Sunday, October 7, 2012

Return to Ravnica Sealed Prep 8: Izzet

OK, Azorious and Selesnya were somewhat lame deck builds. Let's see if I can improve on them with an Izzet deck. I need 23 non-land cards. I am running blue and red in this deck, and both are better run with a lower creature count. I will start with the Izzet cards and then begin selecting by first looking at the non-creature cards.



At first sight Firemind's Foresight has the quintessential qualities of a junk rare: a long rules paragraph, some really great effects, and a prohibitive casting cost as an eye-whopping seven-drop.






I start deck-building with the two light Izzet instants. I add all light blue non-creature spells.





I have 8 light Izzet and blue instants in the deck. Let's add Izzet Keyrune and Pursuit of Flight. We now have 10 cards.



Now for the light creatures, we have four from red, one blue/red, and two from blue. We now have 17 card. We need 6 more. The red creatures have Unleash, a Rakdos ability, while the Izzet cards have overload. This is a bit of a mismatch and an indication that we are running low on cards for a working Izzet deck. Instead of just adding every remaining blue, blue/red and red card left in this selection, I choose to move on. Izzet is not even a bad choice here, it just isn't workable. Not only will this deck be forced to run Rakdos abilities, it will have heavy red cards and no red instants!