Blue’s Brews: Izzet Prowess!

Hello internet, my name is Blue, and we’re back with another episode of Blue’s Brews! This week, we head to Historic to play one of my favorite archetypes in Magic: Prowess! This style of deck draws an absurd amount of cards while piling on loads of damage super quickly, so I thought I’d show off the deck with the recent additions from Amonkhet Remastered. You’ve all heard my ramblings before though, so let’s not waste any more time and get to the deck tech and video!

Izzet Prowess

Creatures (15) 4 Soul-Scar Mage 4 Sprite Dragon 3 Dreadhorde Arcanist 4 Stormwing Entity Spells (25) 4 Opt 4 Crash Through 4 Shock 4 Pillar of Flame 3 Samut’s Sprint 3 Warlord’s Fury 2 See the Truth 1 Finale of Promise

Lands (20) 4 Steam Vents 4 Sulfur Falls 4 Temple of Epiphany 2 Castle Embereth 6 Mountain Sideboard (15) 1 The Royal Scions 2 Saheeli, Sublime Artificer 3 Spell Pierce 3 Redcap Melee 3 Aether Gust 3 Abrade

Creatures

First and foremost when talking about Prowess, we need to discuss the creatures as they’re the most important cards in the deck. All the way back to Modern, and even Legacy when you see this deck played, the creature base is eerily similar, featuring 8 one-drops between Soul-Scar Mage (or SSM for short) and Monastery Swiftspear. While the Historic format has yet to be graced with Swifty quite yet, we do get SSM thanks to Amonkhet Remastered. Additionally, we also get two of the most powerful Prowess creatures ever printed above one mana in Sprite Dragon and Stormwing Entity. Sprite Dragon can come down on turn two and immediately start getting in for damage, while Stormwing can usually hit the board on three and start getting in on turn four, but it scries when it enters so we get some value out of it even if it dies. Lastly for our creatures, I went with Dreadhorde Arcanist to help flash back cards from the graveyard to keep churning through the deck and even further increase our damage output. There’s a lot of options you could play here though, and I mentioned a few of them in the video, so feel free to test out other cards and see what works for you until we get Swiftspear in the format!

Card Draw

The key part to making Prowess decks so explosive is their ability to stick a creature or two, cast a bunch of spells in the same turn, and attack for massive amounts of damage before the opponent can get up solid blockers or find removal. We do this by playing a lot of ways to draw cards for as little mana as possible. For one-drop ways to cycle through our deck, we have three different options that all do different things, except for the text “draw a card.” First, and probably the weakest option, is Warlord’s Fury. The First Strike doesn’t come up that often, since our creatures are usually big enough to kill our opponent’s board and survive anyway due to Prowess, but it does come up occasionally and there aren’t that many options, so it’s not horrible for only one mana. Next, we get Opt. You should all know what it does by this point. It’s a one-mana instant, scry 1, draw a card. If there was another red card draw option, I’d probably play that instead just to ease up on the mana a little, but Opt does a fine job as a can trip in the deck. Lastly for our one-drop cantrips, we have likely the most important in Crash Through. Trample is a very relevant ability allowing us to jam in past chump blockers and drawing a card on top of that is HUGE! Needless to say, Crash Through is a great card in the deck.

I have one more card draw spell in the deck that’s a bit weaker, but gets the job done in a pinch, and that’s See the Truth. On its own, it’s just a sorcery-speed Anticipate, but if we can cast from somewhere other than our hand, say our graveyard for example, we get to draw 3 cards in a way that gets around stuff like Narset, Parter of Veils. How are we casting it from the graveyard, you may be asking? Well, in our creature package, we’re playing three copies of Dreadhorde Arcanist that has the potential to cast See the Truth if we can pump its power. We do that with the help of a couple cards I’ll talk about in just a moment. Additionally, we can also cast it with our singleton Finale of Promise. Finale is absurd in this deck, allowing us to cast up to two different spells from our graveyard in a way that also triggers Prowess several times. A single Finale with the right cards in the graveyard and on the board can represent a lot of damage.

Spell Damage

This section is pretty straightforward. As with most Prowess decks across formats, you can’t rely on creatures alone. You need a little bit of help from spells for a bit of extra reach to close out the game. In Historic, we don’t have that many spells at only one mana so we have to work with what we have. For this, we’re playing Shock and Pillar of Flame. The reason we’re playing these over something like Wizard’s Lightning is because it’s really important our spells have a Converted Mana Cost, or CMC, of one for Arcanist and Finale. While it is possible to get both to the point of casting a three-CMC spell, it’s much easier to just stick with the natural one CMC that Arcanist provides and if we ever have 5-plus mana for Finale, we’re either incredibly behind or about to win anyway and we don’t need to cast Finale.

Pumping Arcanist

So these cards don’t solely serve the purpose of getting Arcanist above one power, but because Arcanist is the most important creature in the deck to pump up (first because it’s the only creature that can’t pump itself and second because it can flash cards back from the graveyard,) I thought it deserved its own section to highlight that. The first of these is actually a really important one that serves double-duty. Samut’s Sprint first and foremost can pump Arcanist to cast See the Truth from the graveyard, but secondly, it gives a creature Haste. This allows us to play a Stormwing on turn four and attack with it immediately for a whopping 6 damage! The Scry 1 is just icing on the cake. I’d most likely play this card even if the Scry wasn’t attached on there. Since we don’t have Swiftspear, we have to build our own Hastey threats and Sprint does that very well

The second of the two is kind of a free roll and there’s very little reason not to play it since it’s a land. Castle Embereth is slow and relatively bad 95% of the time, but the floor on this card in our deck is still pretty good. At its absolute worst, it’s a pseudo-Prowess trigger to pump our whole team for four mana (three to activate plus tapping itself.) If we’re lucky, an Arcanist will be among those creatures to nab a See the Truth from the yard and refill our hand. How’s that for value?

Lands

While we’re discussing Castle Embereth, I might as well cover the rest of the mana base. It’s pretty simple, really. Steam Vents for a guaranteed untapped land, Sulfur Falls for a very-rarely tapped land, and Temple of Epiphany because we don’t have Shivan Reef on Arena yet and we needed another dual land. I considered Ketria Triome instead of the Temple since Cycling is far more valuable in the late game than the scry, but the scry is miles more relevant in the early game when we want to make our land drops anyway. I wasn’t sure, I went with my gut. If you’ve got any opinions on this, feel free to drop them below or tell me on Twitter! Lastly, just a handful of Mountains. No Islands however because lands that don’t tap for red mana are super clunky. This might not be correct, but it hasn’t failed me so far so I just go with it.

Sideboard

The sideboard is the one part of the deck I’m not that sure about. On one hand, we want to be aggressive as possible to maximize our damage. On the other hand, though, we do still need to be able to answer problem cards that make our life difficult. Additionally, mono-red and Goblins tend to be problematic since both decks are generally faster than we are. To shore up the problem with those two decks, I went with three Redcap Melee and three Aether Gust. However, without something like Dragon’s Claw, I don’t think mono-red will ever be a good matchup since there’s not much life gain in the Izzet colors at the moment. We can beat Goblins post sideboard with the help of these cards, but if they can slip a turn three Muxus, Goblin Grandee, there’s no way we’ll be fast enough to win. I also played three Abrades as additional removal, but it’s mostly for artifacts like Grafdigger’s Cage shutting down our Arcanist or to blow up a big Ornithopter or Stonecoil Serpent from UW Aruas.

For control matches, we went the opposite direction. I played three Spell Pierces for a little early game counter magic, two Saheeli, Sublime Artificer to go wide and attack the opponent from a different angle, and a single The Royal Scions to take over the late game with card selection and a potential game-winning ultimate.

You probably noticed there’s no graveyard hate in the sideboard, and honestly this was just a deck-building oversight on my part. It didn’t occur to me how prevalent Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath and Lurrus of the Dream-Den were in Historic until after I recorded the video matches. If I was to redo the sideboard, I’d find room for either Grafdigger’s Cage as an additional hedge for Goblins and Collected Company or Soul-Guide Lantern as a bad cantrip when we don’t need the graveyard hate. Either way, there should be some number of these spells in the sideboard.

Video Matches

(Spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned)

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So in the games, we ended up going 3-2, though that’s relatively impressive considering we played against almost exclusively control decks. We played against UW Control twice (and won both times) as well as Sultai Control twice, and GB Rock for the final game. Sultai and Rock tend to play a lot of disruption between discard and removal, making it incredibly difficult to stay ahead of them. We did take a match off of Sultai, but we couldn’t beat them the second time. While I’m disappointed we didn’t do better, I can’t complain about a winning record.

Overall, I think this deck is better suited for Best of 1 anyway. After recording, I played through a Bo1 event with it and took a clean 7-0 against various decks, including UW Control, Sultai Control, and GB Rock, so there’s certainly evidence to support it being better suited without sideboard games. I don’t know if that means I’m just horrible at sideboarding or if most people are prepared for red-based aggro decks post sideboard, but whatever it means, you might have better luck just running the deck as is in Bo1.

Wrap-Up

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the video! Before we go, one last reminder that if you enjoy the series and anything else we do on the site, it would be much appreciated if you took a moment to subscribe to the YouTube channel and check us out on Twitter @MTGOracle! Don’t forget to follow me @TheRealBlueMTG and our sponsor @Mana_Traders while you’re there! That’s it from me today. This is Blue, signing out!