Building effective MTG Combo decks on a budget can be a tricky endeavor at times. Most of the best combo enablers are well-known, after all, and consequently rather expensive. Fortunately, there are still hidden gems out there that can help fill the gap, particularly in some of Magic’s older sets.
If we turn back the clocks to 2010, we can find one such MTG card in Scars of Mirrodin’s Prototype Portal. This is a potent engine piece that delivers value turn after turn, and powers some slick infinite combos to boot. It’s also wildly underplayed, especially considering its budget price point.
Prototype Portal MTG
With Prototype Portal, you can create an endless stream of any artifact you’d like, provided you exile it from your hand first. This is a hugely flexible ability, letting you rack up continuous value after the initial investment. Since you need to pay the cost of whatever artifact you create this way, Prototype Portal tends to work best with cheaper artifacts.
Value artifacts like Ichor Wellspring and Mycosynth Wellspring are fantastic choices here, offering continuous card advantage every turn. If you’d rather run a ramp plan, you can actually exile artifact lands like Darksteel Citadel and create a new copy for free every single turn.
While cheap artifacts like this are the easiest cards to use with Prototype Portal, it can also be highly effective with the big hitters, too. Once you start dropping a Portal to Phyrexia every turn, even for full price, the game is very likely over. You can also create copies of scary artifact creatures like Blightsteel Colossus, to build up a game-winning army over time.
While this can often be good enough for some MTG decks, leaning into token synergies makes this card even better. Token doublers like Anointed Procession, Doubling Season, or Worldwalker Helm will let Prototype Portal scale your board extremely fast. You can also maximize the card by running untappers such as Voltaic Key to produce more tokens per turn.
To Infinity And Beyond!
As you’d expect from a card with such high flexibility, Prototype Portal enables a wide array of infinite combo lines, around 100 of them, in fact. Many of these can be done entirely with colorless cards, too, which lets you slot them into any Commander deck you’d like. Simply pair Portal with Mindslaver, for example, and you can fully lock one opponent out of the game, making them an ally in the process.
Alternatively, a lot of Prototype Portal combos allow you to take infinite turns, the simplest of which involves Imprinting Ugin’s Nexus to start. With this done, and an artifact sacrifice outlet like Krark-Clan Ironworks in play, you can create and immediately sacrifice Nexus every turn. You can achieve something similar by Imprinting Coretapper, and creating a new copy every turn to power Magistrate’s Scepter.
If you’d rather pop off in one big turn instead, you can rope in Clock of Omens for some dazzling infinites. With any token doubler out, Portal will create two copies of its Imprinted artifact on each use, which Clock can then tap to untap Portal. This only works with zero-cost artifacts due to Portal’s ability cost, but you can still create infinite artifact lands or infinite Memnites to tee up a next-turn win.
For a more guaranteed win, you can Imprint Cathodion on Portal, and pair it with Grinding Station and Dross Scorpion. Each time you create a Cathodion, you can sacrifice it to Station to refund your mana, thus untapping Portal with Scorpion to start the whole loop again. This will mill the whole table out, and can even be done at instant speed if necessary.
An Underrated Gem
While some of these interactions and combo lines are quite specific, the beauty of Prototype Portal is that it can function in pretty much any MTG deck. As long as you’re running a few good artifacts, which most decks these days are, it’s just a nice way to accrue extra value. Even just pumping out extra Arcane Signets or Solemn Simulacrums can be worth a slot in specific decks.
As powerful as Prototype Portal is, both as a general MTG card and a combo enabler, it’s not massively popular in Commander. According to EDHREC data, only around 12,600 decks run the card. This is low in general, but doubly so for a colorless card with such a wide pool of options. Even in artifact-heavy decks where it’d shine the brightest, like Breya, Etherium Shaper, it still only shows up in around 360 lists.
This low inclusion isn’t down to the card’s high price, either. In fact, you can get near-mint copies of the card’s Commander 2018 reprint for just $0.61. The Scars of Mirrodin original and The List versions aren’t much pricier, either. This makes it a no-brainer pickup for your next artifact brew, especially if your playgroup doesn’t mind the odd infinite combo.
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