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Guilding the Izzet

By Richard Bland

 

After some coaxing/nagging from Chris, I’ve finally got it together and written up a deck list.
I snagged the Izzet guild mostly because, being the most powerful limited guild I thought I would have plenty of fun playing with the commons/uncommons of the format. Looking at the set’s cards, two main themes sprung to mind.

1) Instant/Sorcery abuse – a lot of the good Izzet cards either are, or care about instants and sorceries, playing them all together along with cards like gelectrode and wee dragonauts would make an interesting and different aggro deck.
2) Comes into play effect creatures – the Izzet showcase 3 good common CITP critters, and harnessing their power, along with cloudstone curio and peel from reality, would allow the maximum synergy between the cards, the CITP auras would also play a role here.

I decided that the Instant/Sorcery abuse deck would be more unique to the izzet than the curio deck, and left the curio aside (though I’m sure a great deck could easily be built along those lines). After some playtesting against matteo, and some tweaking, I finally came to this build with “only” 10 rares (and 4 more in the side)

8 [RAV] Mountain
9 [RAV] Island
4 [GP] Izzet Boilerworks

2 [GP] Izzet Chronarch
4 [GP] Wee Dragonauts
4 [GP] Gelectrode
3 [GP] Izzet Guildmage

4 [RAV] Compulsive Research
4 [GP] Electrolyze
4 [RAV] Char
4 [GP] Repeal
4 [RAV] Remand
2 [DIS] Demonfire
4 [GP] Quicken

SB: 4 [DIS] Spell Snare
SB: 3 [DIS] Kindle the Carnage
SB: 4 [GP] Goblin Flectomancer
SB: 4 [GP] Leyline of Singularity

The centre of the deck is the gelectrode/dragonuts love of instants and sorceries. The dragonauts can qin the game in only 2 swings unimpeded, and the deck is filled with cantrips to keep the decks mana running smotthly – the gelectrodes play creature control as well as win condition. The other creatures in the deck – the chronarch grabs back whatever spell you need, and the guildmage is an easily cast bear that can replicate a few of the deck’s spells. The only real money in the deck comes from the playset of chars - a necessary inclusion that gives the deck some needed reach and can burn out almost anything in conjunction with gelectrode and the demonfires are a late game finisher, and made the cut over niv-mizzet for general synergy with the deck, plus Niv would often be stuck in hand early on, or would bite a removal spell too quickly. The basic sideboard gives the deck tolls against aggro (kindle), targeted removal (flectomancer) and tokens (leyline) which I found after testing, the deck sorely needs as it has few answers to enchantments.

And there you have it – a fun and semi competitive causal deck. I look forward to playing it in the guildwars playoffs, and hope it can go far.