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Tawnos, Urza's Apprentice

Legendary Creature — Human Artificer

Haste
{U}{R}, {T}: Copy target activated or triggered ability you control from an artifact source. You may choose new targets for the copy. (Mana abilities can't be targeted.)

CMC
2
Mana cost
{U}{R}
Color identity
RU
Rarity
mythic
Set
The List
Price
$0.45
EDHREC rank
#16195
Buy on TCGplayer
Tawnos, Urza's Apprentice card art
Tawnos, Urza's Apprentice copies activated and triggered abilities of artifacts you control — for free, at instant speed, whenever you pay one blue or red mana — which means any artifact engine you're already running suddenly operates at double output. The cost is a three-mana 2/2 with no protection and a once-per-turn window; Mechanized Production and other payoffs that care about artifact count make every extra token or counter he generates count twice, but he dies to anything and needs a board to be good.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

01
Saheeli, the Gifted

Saheeli, the Gifted

17.4% of decks · synergy 0.17

Saheeli, the Gifted's second loyalty ability creates artifact tokens and reduces spell costs, and Tawnos, Urza's Apprentice copies those triggered outputs to accelerate her engine faster than almost any other two-card pairing in her color identity — the copy-plus-discount loop lets you land expensive artifacts a full turn ahead of schedule.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

FormatVerdict
commander legal
legacy legal
modern not legal
pioneer not legal
standard not legal
vintage legal
pauper not legal
oathbreaker legal

Tawnos, Urza's Apprentice is legal in Commander, Legacy, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, but Commander is where he actually sees play — the 100-card singleton format gives him enough artifact density to be worth a card slot, and multiplayer games give him time to generate repeated value before dying. In Legacy and Vintage, a three-mana 2/2 that copies abilities is too slow and too fragile against the interaction-heavy, fast-kill environments those formats produce, so he almost never shows up there. Oathbreaker is a reasonable home if your planeswalker runs an artifact-heavy package, but the smaller starting hand and faster pace make him a conditional include at best.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

34 decks
Tawnos, Urza's ApprenticeSands of Time

Tawnos, Urza's ApprenticeSands of Time

Infinite Mana during the upkeep step; Infinite untap of creatures you control; Infinite mana artifacts you control can produce during the upkeep step; Infinite mana creatures you control can produce during the upkeep step; Infinite mana creatures you control can produce

View on Commander Spellbook ↗

Price Context

Current price

$0.45 bulk tier

At $0.45, Tawnos, Urza's Apprentice sits firmly in bulk territory — easy to acquire and easy to replace if the slot evolves. Bulk rares with niche-but-real Commander applications tend to stay in this range, so there's no urgency to pick up copies for speculation, but no reason to trade them away for nothing either.

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Sources

Mentioned

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Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.