The 31 Best Artifact Card Draw Cards in Magic Ranked

Last updated on March 14, 2024

The One Ring | Illustration by Veli Nyström

I don't know what Conan the Barbarian's stance on drawing cards is, but as far as I'm concerned, it’s the best thing in life. Or at the very least the best thing in Magic!

And, mind you, card draw can lead to crushing your opponents under the sheer weight of card advantage, so I'll go out on a limb here and assume our barbaric friend wouldn't be in total disagreement.

Artifacts are perhaps not the first type of spells that come to mind when thinking about drawing cards, but as it turns out they do an excellent job at it. And since the majority of them are colorless, they’re a good fit for any deck that needs a bit more steam in their engines.

Let's take a look at the best of the lot in this ranking for the best card-drawing artifacts in MTG!

What Is Artifact Card Draw in MTG?

Ichor Wellspring | Illustration by Steven Belledin

Artifact card draw is any artifact that draws you cards. I mean, yeah, I know I'm wearing my Captain Obvious hat here, but that's about it. “Artifact” card draw is the same as any other type of card draw.

There's a bit of subtlety on the “drawing” part, though.

In MTG, card draw is a keyword action, defined as putting the top card of a player’s library into their hand. And, as far as the rules go, there's a difference between cards that literally say “draw” in their text, and cards that say “put a card into your hand” or some similar wording. Effects like Smothering Tithe will trigger in the first case (that's to say, when the card literally says “draw”), but not in the latter, even when the text may instruct you to put cards in your hand from the top of your library.

But the above subtlety has nothing to do with the source of the draw effect. For all intents and purposes, drawing cards from an artifact's effect is the exact same as drawing cards from a green creature's effect, or a white enchantment's effect. Drawing is drawing; the source of the effect is irrelevant.

Honorable Mentions

Save a single exception, for this ranking we'll focus on cards that draw (or have the potential to draw) at least two cards. That means that we'll exclude cantrips from this ranking, “cantrips” being the MTG slang term for cards that draw you exactly one card in addition to other effects – you may hear players saying cantrips “replace themselves,” because you play them and you get a new card in your hand.

But a lot of great cantrips exist, so if what your deck is looking for is any good Magic card that happens to say “draw” in its text, you may want to check these out.

• Mind Stone is the most popular card with “draw” written on it in Commander decks: A mana rock that replaces itself always comes in handy.
• Commander's Sphere is also widely popular for similar reasons: You ramp and fix mana with this rock, and draw a card (at zero mana, even if tapped out!) when needed.
• Mishra's Bauble provides a 0-mana cantrip and a bit of information.
• The cantrip-of-death bird, Baleful Strix, is an amazing 2-drop for Dimir decks.

Also worth mentioning: There are a couple of artifacts that, while not putting extra cards in your hand, let you skim off the top, like The Reality Chip. We won't list them in this ranking, but you may want to check them out in case you need to dig down your deck even further.

#31. Dreamstone Hedron

One of several mana rocks that draw you 2+ cards, Dreamstone Hedron provides a ramp effect when needed and can be ditched for more cards when it's no longer useful.

#30. Mask of Memory

A cheap Equipment with a Curiosity-adjacent effect, Mask of Memory is like a cheaper Sword of Fire and Ice that’s laser-focused on the draw part.

As we'll see in a bit, Sword of Fire and Ice is the better card if you judge the whole package's power level, above all since protection often equals evasion. But if you just care about the drawing cards part, Mask of Memory does a better job: It's cheaper, you dig twice as deep, and if your deck likes discard synergies then you get to pitch the exact card you need.

#29. Ichor Wellspring

Back in Odyssey, Magic hatched a cycle of “egg” artifacts, for example Darkwater Egg. Said yolky folks gave you a card when sacrificed, and given the success that egg decks had at the time “egg” became the MTG slang for artifacts with a similar ability.

Ichor Wellspring ain't no proper egg in that sense (it has no built-in sacrifice ability), but assuming your deck hangs out with such an entourage like Braids, Arisen Nightmare or Daretti, Scrap Savant and you can reanimate artifacts back from the grave, you can draw a lot of omelets with this one.

#28. Well of Lost Dreams

Drawing cards and gaining life are unconnected effects at first glance, but they both share a tempo-negative nature: You spend resources to manipulate your hand or your life total, rather than your board. In this aspect, they can be synergistic: Gaining life can be one way to buy yourself time to put the drawn cards to good use.

Well of Lost Dreams excels in that aspect. A colorless card that probably fits black or white decks, if your deck already relies on life-gaining effects then this becomes an efficient, cost-effective draw engine.

#27. Howling Mine

Howling Mine (and similar iterations like Dictate of Kruphix or Kami of the Crescent Moon) is central to what’s known at Commander tables as “group hug.” In Commander lingo, that’s cards that provide a benefit to one or several of your opponents.

Howling Mine is the grandparent of them all, having seen the light of decks back in Alpha, and it does have an interesting catch that not all later iterations have: You can turn the hugs on and off, as long as you have ways to tap or untap the artifact as needed. Something like, say, an all-purpose Staff of Domination?

#26. Staff of Domination

Back in the old days, the Stick of Doing It All was potent enough to earn itself a ban in Commander. Those old days were more chivalrous times, when turn-four wins were considered overly rude… But, as the song says, the times they are a-changin’, and as much scarier things entered the chat Staff of Domination‘s EDH legality was restored.

As with several other artifacts in this ranking, this Swiss Army Stick wouldn't earn any gold stars just by its card-drawing power alone – but the ability to manipulate the board at instant speed, and being able to eventually provide card advantage when that's the best option, does make Staff of Domination one of the best artifacts that can draw cards in MTG.

#25. Lifecrafter's Bestiary

Green has a good amount of artifact hate, but it certainly doesn’t loathe this one. One of the best green artifacts in Magic, Lifecrafter's Bestiary does a great impersonation of a permanent Glimpse of Nature, with a free scry on top every upkeep.

All for the modest price of 1 green mana. Truly a bargain for any true forest fan!

#24. Midnight Clock

As noted in the Honorable Mentions, we've left some very popular mana rocks out of this ranking (like Mind Stone or Commander's Sphere) on grounds of them being cantrips rather than providing card advantage. But here's a mana rock that makes the cut: Midnight Clock is the uncommon case of a colored mana rock that provides ramp to blue, and that if timed properly can put you way ahead on cards.

Notice that our clock gets a counter every upkeep (that's to say, both during your and your foes’ turns), so in a 4-person table you have about three rotations to make Midnight Clock tick.

#23. Alhammarret's Archive

Alhammarret's Archive doesn't draw cards itself, but it's a Doubling Season for any draw effect you put in play.

As we'll note for a particularly lonesome ring (about which we'll talk in a bit), it works well in decks that want to draw a lot of cards by also doubling life-gaining effects that may buy you the time you need to actually get to play those cards. An effect that decks with commanders such as Queza, Augur of Agonies or Well of Lost Dreams may be very interested in.

#22. Bident of Thassa

One of the best blue artifacts you can find, Bident of Thassa turns all your creatures into cats, ready to die of Curiosity.

Bident of Thassa‘s main effect suits decks with evasive creatures and/or lots of cheap creatures that you don't mind sending forth as lemmings, but its activated ability can also pave the way for bigger threats.

#21. Idol of Oblivion

If you have a way to generate tokens (which, in Magic, are legion), Idol of Oblivion becomes a solid once-per-turn draw engine. It gets even better if you have ways to untap it and create tokens during your foes' turns.

Then it calls for the big, bad Eldrazi token to add some extra punch!

#20. Hedron Archive

Hedron Archive is yet another mana rock with a built-in sacrifice-to-gain-cards ability, but makes the cut in our ranking in that it does provide card advantage.

And now that reprints of Mana Crypt are right around the corner as part of the Special Guests of The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, mana rocks that cost 4 mana may become a very enticing turn-two play.

#19. Vanquisher's Banner

Only a good fit in typal decks, but in those cases, holy heck does this banner fly high!

Vanquisher's Banner provides pretty much all you want from a support artifact: a lord effect (in Magic lingo, giving a +1/+1 buff to one type of creature) and a very solid draw engine to go along with it.

As noted, not every deck will able to wave this banner. But in any deck with a strong typal synergy that doesn't need an ultra-low curve, Vanquisher's Banner is just plain great.

#18. Solemn Simulacrum

We've left cantrips out of this ranking, with a single exception: Solemn Simulacrum.

A Swiss Army artifact and the most popular EDH card in this ranking, Solemn Simulacrum does pretty much everything you want from a Magic card: It ramps and fixes your mana, it punches foes in the face or bravely dies chump-blocking for yours, and when its duty ends it draws you a card.

Truly a team player!

#17. Mind's Eye

If we go purely by card-drawing efficiency, Mind's Eye is one of the greatest artifacts for Commander decks, letting you draw at the very least three extra cards per turn as long as you have available mana. If you need a no-frills draw engine and don't care for anything else, Mind's Eye is a very efficient option.

#16. Scroll Rack

Scroll Rack may be a contentious inclusion in this ranking because, technically speaking, Scroll Rack doesn’t draw you any cards but rather puts them in your hand.

This will be a negative for decks with payoffs that specifically want you to draw cards, but on the other hand your foes won't be able to target your draws. Smothering Tithe or Narset, Parter of Veils, for example, won't work against Scroll Rack.

Note that activating Scroll Rack won't provide card advantage (you end up with the same amount of cards in your hand), but it provides excellent card filtering along with any shuffling or scry effect.

#15. Horn of Greed

Like all cards that provide a symmetric effect, Horn of Greed is excellent in decks that are ready for it. Pair it with the likes of Exploration or Azusa, Lost but Seeking and you have a great draw engine to find whatever it is you’re ramping towards.

Note that you have to play the land – that's to say, play it from hand. Putting an extra land on the battlefield, like with a fetch land, won't trigger Horn of Greed.

It's also a great inclusion in decks that want to force foes to draw cards.

#14. The Immortal Sun

Like several other artifacts in this ranking, The Immortal Sun earns its place not just by its card-drawing effect (which, if taken in isolation, isn’t that great for a 6-mana artifact) but by the whole package it provides.

When taken all together, what you have is a colorless Glorious Anthem with an unconditional discount on all your spells, on top of completely shutting down all planeswalkers.

#13. Font of Mythos

Font of Mythos provides a plain, clean group hug effect where everybody can enjoy your generosity, hopefully earning you some political credit as the player that helps folks find the cards they love to play.

Of course, good will alone won’t win you the game, so Font of Mythos will only be a good fit in decks that know what to do with the extra cards they draw (or how to punish foes for being flooded with cards…). But as pure card draw effects go, this Font is one of the most efficient and straightforward.

#12. Temple Bell

Yet another group hug effect, Temple Bell draws one less card than Font of Mythos but it's cheaper and you can turn it “on” at will.

#11. Palantír of Orthanc

Palantír of Orthanc presents foes with a choice that gets worse every passing turn, and can of course be made even nastier if you have effects that can put extra counters on it.

You'll need a deck that can make use of your discarded cards to get the full value out of Palantír of Orthanc (above all early on, when your opponent is unlikely to let you draw), but once the counters start piling up the Palantír’s often a free card per turn.

And the unconditional scry 2 every turn comes in handy to filter your draws.

#10. Coercive Portal

Coercive Portal is a weird case: a card that seems designed with multiplayer in mind, but one that’s great in 1v1 since you're guaranteed one free draw per turn if you want (since “homage” wins if it's a tie).

Things get dicier (and arguably a whole lot more fun!) when several votes are in play. More often than not Coercive Portal will still be a free card draw, but the potential threat of “carnage” winning the poll makes politics a lot more interesting.

#9. Wedding Ring

Wedding Ring is a single-target group hug effect that lets you and another players share your card-drawing and life-gaining fates; like Coercive Portal (and convenient marriages, one would add?), this Ring can also make politics a lot more engaging.

#8. Anvil of Bogardan

One usual piece of advice to rookies is to read the card to know what it does, but it would be misguided here: Anvil of Bogardan used to say “each player skips their discard phase”, but has received errata to say “Players have no maximum hand size.”

A bit of a Howling Mine with its group hug effect and great in discard-heavy decks, Anvil of Bogardan‘s current popularity is marred by its steep price: Being a Reserved List card and having seen no reprints since Visions, it sits above $30 if you want to buy a copy.

#7. The Great Henge

Most decks with big creatures play The Great Henge to keep doing what they love doing: ramping up and dropping even larger creatures (which this artifact makes huge!) while gaining life to stay in the game.

Drawing cards is just the cherry on top, but the whole package makes The Great Henge a “Deal with this or die” threat – one of the best artifacts overall, and probably the best green artifact in MTG, it comes with a hefty $35-$40 price tag.

#6. Esper Sentinel

Ah, Rhystic Buddy!

Esper Sentinel is white cosplaying as Rhystic Study. Opponents tend to underestimate this little artifact (I mean, it's just one card, right?) and keep playing their cards on curve until they realize you are wildly ahead in card advantage.

And it scales with the amount of players at a table, a hallmark of great Commander cards. Esper Sentinel is among the best card draw effects that white has access to, and a good fit in pretty much any deck that plans to play plains. Only printed in Modern Horizons 2, it's hard to find a copy for less than $25.

#5. Sword of Fire and Ice

A Curiosity saboteur effect with a Shock on top, and blue or red shenanigans just bounce off your creatures – what's not to love?

If we go strictly by suitability as a draw engine, Sword of Fire and Ice is nothing to be crazy about. If your deck really needs to see a lot of cards, then this particular Sword will probably be a lot lower in your personal list.

But if we're looking at great artifacts that draw cards, Sword of Fire and Ice is amazing in its Jack-of-all-trades-ness: Even expendable fodder turns into a must-kill threat when wielding this fiery blade.

And just in case, since protection is a tricky keyword: The bonuses that Sword of Fire and Ice provide do have synergy – protection from a color not only protects against removal, but also lets you bypass blockers from that color.

#4. Skullclamp

Most of the best cards in this ranking cost between $20 and $40, but you can get Skullclamp for about 10% of that, thanks to its many recent reprints. If we were to judge cards in this ranking by their power/budget ratio, Skullclamp would most likely be #1.

This artifact has a fun story attached to it, too: Originally, Skullclamp was designed to give a +1/+1 buff, but before seeing print the Magic designers thought that such a buff would make Skullclamp too powerful and they changed it to +1/-1.

Enter any creator of X/1 creatures, from Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance to Bitterblossom, and the -1 killing the creature as soon as you equip it turns Skullclamp into one of the best draw engines in the game. It was so good it was quickly banned, and remains to this day illegal in Modern and Legacy.

Budget-friendly to buy, cheap to play, works with big creatures and even better with small fodder – you can't go wrong with Skullclamp!

#3. The One Ring

Unless you just play Standard (and have been living under a non-Magic rock in the last few months…), you may have heard of this little piece of jewelry: The One Ring is currently the most expensive card from The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, and at $40-$45 it's the priciest artifact in this ranking. This one Ring has had a huge impact in tons of different formats, from Modern to Arena-exclusive Historic.

The One Ring‘s card draw ability is by itself excellent, but what makes it shine is that it buys you time. In general, drawing cards tends to be a tempo-negative play: You spend resources to get cards that you may use later, rather than affecting the board right now. The One Ring makes sure that “future you” will be alive to enjoy the fruits of the sacrifices that you're making right now on their behalf.

Sauron's favorite trinket is, as of now, legal in Modern and all Eternal formats.

#2. Memory Jar

Memory Jar is the delight of combo lovers, letting you dig deeply to find your missing pieces. And it’s among the best “get out of jail” cards when you're caught between a rock and a hard place: You draw a full new hand, and after you cast anything useful from it you get your old hand back.

On top of that, notice that you can tap it anytime (not just your turn), so in some spots you can disrupt your opponent's multi-step combo from going off.

This colorless  variant of Wheel of Fortune is, if you judge by bans, the scariest thing in our list: It's banned in Legacy, restricted in Vintage, and part of the Reserved List, putting its price above the $30 mark.

#1. Sensei's Divining Top

Letting you filter your draws and peer into the future, Sensei's Divining Top is not just the best artifact card draw, it's one of the best colorless cards in Magic. Among other accolades, it's so powerful that it is, alongside Memory Jar and Skullclamp, the only other card in this list that‘s banned in Legacy, a format where Sensei's Divining Top pushed Miracles as one of the format's most dominant decks.

For starters, it's quite hard for opponents to get rid of Sensei's Divining Top once you play it, given its built-in “tuck myself into the library” ability. The draw is at instant speed, providing you with lots of tempo. And alongside Mystic Forge plus some effect that reduces the cost of artifacts (such as Enthusiastic Mechanaut or Foundry Inspector) you can set up an infinite combo and draw as many cards as you want.

Best Artifact Card Draw Payoffs

Like all the best things in life, drawing cards is its own reward!

MTG games are at their core about resource management. By drawing cards you accrue more resources, and you have better odds of finding your best resources. Which, in turn, is often the key to winning, so a ton of decks include card drawing not because of any specific payoff for playing something that says “draw”, but because drawing card is one of the most powerful things to do in Magic.

And, as noted, there's no difference between artifact card draw and card draw from other sources (like blue instants, or white enchantments, or any other source). They all give you access to more, and hopefully better resources. What most artifacts in this list do provide is their colorless mana cost, the payoff being the ability to fit any deck regardless of mana base.

Still, that's not to say that Magic lacks specific payoffs for cards that say “draw” – Steve has a dedicated article on the topic, where he lists the 40 best card draw payoffs in MTG.

I'll just drop here a word for whom Steve ranks at #4 among multi-color payoffs, because I just freaking' love this pinging ol' dragon: Niv-Mizzet, Parun!

Wrap Up

Sensei's Divining Top | Illustration by Michael Sutfin

And that’s about it for artifacts that do the best thing in Magic: drawing us card upon card.

I hope this has been a useful list, and has drawn you to the tools you were looking for! There are more than 300 artifacts with “draw” in their text box, so if what your deck needs isn’t in this article, do try your luck searching around Scryfall a bit. And remember that there are several artifacts that, instead of drawing, put the card into your hand – they won't trigger effects, good or bad, that fire off when “drawing”, but they’re still ways to get extra resources into your hand.

If you have any comments or further questions, do stop by the Draftsim Discord for a chat or ping me on the social network formerly known as Twitter.

And may your artifacts always draw you your wincons just in time!