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Hello, everyone, and welcome to another Magic Arena article! Last week we had a quick look on how to build a competitive deck on budget. This week, I'm going to showcase the building process of a Standard 2021 deck, together with a quick three-game video to showcase the deck on Arena!
A few days back, I was scrolling through my lands collection, thinking about the decks to play post rotation. Then, I looked at the full sets of Temple of Epiphany for a moment and tell myself - I haven't played with Izzet colors for quite some time, maybe this is a great opportunity to put something together for some games!
Speaking of blue, there are two cards that I identified as staples after rotation.
Brazen Borrower is great on its own, with the adventure part of the card being an instant speed bounce spell to return something troublesome off the opponent's board. After that, this faerie card can flash in as a 3/1 flying attacker which can put in some good work on pressuring the opponent's life total! Given a playset of Brazen Borrower, I would play four copies in most of my blue decks. For the article this week, I only have access to two copies so I'll only play two, to better simulate the "building on budget" scenarios.
Another card that caught my eye is Stormwing Entity. This is a 5-cmc card from Core Set 2021 and it will become cheaper when we cast an instant or sorcery spell before it on the same turn. It makes me think of the Delver decks in Modern and Legacy; a 2-mana flyer with prowess and a scry 2 ETB trigger seems pretty good in Standard. While Eliminate would probably become one of the best removal spells in Standard, Stormwing Entity totally dodges it.
So, I started off my Izzet deck like this:
Again, this is based on my collection, you can totally change the numbers depending on what you have. As always, I wouldn't recommend you to craft cards that I showed, unless you really, really like the card. Always remember, only keep a card if you will be playing with it in the longer-term.
Since we want to maximize Stormwing Entity's potential, we want to have a lot of cheap instants or sorcery spells. Speaking of cheap, Shock and Opt quickly came to my mind. With these 1-mana spells, Stormwing can potentially become very huge and helps us close out the game faster. Opt is also very important for this deck because we don't want to include too many lands in a tempo strategy.
I then went through the collection, looking for creatures that suit the same gameplan and I found Sprite Dragon, as well as Riddleform. These two cards fit the theme pretty well, with the "cast noncreature spell" triggers, similar to Stormwing's prowess trigger. Sprite Dragon also has haste, which provides us momentum after potential sweepers or removal out of the opponent's hand. Like I said, with a bunch of cheap spells, these flyers can potentially close the game quickly.
Now, my Izzet deck looks like this:
I could have added playset of Fabled Passage, but I really want to make the deck cheapest possible. Competitive-wise, I don't want so many tapped lands in the first three turns of the game since we are on the tempo plan. In order to not draw too many lands, I decided to play 22 lands, instead of the 24 lands suggested by Arena's deckbuilding tool. Most of our cards only cost 1-3 mana anyways.
At this point, I still need another 16 cards to complete the deck. I can't play a blue deck without some Unsummon effects and counterspells! Unsummon is actually going to rotate soon, but the good news is I found a better replacement in Stern Dismissal. Instead of only bouncing creatures, Stern Dismissal is able to bounce enchantments like Banishing Light, for just one mana. Not much consideration needed! A playset of this card is exactly what we need to deal with troublesome blockers and enchantments.
For counterspells, I did some comparison and personally think Lofty Denial fits this deck best. It becomes better when we have flying creatures in play - which is exactly what we have right now! We have a total of fourteen flyers including the Riddleforms. Riddleform will be able to help Lofty Denial because we will have a 3/3 sphinx before the counter spell resolves.
Alright, what else do we need? We are down to 8 cards.
Technically, we can simply add in 8 burn/removal spells to call it a day. But I really want to play with some cards that I would probably not touch in other decks. Then I found this card.
Improbable Alliance may not be the best include in this Izzet build as we don't really have that many card draw effects other than Opt. However, I see this card as land-flooding insurance: we'll be able to filter our draws, trigger Riddleform, and create 1/1 flyers. After some testing with this card (outside the video), it can sometimes smooth out draws in the late game and ultimately helps to close out stalemate situations. To make Improbable Alliance better in the early games, I've added a few Fire Prophecy as removal with the ability to potentially exchange dead cards in our hand for more useful cards.
We are almost done, but I want to add a few burn spells which can target anything so that we can play more aggressively. I ended up with two copies of Slaying Fire and a Bonecrusher Giant. As I was about to conclude the deckbuilding, I ran into a red planeswalker from Core Set 2021...
The fire in her eyes is telling me to bring her along, so I cut a random card to add her into our 60-card deck. The final build looks like this:
I was lucky to have won all three games in the video. If you are interested to try out the deck, I have the decklist over here. Feel free to make changes accordingly!
That's all for this week, hope you enjoy the write up as well as the video! Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below people!
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!
–Adrian, signing out.
I fully agree with 
The logic is that the untapped MDFC's replace all the other lands, so there's never any risk of fizzling a Charbelcher activation. MDFC's are front-facing 
And Scourge does resemble Shadow. It's just got a lot more text and conditions attached. Where Shadow is always a 13/13 and has an ability that shrinks it, Scourge's power and toughness is 20 minus the highest life total. Scourge has no evasion, only heft, but it does have a kicker which halves everyone's lifetotal (playing nicely with its P/T condition). Of course, that kicker costs five, which means that Scourge would have to be played for seven. That's an enormous cost in Modern, and most likely means that it's not going to happen. Shadow decks run very low to the ground, so if the plan is to run Scourge as Shadows 5-8, that kicker is out of reach.
Then there's the fact that the opponent will object to having their life lowered. Plans never survive contact with the enemy and all that. I read 
better than Shadow. Killing the opponent from high life requires Shadow players to be quite low themselves. To kill an opponent on 16 life, for example, Shadow must be at least an 8/8, meaning 5 or less life. That's not a small amount of danger in a world 
If Scourge was a card where I know exactly what it does, but I don't know where it's for, then this next card is one that I know exactly what it's for, but not what it does. On the surface, Nahiri's Lithoforming looks like a variation of Scapeshift, sacrificing lands then replacing them. However, cost notwithstanding, Lithoforming is worse than Scapeshift because it doesn't search for lands. Instead, it draws cards, and its controller may play lands from hand to replaced the sacrificed ones. Assuming they've drawn enough to replace the lost lands. And the new lands enter tapped. Which means that Lithoforming is far less likely to combo kill than Scapeshift.
However, there is a deck that doesn't mind sacrificing lands, doesn't care about comboing with the right ones, and likes to draw cards. Its name is 
Critically, Archon swaps the anti-creature ability for Rule of Law. Suddenly, Archon becomes a huge beating against Prowess decks. Unless they have Lightning Bolt the turn Archon comes out, Archon will buy absurd amounts of time to stabilize. Prowess will only get to play one spell, which means there will be no explosion, and few ways to take out the flier. Theoretically, that also means that Archon could profitably block Monastery Swiftspear, but that's only for the brave; blocking a 1/2 then getting the Archon Darted is a bad time. Archon's also devastating against traditional combo decks as a result.
On the other hand, Skyclave Apparition looks to fit right into existing decks. Apparition exiles anything with CMC 4 or less. Thus, it is the most versatile removal in white's arsenal. The drawback is that when Apparition leaves play, the exiled card's owner gets an Illusion with P/T equal to said card's CMC. However, this is a very small drawback compared to the fact that the card never comes back. Turning a planeswalker, Uro, or Ensnaring Bridge into a vanilla creature is still amazing. And the drawback only manifests if Apparition leaves the battlefield.
By now, everyone's seen the card because, at minimum, you see it alongside this paragraph. And there is a lot of text to work through then try and wrap the mind around.
The final note is that triggers go onto the stack active-player-first, so any triggers the opponent may get from the extra land entering the battlefield happen after a land has been bounced by Conundrum. This in turn means that Conundrum effectively answers all the payoffs for all the Primeval Titan decks. Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle and Field of the Dead are looking for certain conditions to be met when they trigger and when they resolve (the intervening "if" clause). Both lands trigger when the conditions are met, then Conundrum's trigger goes on the stack and resolves first. If Conundrum leaves less than 5 other mountains or 7 lands with different names on the battlefield, the abilities fizzle. If they Scapeshift, then all the lands will have to be bounced for a really bad time. By the same token, Amulet must bounce a land before Amulet of Vigor can untap the karoo.
bounce a land afterwards, they've at least ensured they'll have their next land drop. They can also resolve their Search for Tomorrow and not play another land that turn. With only one Conundrum out, this is a bit of a wash, and will only be relevant with several Conundrums out; indeed, fully resolving Search and triggering two Conundrums sets players back on mana development, making a fail preferable.
make Spirits and Taxes work a few times. It never really worked out in the past as the deck, was incredibly anemic and fairly schizophrenic due to the Spirits portion not jibing well with the Taxes side, and the mana was always all over the place. However, 
Conundrum is not good against Prowess decks. This shouldn't be much of a surprise as the tempo-negative Spreading Seas was never good against Burn, even though it usually took out one of their mana sources. Against Izzet and Rakdos, Conundrum hitting fetchlands does slow down the explosive attack. However, Prowess is still free to use fetched mana to play spells, and all I did was spread out the pain. There were a few times Conundrum slowed Prowess down enough to stabilize, but they were far outweighed by the times I lost to playing a do-nothing cantrip instead of a creature.
Against Jund and Wilderness Reclamation decks, Conundrum showed potential. Both decks play lots of fetchlands and like to use all their mana in a turn. Temur also runs acceleration sometimes. This meant that both had to really think about playing into Conundrum and reevaluate their gameplans. It was especially hard for Jund, given its 
With two Sakura-Tribe Scouts, Azusa, Amulet, and five lands out against my Conundrum, Amulet played Simic Growth Chamber. Then started going off. As in, Summer Bloom 
At their most basic, the flipping cards are two-sided lands, giving players the choice of producing one of two colors for a game's entirety (as with Riverglide Pathway). This cycle aims to provide mana fixing, but fixing is already very good in Modern—we've got fastlands of every pair, Horizon lands, and of course the ol' fetch-and-shock. Nonbasic lands need to be quite powerful to merit inclusion in Modern decks, as players open themselves up to hate like Blood Moon and Field of Ruin for running them. I don't think the double-land cards are gonna make it.
Whether flip lands beat cycling lands depends mostly on how good the spells on the other side are. And they aren't great. For the most part, these spells are wildly overpriced for their effects, especially since they force players to run taplands.
Splashier spells like Valakut Awakening show more promise. Depending on how the rulings will go, a deck like Dredge could bring back the land with Life from the Loam, then cast Awakening for more Dredge triggers. But even that deck now has better things to do at that stage of the game: recur Blast Zone, for instance, or just cast Ox of Agonas for a similar effect that also impacts the board—and a cheaper one, to boot! This line of thought gets more interesting with other land recursion effects, such as Wrenn and Six, but there's no getting around that the new spells in question leave much to be desired.
Yet another cycle of flip lands is the most promising. At mythic rare, this final cycle lets players have the spell land enter untapped, but at the cost of 3 life. That might seem like a lot until one considers these cards have three modes: spell, tapped land, and untapped land. That flexibility makes the steep asking price worthwhile and even desirable in many scenarios.
Another exciting development is Rising is the set's plagiarism—that is, its printing of cards that closely resemble existing Modern playables.
Steppe Lynx? Wow, haven't heard that name in a while. That's because Lynx was petty much the only Modern playable landfall creature, and as such, not really worth building around with a high land count: don't draw one of just four copies, and you're playing a Zoo deck full of lands. Yuck!
Yes, that's Tarmogoyf, who effortlessly grows to 5/6 in this build and backs up our fragile landfall clocks by slamming opponents who Fatal Push them. And Monastery Swiftspear, the attacker 
Sea Gate Stormcaller
Hierarch, Aribter, Wildfire? Who doesn't want a cantripping Stone Rain? But then, what Hierarch-powered Christmasland scenario doesn't look awesome on paper? Cleansing Wildfire might take a bit more work to get going than Conundrum, but giving red a way to Field of Ruin opponents on a cantrip strikes me as a great way to start spreading nonbasic hate into different deck niches.
I've recorded every deck from every event that happened in August that was posted by noon on Monday, August 31. And it was a strange month data-wise. Early on, there was some kind of bug that prevented new Preliminaries from posting. Instead, the same tournament from August 6 was posted repeatedly. A MOCS season also ended, which meant championships and additional events that boosted the data. Afterwards, there was a week of no Challenges, just lots of Preliminaries.
The actual control elements have been shaved down to facilitate more lands for more Field of the Dead triggers. These decks are banking on Uro's ramp and lifegain, with some disruption keeping them in the game until Field takes over. It feels like a very fragile strategy, and I'm curious to see if it persists.
partial reflection of each deck's power. That system doesn't work anymore both due to MTGO changes and the fact that there's no paper, but using a weighing system to examine deck strength does appeal to me. So I adapted the pointing system.
The first thing worth mentioning is that the power metagame is one deck smaller than the prevalence metagame. The missing deck is Goblins, which only mustered 13 points, just under the cut. Its omission suggests that while the deck may be a popular choice, it doesn't necessarily perform well in practice. Putting 10 results into the data is no small thing, however, as most results were 3-2's. We could therefore peg Goblins as perhaps overplayed relative to its strength.
was no evidence to back that up. Reclamation variants weren't special during the 
By averaging the point totals against the prevalence total, we get the average points per entry for each deck. This practice seeks to answer the question of which decks earn their tier position based on popularity versus actual strength. I've long wondered and 
Humans was second despite only being Tier 3. It might not come out often, but when Humans does, it comes to win. This suggests it's being underplayed overall. Temur Reclamation came third, which would confirm my earlier speculation: it may win many events, but it struggles to gain adherents. It's striking to me that most of the top performers lie in Tiers 2-3. Eldrazi Tron is the only other Tier 1 deck in the top 10 with 1.56. There may be no difference practically, but the meta is defined by decks that are popular, not dominant. In other words, we may be due for a meta overhaul!
