Arjun, the Shifting Flame, the Izzet Sphinx I guess! The game plan for Arjun is pretty simple: build up your mana base, keep the number of cards in your hand high, play Arjun, self-wheel a lot, and hope to hit one of five wincons.
TL;DR:
- Keep your hand size up, as it gives you access to more cards. You can easily run out of gas if you get trigger happy with burn spells.
- You're looking for Niv-Mizzet, Locus God, Psychosis Crawler, or [to a lesser extent] Diviner's Wand.
- You have to be willing to let go of the cards you currently have in your hand with this deck.
This deck isn't the most optimized or polished deck, but I still like it. Arjun forces you to wheel away your hand every time you cast a spell. When the main thing we want to do for this deck is hit Niv-Mizzet, Niv-Mizzet, Locust God, Psychosis Crawler, or Diviner's Wand, that becomes a huge plus! We aren't a combo deck, though, as frequently hitting one of those five cards means our opponents have two turns or so to get rid of it.
When I first built Arjun, I wanted an Izzet deck that cared about blue draw spells and red burn spells. The red burn spells are cheap, which helps dig through your deck at an alarming rate once you get Arjun out. The blue draw spells are vital; if you have two cards in hand and neither of them are draw spells, you've run out of gas.
Utility cards include some zero drop cards like mishra's bauble, fun cards like Mind's dilation (more there for the cast trigger than anything else tbh), redundant cards like mindmoil (love that card), the three tron lands (you wheel so much that you can hit them if you want), leyline of anticipation (flash is great when you're between wheel triggers), eye of the storm (each card is CAST when you copy it, which produces ever increasing wheel triggers -- valuetown with runaway steamkin), parallel thoughts (a pet card that more often than not says I hit my land drops), and so forth.
Issues with the deck/possible upgrades:
- I've often had to drop two cards on removing things with toughness 4 or more. That really hurts, as you NEED to keep your hand size up around 5 or more.
- I am planning on removing a red X boardwipe and replacing it with evacuation or devastation tide or the like.
- I want to add chaos warp and pongify to have unconditional removal, as Arjun gets toppled by a single well-timed enchantment and only has one non-damaged-based creature removal (unsummon).
- To upgrade, add better mana rocks/lands/better versions of cards. Take out some of the red burn spells, cards like Surrakar Spellblade, ring of three wishes, mind's dilation, etc. Some cards (smoke, electrickery, venser's journal) are only useful in certain games but when they do come up, they save your bacon. When they aren't useful, they aren't dead cards as you just wheel them away.
Satisfying moments with the deck:
- Casting a burn spell to fish for X (a zero mana counter spell, a stifle-like effect, etc) AND GETTING IT. That's the main one, really; this deck is such a wild ride at times.
- When you have eye of the storm out and either runaway steamkin or leyline of anticipation, you really do feel like a mage harnessing a storm. It's incredibly fun.
