Races
The race you choose for your Artificer can have a drastic effect on what kind of Artificer you end up with, and while D&D has a wide array of different races, this guide will restrict it's focus to mainly the "Core" races. The core races for Eberron are the standard races from the Players Handbook, and the four new races introduced in the Eberron Campaign Setting. In addition to those, I will also cover a race that has an established place in Eberron's civilized areas, makes for a fairly well balanced PC, and that brings it's own flavorful pros and cons to the table, the Goblin.
HumansGnomesThe idea of the tinkerer gnome predates Eberron by quite a bit, and you find aspects of this in Eberron as well. However, as with everything else, Eberron puts it's own special twist on things that makes a gnomish Artificer an interesting experience. Gnomes are information hoarders, who typically aren't afraid to use what they know about you to plant a proverbial dagger in your back should you cross them. As such, you would be well off putting some points into Knowledge (Local) and Knowledge (Nobility), as well as your people skills. Odds are, if you don't know where a magic item is (or what it is!), as a gnome, you will know somebody who does, if you're willing to trust them with that information, that is.
Mechanically, gnomes have four major advantages going for them.
First, their sharp noses give them a terrific sense of smell, which grants them a +2 to any alchemy check. As an Artificer, you qualify as a spellcaster for the purposes of making alchemical items, and you will find them to be a big help, so making yourself some sunrods and tanglefoot bags is always a good idea. In addition, you can identify unknown potions by making an alchemy check, meaning a gnome knows better than anybody if that vial contains a Cure Light Wounds potion, or a horrible poison.
Second, gnomes get a number of cantrips as a racial ability, including prestidigitation. This means they never need worry about making UMD checks when using scrolls of these spells, or when making items of them. Since the number of UMD checks you get to make an item are dependant on how long it takes to craft them, you don't get many shots at making low level items, so every little bit counts. And while you may think that these cantrips are worthless when it comes to item making, the shear number of useful gadgets you can make out of Prestidigitation alone are astonishing, not to mention lucrative.
Third, gnomes are Small sized, which comes with a number of potent advantages, especially for the Artificer. Bonuses to attacks against larger creatures (like humans), bonuses to your AC, and most important of all for the Artificer, it makes you 25% stronger, meaning you can carry more stuff. Remember, items scaled to fit Small sized characters weigh 1/4 of what they do for Medium sized characters. Small characters only have their carrying capacity cut in half, which means that, as long as everything they carry is scaled to them, they actually have 25% MORE carrying capacity than the tall folk do. Given how many magical goodies you will be carrying around, you can never have too much carrying capacity.
Lastly is the biggest flavor reason. Gnomes in Eberron have a literal monopoly on elemental binding. While other groups have been trying to unravel the secret, none of them (officially) have gotten the hang of it, meaning if you want an airship, or an elementally bound weapon or piece of armor, you have to go to a gnome to get it. If you want your Artificer to be making this sort of equipment later on, the only way for him to learn it (short of invading Xen'Drik and trying to talk the drow into teaching you) is to learn it from the gnomes, and they don't teach it to anybody outside of their own race.
Half-ElvesThe main reason to play a half-elf Artificer has nothing to do with their racial abilities or skills, and almost everything to do with one thing, airships. House Lyrander operates the largest airship fleet in the game, and if you want to get your hands on one of those beauties, being a member of the house will go a long ways to accomplishing it. While you won't be able to build an airship yourself, as you are unlikely to get a gnome to tell you how to bind an elemental into it to power the thing, as an Artificer you will have the skills and expertise to keep it running smoothly, and even upgrading it with new defenses, and possibly even magical weapons. Being a half-elf with the Mark of Storms also makes it easy for you to control the ship, which will likely make you the defacto captain, as you will be the only one that can reliably make the ship do what you want.
Of lesser importance, but still worth mentioning, your racial bonuses to the people skills can come in handy when you need to find rare items to craft with, and a good Gather Information check can always help you get a clue to where a powerful magic item is hiding. And while it has little bearing on anything mechanical, always being able to find a place to stay in half-elf communities is very nice. What self respecting Artificer wants to sleep under a bush when a little racial clout can get him a nice warm bed?
However, if you are looking to build a mechanically powerful Artificer, you may want to skip the half-elf. It provides little direct benefit to the Artificer class, although Favored Class: Any means it excels at multiclassing, which opens up a number of doors in its own right (see the Multiclassing section).
ElvesHalflingsLike elves, the dual nature of the halfling race gives you two very different courses you could take with an Artificer, while giving you some real tangible advantages regardless of type. Halflings are a bit of a cross between the Small size of the Gnome, and the Dexterity boost of the elves, giving you two good aspects of each race in one tidy little package. In addition, the halfling bonus to their saves means you are less likely to need to burn action points on said saves, which leaves you that many more AP to use to speed up your infusions.
If you go for the "civilized" halflings, you will also gain access to a good number of bonuses through House Ghallandra (detailed later), which means you and your party never need to worry about where you are going to sleep that night. You would be well accustomed to the comforts and luxuries of "the good life", and would likely make a good number of magical items to ensure the quality of living for yourself and your party. For a more direct approach to combat, the barbarian Talenta halflings give you the option to make tribal like magical items, as well as the one thing nobody else in the party gets to do, ride a magically enhanced dinosaur in full barding. Nothin' says lovin' like firing off a massive fireball from the back of your armored velociraptor!
DwarvesInitially, you may look at dwarves and see that they have a -2 to their Charisma and think they would make a poor choice for an Artificer, and to some extent this is true. The lower Charisma means they will have a lower Use Magic Device check, which means they will have a harder time using and enchanting magical items. However, they do have a number of things going for them that help offset this disadvantage. With a rather fragile d6 hitdice (second lowest in the game), any Artificer caught in harm's way wishes for more hitpoints, and the dwarven racial bonus to Constitution helps make this possible, putting the dwarven Artificer in the same hitpoint range as a d8 hitdice. You also receive a racial bonus to any craft check relating to stone or metal, and given how virtually every weapon, many armors, and the bulk of assorted mundane items have stone or metal of some kind in them means that you will be cranking out items of exceptional quality that you can later enchant and sell for a pretty copper or two.
Dwarves also have a major advantage when it comes to selling magical goods. Dwarves run the banking system in Eberron, and as such poses an implied amount of trustworthiness, which means you should have little problem getting people to do business with you. Being a member of House Kundarak (detailed later) will also help you with your magical item crafting, as you can get loans from the bank fairly easily, meaning you'll never be in a money crunch when it comes time to make that new Sword of Uber Coolness. Paying that loan back is another matter though.
Half-OrcsOf all of the PHB core races, the half-orc is arguably the worst choice for a traditional Artificer. They suffer a hit to both Charisma and Intelligence, the two prime abilities of the class, that immediately puts them far behind the curve. However, there is one particular kind of Artificer that the half-orc can be that will offset many of his penalties, and accentuate his strengths, the Meleeficer. Artificers get access to medium armor from the beginning, and with the right infusions they can buff their AC and damage output through the roof, meaning they can go toe to toe with just about anything in melee combat, which is precisely what the half-orc is good for, mechanically speaking. That high strength means you will dish out damage like no other artificer out there, and you'll never have to worry about not being able to carry all of your goodies along with you. Don't worry about crafting things, just buy what you need for a base, enchant them with some vicious spells, and get ready to watch the opposition fall before your magically enhanced sword.
Eberron also gives a much welcomed twist to half-orcs and orcs in general by removing much of the savage bent and racial hatred baggage that normally comes with the race. While there are plenty of orc and half-orc barbarians out there, there are also quite a few orc druids (like the Gatekeepers) that are the appointed guardians of Eberron, preventing extraplanar invasion. A half-orc Artificer could just as easily be a wise and calm soul that looks for ways to strengthen the magical wards that protect Eberron as a magically enhanced front line warrior.
WarforgedLike the Dwarves, the Warforged appear to be a poor choice for becoming an Artificer due to their Charisma penalty, but even more so than the dwarf, the warforged makes up for this shortcoming to be arguable one of the best Artificer races in the game. One of the biggest racial drawbacks for a Warforged is it's inability to heal naturally, and it's resistance to healing magic. As an Artificer, not only will you likely have a maxxed out Craft skill to let you make your own repair checks while your party member sleep, you will have access to infusions for Repair X Damage that will let you heal yourself quickly and efficiently. There are also other infusions that only work on constructs in the Artificer list that are personally useless for the fleshy Artificers, of which you can take full advantage of. Even without that, an Artificer has to have something to infuse (more on that later), which means a naked human artificer with nothing around can't use their infusions, where the WF Artificer could always use his own body as the focus of his powers. As icing on the proverbial cake, the warforged have access to what is perhaps the single most useful item for an Artificer, the Wand Sheath, and its exclusively a warforged component.
On top of the mechanical advantages, there is one large advantage to the WF Artificer provided by the setting itself, the Mournlands. The Mournlands hold little terror for a warforged that can heal himself through infusions and repairs, while Cyre was the home to House Cannith, giving it some of the greatest magical riches in the setting, many of which are still literally just sitting there for the taking. The fleshbound Artificers would be hard pressed to retrieve these magics, where you can simply walk in and take them for yourself. Another setting advantage for playing a warforged Artificer is Xen'Drik. The most powerful of magic items, including the Creation Forges, originally came from Xen'Drik, and the fact that there are a large number of WF components in that continent make it a virtual shopping spree for the warforged artificer.
KalashtarThe Kalashtar have little to offer the traditional Artificer, regardless of what kind of artificer you want to be. No real advantages, but no disadvantages either, making them fairly neutral as to their mechanical effectiveness. However, the real advantage to the Kalashtar appear when you give them access to the Psionic Artificer variant from Magic of Eberron. The naturally psionic nature of the Kalashtar mean they immediately qualify for almost every psionic feat out there without having to burn a feat on Wild Talent first, and the nature of the Psionic Artificer gives them an even bigger advantage over items than the normal artificer. While there are seemingly limitless supplies of magical items in the game, the relative scarcity of psionics means that coming across a psionic item by chance is fairly low, which means this variant will be much sought out in any psionics focused game, and the Kalashtar are far and above the best possible choice to become a Psionic Artificer out of all the core races.
However, if its not going to be a game focused on the Kalashtar, the Dreaming Dark, and Psionics, then you should likely skip this race when making a traditional Artificer. They don't excel at it in any meaningful way, and they inevitably bring a lot of baggage with them that you/the DM may or may not want to deal with.
ChangelingsLike the Kalashtar, the Changelings offer little in the way of benefit to the Artificer class in the core books. Unlike the Kalashtar though, there is a redeeming factor that make Changelings pull ahead as Artificers, Racial Emulation. If your DM is allowing material from Races of Eberron (and most do), the Racial Emulation feat allows you to count as a particular race when you take the shape of one. While appearing to be fairly minor in terms of usefulness to an Artificer, it can be very nice for one reason, it removes the need to emulate that race via UMD. Constantly making those checks can be a pain, while the changeling can essentially throw that entire subsection of UMD checks right out the window, at least in regards to that particular race.
From the other way around, the Artificer class can offer quite a bit to the changeling. Many items that would aid their Minor Shapechange ability are fairly minor, both in cost and crafter level, meaning a changeling Artificer could make themselves a Hat of Disguise which would boost their check through the roof, making it virtually impossible to be spotted. Note that while there is some debate on the allowability of a changeling using a Hat of Disguise, the item and the racial ability have different bonus types, so they do indeed stack, strictly by the books.
ShiftersShifters take a large hit from racial penalties to both Intelligence and Charisma like the half-orc, but do not automatically gain the strength benefit to make a good Meleeficer. While the various shifter traits can certainly add new levels of versatility to your Artificer, the mechanical aspects weigh against the race pretty much across the board. More so than any other race available, shifters are hands down the worst option for making an Artificer, from a strictly mechanical point of view.
From a flavor point of view, however, there is definitely a place for the Shifter Artificer. Shifter culture is described as putting a high value on a small number of well made, portable items (both magic and mundane) that have multiple uses. As an Artificer, making these sorts of items can quickly put you at the head of the pecking order in that regard, and your combat ability after you buff yourself and shift can make you a potent Meleeficer, however the limited amount of time you can stay shifted combined with how many feats you must spend to make this option viable tend to limit it's usefulness.
Like any other race, you can make a viable shifter Artificer (one of my favorite characters was actually a shifter artificer), but honestly, the reason you would choose this race is almost purely one of flavor, not mechanical ability.
GoblinsIn any other setting, the choice of a goblin anything for a PC would likely be a bad one. Seen as weak and stupid monsters by all of the other settings, Eberron gives them a twist that not only makes them into viable PC choices, but give them some important advantages for Artificers, both mechanically and for flavor.
Mechanically, the goblin takes a hit to both Constitution and Charisma, making them fairly fragile as well as lowering their UMD checks. However, they have the Small size and Dexterity bonus of the Halflings, darkvision that lets them go places most other Artificers can't go, and more importantly, a 30' movement rate. The biggest drawback to all of the Small races is their 20' movement, but the goblin does not have this drawback.
Flavor wise, it was the goblins that built the initial foundations of Sharn back during the goblinoid empire days, and it was the goblins that the humans used to build much of what Sharn is today, so they have a long, established tradition as magical craftsmen. However, they are still looked upon as second class citizens, and are forced to live in the lower levels of Sharn, scraping by on whatever they can find, beg, or steal. As such, a goblin Artificer almost comes prepackaged with the flavor of being someone who cobbles together working magical items out of what other people throw away. And since it is very uncommon to see a goblin PC, even in Eberron, and especially as an Artificer, its virtually guaranteed to become a very memorable character.