Nexus of Becoming
Artifact
At the beginning of combat on your turn, draw a card. Then you may exile an artifact or creature card from your hand. If you do, create a token that's a copy of the exiled card, except it's a 3/3 Golem artifact creature in addition to its other types.
- CMC
- 6
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- C
- Rarity
- mythic
- Set
- The Big Score
- Price
- $4.16
- EDHREC rank
- #6436
Nexus of Becoming drops onto the battlefield and immediately hands you a card from the bottom of your library — raw card advantage stapled to a permanent that Leonardo da Vinci and other artifact-matters commanders exploit from turn one. The cost is real: it's a colorless artifact with no other text, so it earns its slot purely on that ETB draw and whatever synergies your commander provides.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci cares deeply about artifacts entering the battlefield, and Nexus of Becoming is an artifact that draws a card on arrival — it triggers Leonardo's ability while replacing itself, making it one of the cleanest inclusions in the deck.
Arcum Dagsson
Arcum Dagsson can tutor Nexus of Becoming directly onto the battlefield by sacrificing a lesser artifact creature, immediately drawing a card and leaving behind an artifact permanent that feeds future Arcum activations.
Brenard, Ginger Sculptor
Brenard, Ginger Sculptor cares about artifact tokens and non-Human creatures, and Nexus of Becoming is the kind of cheap, ETB-relevant artifact that Brenard lists lean on to generate incremental value while building a board.
Ghired, Mirror of the Wilds
Ghired, Mirror of the Wilds wants to copy permanents with powerful ETB effects, and Nexus of Becoming's enter-the-battlefield draw makes it a clean copy target — each token of it nets another card.
Karn, Legacy Reforged
Karn, Legacy Reforged scales on the number of artifacts you control, so Nexus of Becoming earns its slot as an artifact that replaces itself, ticking up Karn's loyalty-ability output without taking up a slot that needs to do more.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | legal |
| pioneer | legal |
| standard | legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Commander is where Nexus of Becoming does its best work — artifact-matters commanders treat it as a free card draw stapled to a permanent, and the singleton format means that bottom-of-library effect is more reliable than it looks. In powered Constructed formats like Legacy and Vintage, it's far too slow; a one-card ETB draw on a do-nothing artifact body doesn't compete with the available card advantage engines. Modern and Pioneer are similarly unkind — three mana for a single card is below rate in competitive 60-card environments. Standard is the one exception worth watching: if artifact synergies are present in the format, Nexus of Becoming can punch above its price tag in lower-powered midrange builds.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$4.16 cheap tier
At $4.16, Nexus of Becoming sits at the low end of the mid-tier range — cheap enough to include speculatively in any artifact deck without budget guilt. New-card prices in this range typically settle lower once supply catches up, so there's no urgency to buy in, but there's also no reason to wait if you need it now.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.