Standard: How Izzet Lessons Stood Out in the World Championship

World Championship 31, which took place this past weekend, was the stage for the main competitive Magic: The Gathering event of the year, and despite criticism regarding Wizards of the Coast's low investment in promoting the pinnacle of its professional play or some controversies regarding Seth Manfield, the event also brought, in addition to the opportunity to watch the world's best players compete, some new developments for Standard.

Among these, Izzet Lessons stands out. The most played deck of the event, it placed four copies in the Top 8, and its results were enough to revive an old argument on social media that Standard is perpetually dominated by decks; after all, it would be the third archetype to show significant results in this color combination during the year.

Perhaps, however, the story of this strategy is a little different. It might have emerged at an opportune moment in the Metagame, or it might have functioned as a response to something. Overall, its win rates don't point to a dominant strategy yet, and there are ways to defeat it and even have a favorable matchup against it.

Izzet Lessons is a deck composed of the interaction between Gran-Gran and Accumulate Wisdom with the various Lessons cards to transform the draw into an Ancestral Recall, essentially generating a considerable amount of value for the lowest possible cost while using cheap spells to interact with the board.

The deck complements this line by using Stormchaser’s Talent and the interaction with Boomerang Basics to exert pressure with Prowess tokens, also gaining the inevitability of always being able to reuse Boomerang Basics in the late game to return Talent and use Talent to return Boomerang Basics, creating a slow but frequent army of 1/1 tokens.

From this point on, the other lines of play blend.

Some opt for a combination of Eddymurk Crab and other cheap threats; others opt for a more "Control" line with Stock Up, but it appears that the best version at the moment uses Artist's Talent — which enables Accumulate Wisdom as a more consistent "draw 3 for one mana" — along with Monument to Endurance and Abandon Attachments as a win condition, where each spell cast can turn into more draws, lootings, and, consequently, become [[Lava Spike]s], ramps and extra draws with the Monument.

Izzet Lessons, as already mentioned, was the most played deck at the World Championship and also had the highest representation of copies in the Top 8 of the tournament, as well as winning the tournament. It's natural that the current discussion revolves around two arguments: that Stormchaser's Talent is too efficient with Bounce and that Accumulate Wisdom is dangerously too close to Ancestral Recall — but this also ignores the other nuances of the World Championship environment and how the event's Metagame was, in part, in its favor.

Perhaps it didn't dominate

Despite its representation in the tournament and having the most players in the Top 8, Izzet Lessons may not have dominated the Standard rounds.

Its overall win rate was around 57%, which is good, but not enough to establish it as a dominant strategy, especially when it was, theoretically, off the radar. If we separate the variants, the numbers become more interesting: according to Reddit user Optimustormtv, the versions with Monument to Endurance were considerably better than those without, with a 63.9% win rate against the rest of the format, while the variants without this combo had only 44.9%.

One version might have dominated and was dragged down in overall win rate by the other, and we will find out in the coming weeks if the overall Metagame of the format will be able to adapt and how many concessions will be made for this purpose.

The strategic advantage

Despite being obvious to everyone, the combination of Accumulate Wisdom with Gran-Gran had not shown major results in competitive tournaments until the World Championship. Consequently, there are some risks involved when a supposedly "off-the-radar" archetype appears as the dominant strategy in a tournament of this size: some players haven't prepared properly to deal with it, and others won't know how to optimize their playstyle for a given match.

Those who piloted Izzet Lessons have a strategic advantage compared to the rest of the format, as they had the opportunity to extensively train against all other archetypes, while some opponents may not have had the same experience against Lessons—at least not with the same sample rate to find the main ins and outs.

Furthermore, Lessons has a specific core, but today it is divided into different variations, and each requires a type of interaction: you want Abrade against Monument to Endurance, but this is a terrible card against Eddymurk Crab, while Broadside Barrage has the opposite role.

Not knowing how to deal with each variant and the possible responses you need is an important strategic advantage, which should even remain part of the appeal of Izzet Lessons until the fully optimized version is built.

Decks like Izzet Lessons are also very popular in large events because they have a good learning ceiling combined with a high-power level. Yes, the combination of Accumulate Wisdom with Artist’s Talent or Gran-Gran is an Ancestral Recall, but understanding how to extract the most from your cards and the ideal timing is a challenge when the most obvious lines may actually be the wrong ones, and this skill curve becomes a differentiator when you are competing with the best players in the world, being part of the potential strategic advantage that the archetype had at the event.

Lack of answers against key cards

There is a relatively small number of answers against graveyards in the sideboards of World Championship decks, and Izzet Lessons requires cards to be in the graveyard to extract the most from Gran-Gran and Accumulate Wisdom.

Players haven't relied as heavily on artifact hate and cards like Annul now that Agatha's Soul Cauldron no longer has its own archetype, and Izzet Lessons runs Monument to Endurance as a win condition, even being resilient against graveyard hate when it already has the engine with Artist's Talent active.

Players over-prepared against Badgermole Cub and other archetypes that were trending in the Metagame in recent weeks, and despite the common practice of expanding the number of one-of or two-of decks to have a broader scope of answers against different game modes, there weren't enough answers to properly deal with this archetype.

Now that the deck is on the radar, the question is how to deal with Izzet Lessons?

The hype will last for two or more weeks until players find the next big thing, or the Metagame stabilizes to the point where it can accommodate the standout deck of the World Championship, and this involves understanding how the archetype operates and evaluating which decks worked best against it.

Graveyard Hate and Cheap Comprehensive Interaction

In theory, cards like Gran-Gran and Accumulate Wisdom only work because Izzet Lessons has an easy time feeding the graveyard, and point-based answers that work better against other strategies are not great in preventing it from consistently having these cards active.

Targeted hate cards are needed that primarily function to exile the entire graveyard at once, such as Soul-Guide Lantern, or permanently disable the opponent's ability to feed their own graveyard, as in Rest in Peace. Cards like Ghost Vacuum are too slow for this purpose, and the deck has too much ease in resolving repeated creature hate like Keen-Eyed Curator or Scavenging Ooze.

Comprehensive answers that can attack the deck from multiple angles are also more necessary now. Let's imagine a card like Abrade: if the version with Monument to Endurance proves to be the best, it makes sense to use it in the main deck or sideboard as it deals with one of the win conditions and the main cost reduction enabler, Gran-Gran.

The same can be considered for cards like Withering Torment, which deal with creatures while also resolving Stormchaser’s Talent and Artist’s Talent in the same slot. Other cards, such as Annul, deal with the deck's win conditions at the lowest possible cost, while Heritage Reclamation is slow as graveyard hate but also resolves troublesome permanents while never being a dead card in its owner's hand.

Play Reanimator

Reanimator is one of the Achilles' heels of Izzet Lessons. This is a deck aimed at making fair trades and winning the game by overwhelming the opponent with the pressure of Stormchaser's Talent tokens or with the combination of its other spells and Monument to Endurance, but none of that matters when the opponent explodes with a combo, and the current version of the archetype is suboptimized to handle game plan builds that aren't on the board.

With a 33% win rate against Reanimator during the World Championship, it's clear that Lessons' current shells have little chance of winning against this opponent. However, it's not an unbeatable matchup: Seth Manfield, for example, managed to beat Ken Yukuhiro, mainly through the inconsistency of Reanimator lists in finding the pieces to complete the combo and/or having weak topdecks.

Play with decks that generate more value or demand more answers

Looking at the overall scope, Izzet Lessons doesn't seem as unbeatable as it seemed: Ouroboroid decks had a positive win rate against it, while the forgotten, yet still present, Dimir Midrange proved capable of playing well against both variants of the archetype.

The version with Monument had a 33% win rate against Simic Aggro, 47% against Golgari Ouroboroid, and finished the day with only one win out of the four matches Dimir Midrange faced against it, and the numbers don't seem to differ much for the other variants.

On the other hand, Izzet Prowess and Jeskai Control performed better against traditional lists while having considerably worse numbers against lists with Monument to Endurance, placing them in a sensible position where adaptations will need to be considered to deal with the inevitability of this version.

Izzet Lessons seems like an archetype that benefited from being a major novelty to make its mark at the World Championship, but the numbers, win rates, and Metagame movements don't seem to place it in the role of the dominant Standard archetype in the future: it has advantages, and the combination of Accumulate Wisdom with cost reduction is a remarkably explosive play, but this doesn't necessarily put it in the role of oppressor or place it alongside other troublesome decks of recent history—at least not in the current version.

Now that the archetype is on the radar, Standard will be buzzing. Players will create answers and counterplays, while others will bet on the archetype's growth potential to create new variants until a "perfect list" emerges — coupled with the hype, it's preferable to have good answers for the archetype in the coming weeks, so prepare your Abrade against Monument to Endurance, and remember that both this strategy and the possible best archetype against it today are partially reliant on the graveyard.

Thanks for reading!