the more traditional Group Hug cards like Rites of Flourishing, Heartbeat of Spring, Weird Harvest, New Frontiers, etc. that probably help the good decks too much relative to the underpowered decks. I guess a lot of what you might want to include depends on what angle you want to attack or exploit to try and accomplish what you are looking for.
These are all regular group hug cards and are exactly what I'm trying to avoid. If the whole table benefits then the good players just run away with games that much more easily.
Certain cards like the now-banned trade secrets and evolutionary escalation create a Two Horse Race scenario, in which two players are so far ahead that the other X players don't really matter. This is technically less unfavorable than traditional group hug because quickly eliminating the other ahead player virtually guarantees victory over the other two left behind in a 4 player pod.
This is pretty much exactly what I'm looking for; a deck that beefs up the weakest player so they get a chance to slug it out with more expensive/tuned decks, and then tries to get into a 1v1 with either the weakened players with the good decks or the original weak player for the win.
I have made such a list. Haven’t posted it yet, but I call this kind of deckbuilding ‘Fist Bump’ rather than ‘Group Hug’. I‘ll try to finalize and link later.
This sounds great! Thanks for the help when you get around to it.
There's a problem I've noticed at my LGS when it comes to Commander night and people get put into random pods. The disparity between players is typically so huge that one of two things happen in the first few rounds: A very powerful deck combos out and wins, or a very weak deck gets killed and doesn't get to play for more than 15 minutes. I've wanted to build a deck that helps police imbalanced tables by trying to simultaneously hold down any clear frontrunners and help out the weakest player. DirkGently's Phelddagrif deck is by far the best example of a deck that employs this strategy. My issue with his list is...I just don't like Phelddagrif. The idea is sound, I think Bant is a great color combo for what I want to do, and I like the gameplan of hanging out in third place while keeping the weakest player alive until you're in an un-loseable 1v1 endgame. But I'd rather the political cards be in the 99 rather than in the commander. It doesn't help that everyone sees him and thinks "kill the group hug scum" before the game even begins.
So what I'm looking for is suggestions for cards that you can directly help another player with, while still having the option to exclude the entire table from the fun. The Offering cycle and friend/foe cycle from Battlebond are the most blatant examples of these, and there are also cards like the Vow cycle and/or the "each other player does the same" cycle which you can use to help other players while keeping heat off of yourself, but I'm sure I'm missing out on plenty of good options. I'm not married to the Bant color combo either, since this hypothetical deck has yet to take any form. Thanks for the help.
How does this deck perform in a meta full of boardwipes and creature removal? I did a bit of goldfishing and while I like how the deck plays out in general, it seems like finishing off opponents is tough if your creatures don't stick. Would you throw in a combo win, more control, or something else? Sentinel Tower?
Also, I understand several reasons not to include it in this deck, but not having Thousand-Year Storm in a deck full of cantrips just doesn't feel right to me. I'd try to cram it in just for the principle, even if it put a huge target on my head and/or got removed immediately.
The duo of Courser of Kruphix and Oracle of Mul Daya seem like good options for you if you want to go the route of showing off your miracles to everyone as a potential deterrent. It's leaning a little bit into political territory so it may not be your thing, but being able to play lands off the top lets you see more cards and dig into miracles faster regardless. You aren't playing a super-reactive deck so showing your draws isn't as much of a downside as it would be in a full-on control shell.
Is this similar to if someone cast Duress on their opponent, failed to write down the contents of their hand, and then immediately asked their opponent to tell them what they had in their hand (before any more cards were drawn, played , or discarded)? Is that something the opponent is obligated to do?
Those, any Mox, Astral Cornucopia/Everflowing Chalice, and any 1 cost artifact with one of your cost reducers out all work. I'd go with the mana rocks myself since they're useful outside the combo.
Expedition Map and Tolaria West are both good land tutors you can use to assemble Urzatron more regularly. They can also grab your other utility lands, so you're not giving up a whole lot by adding them.
Master Transmuter and Phyrexian Metamorph are a bit generic goodstuff but they're great in pretty much any blue artifact shell. You can do stuff with Transmuter like pick up and put down Spine of Ish Sah repeatedly for 1 blue mana.
Mechanized Production] wins you the game off of 8 thopters. Emergence Zone lets you cast it at the end step.
Eldrazi Monument and/or Darksteel Forge would make you a lot tougher to put down once you going.
As for cuts, the Clock of Omens doesn't look like it's doing a whole lot. Retrofitter Foundry doesn't look good without an infinite mana combo to close out the game. Gravitational Shift costs a lot for what it does, especially since you have so many other anthem effects. Aetherflux Reservoir similarly looks like it'll underperform without some kind of infinite to make it wipe out the table.
Hope some of these help. I like the deck a lot and most changes i'd make would be more personal preference than objective improvement.
Hex Parasite can actually be quite useful if you build around it though. Specifically, Sagas. The Eldest Reborn and Phyrexian Scriptures both become permanent threats when you can remove counters from them at will to continuously get the effect you want. I also highly recommend Thrull Parasite, which performs as a Horobi enabler, a Saga fixer, and a nice source of incidental life drain via Extort. My other preferred Horobi activators are Scuttlemutt, Shadow Alley Denizen, and Profane Command due to their standalone utility.
Also, Fated Return is a great spell to cast on Horobi so he/she isn't quite as fragile. Indestructible isn't total protection but it makes sure Horobi doesn't die to a random Pyroblast.
It's probably given a premium here based on how good it is against Afterlife. I'm not too mad about it
Wasn't Rampaging Ferocidon banned before it ever showed up in competitive decks because the development team thought it would be too good with the Ramunap Red decks running around? It never once got a chance to see competitive play.
These are all regular group hug cards and are exactly what I'm trying to avoid. If the whole table benefits then the good players just run away with games that much more easily.
This is pretty much exactly what I'm looking for; a deck that beefs up the weakest player so they get a chance to slug it out with more expensive/tuned decks, and then tries to get into a 1v1 with either the weakened players with the good decks or the original weak player for the win.
This sounds great! Thanks for the help when you get around to it.
So what I'm looking for is suggestions for cards that you can directly help another player with, while still having the option to exclude the entire table from the fun. The Offering cycle and friend/foe cycle from Battlebond are the most blatant examples of these, and there are also cards like the Vow cycle and/or the "each other player does the same" cycle which you can use to help other players while keeping heat off of yourself, but I'm sure I'm missing out on plenty of good options. I'm not married to the Bant color combo either, since this hypothetical deck has yet to take any form. Thanks for the help.
Also, I understand several reasons not to include it in this deck, but not having Thousand-Year Storm in a deck full of cantrips just doesn't feel right to me. I'd try to cram it in just for the principle, even if it put a huge target on my head and/or got removed immediately.