Sword of Forge and Frontier
Artifact — Equipment
Equipped creature gets +2/+2 and has protection from red and from green.
Whenever equipped creature deals combat damage to a player, exile the top two cards of your library. You may play those cards this turn. You may play an additional land this turn.
Equip 
- CMC
- 3
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- C
- Rarity
- mythic
- Set
- Phyrexia: All Will Be One Promos
- Price
- —
- EDHREC rank
- #1855
Sword of Forge and Frontier gives the equipped creature protection from red and green, exile-and-play off the top for each land hit in combat, and a land drop on top of that — the card advantage engine is real and it compounds fast. The cost is three to cast and two to equip, which is steep enough that you need a reliable equip target to justify it, but in shells built around Cloud, Midgar Mercenary or any commander that cheats equip costs, it earns its slot immediately. Outside those shells, Mortuary effects aside, this is a five-mana investment before it does anything — know what you're getting into.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Cloud, Midgar Mercenary
Cloud, Midgar Mercenary appears in 38% of decks running Sword of Forge and Frontier because the Sword feeds directly into Cloud's damage-based draw and land-grab triggers — every hit in combat chains into more resources and more hits. The protection from red and green also insulates Cloud from the removal colors most likely to answer him.
Gwen Stacy
Gwen Stacy's ability to copy Equipment onto tokens means Sword of Forge and Frontier's triggers can fire on multiple attackers in the same combat, turning one land hit into several. That kind of doubling is exactly what makes the Sword worth its equip cost in her decks.
Balan, Wandering Knight
Balan, Wandering Knight can attach all Equipment in play for a single two-mana activation, which collapses the equip cost problem that holds Sword of Forge and Frontier back in slower lists. The result is a massively buffed Balan swinging into protection from two colors while generating card and land advantage each attack.
Pia Nalaar, Consul of Revival
Pia Nalaar, Consul of Revival generates artifact tokens and cares about artifacts entering play, so Sword of Forge and Frontier slots into a shell that already wants to keep equipping and swinging. The Sword's land-drop bonus also keeps Pia's artifact-heavy curve moving when the game goes long.
Arna Kennerüd, Skycaptain
Arna Kennerüd, Skycaptain copies Equipment onto attacking creatures, so Sword of Forge and Frontier's triggered exile-and-play effect can stack across a full board of attackers. At nearly 25% inclusion across Arna's 9,700-plus decks, the Sword is a known quantity in that archetype.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | legal |
| pioneer | legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Commander is where Sword of Forge and Frontier does its best work — the combination of protection, land acceleration, and card advantage scales well over a longer game, and the five-turn clock that would make it awkward in 1v1 formats is largely irrelevant when you're playing to 40 life. In Modern and Pioneer, the equip cost makes it a liability against fast decks; Equipment strategies in those formats generally want cheaper curves, and the Sword's payoff requires combat steps you may not survive to take. Legacy and Vintage have stronger Equipment options and more efficient ways to cheat equip costs, so Sword of Forge and Frontier sees almost no play there despite being legal. Oathbreaker is a reasonable home if your planeswalker commander benefits from the triggers, but Commander remains the clear primary format for this card.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Sword of Forge and FrontierMortuaryIntruder AlarmTawnos, Urza's ApprenticeActivated Sleeper
Exile your library with the ability to play the exiled cards until end of turn; Play all lands in your library
View on Commander Spellbook ↗Price Context
Current price
unknown tier
Current pricing data for Sword of Forge and Frontier isn't available in our system — check Scryfall or TCGPlayer for live market prices before buying or trading. As a mythic Equipment with a strong Commander following, it typically sits in the range where it's worth picking up proactively if you're building any of the high-synergy shells listed above rather than waiting.
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Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.