I absolutely adore
Fevered Visions
. You draw cards and then kill your opponent by making them over-draw? Fantastic!
This little deck I've brewed up aims to leverage Fevered Visions as a unique finisher, leaning into the draw engine with a bunch of cheap bounce spells to make sure our opponent's hand is always nice and full. Can we 20 our opponent before they go off, or will we just frustrate them into scooping? In fact, we aim to do both!
Wincons
Our main win condition is the aforementioned
Fevered Visions
smacking our opponent for 2 each turn. Enchantments are somewhat difficult for most Modern decks to remove so sticking just one or two copies of Visions is usually enough to give us inevitability.
That said, we speed up the clock with the good ol'
Delver of Secrets
. You know him, you love him, Delver is the Blue one-drop that keeps on flipping. Half the deck is Instants or Sorceries and we have a few ways of manipulating the top card of our library, so flipping this little guy quick isn't much of a trick for us.
We also have the full playset of
Lightning Bolt
to help us clean up. Another oldie-but-a-goodie, Bolt is exactly what we need to fend off Aggro and deal those last few pesky points of damage to our opponent's face.
Bounce
Fevered Visions
is a pretty reasonable clock if you get it down early while our opponent is developing their board, but what if you don't drop it until after their hand is empty, or what if they just start dropping bigger creatures than what Bolt can handle? Ah, that's where our bounce cards come into play. Bounce cards are usually pretty bad as they're card disadvantage but when we're drawing 2 cards a turn and our opponent is desperately trying to empty their hand, we don't mind so much.
First, we have the color pie bend that is utterly unmatched in efficiency:
Vapor Snag
. Cram a card back into our opponent's hand and nug them for 1, all for just one Blue mana? Exactly what this deck wants.
Next, we have one of the meanest bounce spells ever designed:
Boomerang
. It just looks like a bad
Disperse
at first until you realize that it's missing the "nonland" rider. That's right: it can bounce anything, even lands, that's a critical part of our strategy. See, letting our opponent draw cards is obviously really bad but if we can keep them pinched on mana, then even drawing their whole deck won't help them as they simply won't be able to cast spells quickly enough to survive. Even just putting them down a land drop is great but if we can bounce an early creature land, a shockland, or (deep breath) a bounceland, that's just gravy. And, of course, you can still play
Boomerang
as
Disperse
to bounce a threat as needed.
We finish off our bounce suite with a few fun-of's:
Select for Inspection
acting as
Vapor Snag
#5,
Echoing Truth
for tokens decks, and
AEtherize
for when things have gone totally wrong.
Countermagic
Sometimes I feel like
Remand
was designed specifically for this deck. It's basically the bounce version of a counterspell, allowing you to spend 2 mana to waste whatever mana your opponent just spent on their own spell. We usually want that card to end up back in their hand anyway so what would be a downside for any other deck actually works perfectly for us.
While we can bounce threats all the live-long day, sometimes we do want to get rid of a particular card for good and for that we have our trusty playset of
Mana Leak
. An efficient catch-all counterspell,
Mana Leak
is particularly good in this deck since our opponents are almost always running short of mana. In fact, we might sometimes want to cast it even if our opponent has 3 mana up since either choice they make is good for us: either they pay and the spell resolves but they still have too many cards in hand to avoid damage, or they let us
Counterspell
them so they can use that mana to drop another card. I don't mind casting
Counterspell
in Modern, do you?
Cantrips
Cantrips are always good but decks that really need a specific card to hum need cantrips more than most. To that end, we're running
Serum Visions
and
Faithless Looting
.
Serum Visions
pulls double duty in this deck on top of the usual hand sculpting: 1) it digs us towards
Fevered Visions
when we don't have one, and 2) it helps us set up the top of our deck for quick Delver flips.
Drawing two cards a turn is fantastic but since our opponent is drawing two cards as well, we need to ensure that our card quality is higher than theirs or we risk flooding out while they rip threat after threat. There's no better way to do that than with
Faithless Looting
. We're not abusing the discard aspect all that much but looting 4 times off a single card really helps us swim through the rapids without going under.
Lands
Here's where our budget really starts to hurt us. For example, it's possible that
Snapcaster Mage
and
Cryptic Command
have a place in this deck but since we're really trying to keep our curve down, there's at least an argument to be made against including them. The same cannot be said about our lands. There's no way around it: this deck would absolutely be better if we shelled out for the typical fetch-shock mana base. However, Izzet dual lands are almost always the single most expensive members of any land cycle so this price jump is pretty big for us.
So we're doing the best we can without breaking the bank. Most of the mana base is composed of copies of the lowly
Island
and
Mountain
, but that means we can run Sulphur Falls without too much trouble. We're also running
Temple of Epiphany
as a second set of dual lands and while it does always enter tapped, the Scry 1 is another way we can set up for
Delver of Secrets
so at least we're getting some value for our tempo loss.
That said, if you're going to upgrade the deck, this is the place to start. Even just swapping out
Temple of Epiphany
for
Steam Vents
would be a big upgrade.
Sideboard
Our sideboard is a nice mix of silver bullets and light transformation.
For silver bullets, we have
Alpine Moon
for Tron,
Electrickery
for tokens decks that overwhelm our 1-for-1 removal,
Pithing Needle
for planeswalkers, and
Relic of Progenitus
for graveyard decks.
Dragon's Claw
deserves special mention as it isn't typically seen in Modern sideboards. Burn is a bad matchup for us since it thrives on tight tempo and often needs just one or two extra draws to 20 someone. Not having a fetch-shock mana base does help but
Dragon's Claw
can really move us from struggling to favored by converting Bolt into
Shock
while also giving us incidental lifegain from our own Red spells.
Finally, we have
Young Pyromancer
and
Spell Pierce
. We can bring these in when we're worried about Enchantment removal or even if we just need more chump-blockers. We can even take
Fevered Visions
out completely and go on the Pyro plan. Turns out free 1/1 creatures can actually be pretty useful, go figure!
Conclusion
Thank you for reading my ramble about my silly little Izzet deck. It's a ton of fun to play and incredibly frustrating to play against. What more could you want from Blue and Red?
I would be happy to hear any suggestions you might even to improve the deck. Is there a better bounce spell that I'm leaving on the table? Should I mix up the ratios? Do I need to shave a land or add one? Let me know!