Izzet Midrange

Yesterday the first event of the Season 30 of Monday Pauper Deck Challenge kicked off. We had 19 players, with a fairly diverse Top 8 (in fact, 8 different archetypes!), but it was JogandoPelado's Bullying deck that captured the trophy. Yesterday's event was also personally significant, as it represented the first time I've actually played Standard Pauper since the end of May. And let me tell you, it felt good to be back. Not just because I managed to get into Top 8, although that certainly helped. No, it felt good because I actually enjoyed my games, even when I was losing terribly.

After seeing the success of the creature-less Izzet Token Control decks last season (including this excellent build that Cabel ran to 1st place in SPDC 30.01), I was curious to see if you could take that same shell, take out all the tokens, and instead make the deck play out more midrange by including some Prowess creatures that would have synergy with all the spells being flung around. I also wanted to test out Mage-Ring Bully and see if it was as good as what I was hearing. So here's the deck that I played:

Izzet Midrange

Top 8 in MPDC 30.01 by gwyned

Creatures 4 Bloodfire Expert 4 Lotus Path Djinn 4 Mage-Ring Bully 12 cards Other Spells 4 Fiery Impulse 4 Lightning Strike 4 Voyage's End 3 Anticipate 3 Divination 3 Ojutai's Summons 3 Treasure Cruise 1 Negate 25 cards

Lands 8 Island 7 Mountain 4 Evolving Wilds 4 Swiftwater Cliffs 23 cards Sideboard 4 Scouring Sands 3 Disdainful Stroke 3 Pin to the Earth 2 Negate 2 Whirlwind Adept 1 Treasure Cruise 15 cards

So there's not much that's new here. I thought all three creatures played out very well, particularly with all of the combat tricks that could be pulled off with all of the Instant speed spells at my disposal. As you can see, I ended up cutting not only most of the token generation, but almost all the counter magic as well, save for the three copies of Disdainful Stroke in the Sideboard. I also swapped out Magma Spray for the new Fiery Impulse, and overall I was happy with that change.

Based on my experience, I would like to look for ways to improve the match-up against both Jeskai tokens and MonoGreen, possibly by including more permission spells in the Sideboard. But my difficulty with those particular matchups could also be chalked up simply being out of synch after such a long break from the format.

Anyway, yesterday's event was a blast! Thanks to everyone who participated. And I hope to see many of my readers next Monday for our next event.