"Even if you beat me, I'm still the best. "

-Izzet Phoenix, 2021-2030

Very recently, I piloted Izzet Phoenix to the top 4 of the EMEA Regional Championship in Lille. Besides the fact that I now somehow qualified for the same Pro Tour in 4 different ways and how comical that is, I intend to give an updated on the status quo of the Phoenix deck in Pioneer: Why it has been good, why it is still good, how to play with Artist’s Talent and a quick look at a post Foundation world.

What is Izzet Phoenix and what makes it so good?

Izzet Phoenix has been the boogeyman of the format for quite some time now. The deck has been part of Pioneer since the format’s inception and a powerhouse even long before the arrival of Amalia Benavides Aguirre and Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord - cards which are now no longer legal. We have seen Expressive Iteration get axed because of this deck and despite that it still prevails to this day. Several people have been upset that Phoenix didn’t get hit with a ban because it was part of the perceived trifecta of the Amalia - Vampires - Phoenix format, so the only strong deck left out of the 3 after the banishment of the former 2. Early concerns that it would single-handedly oppress everything else and terrorize the format have turned out to not be validated at all though. 

On the flipside, a lot of players enjoy the play-patterns and plentiful decision making the deck offers and think it’s a fun “best deck” to have. Personally, I’m all for it. I do believe that potentially at some point Treasure Cruise or parts of the Phoenix deck could be banned, especially since Artist’s Talent (which gives Cruise another boost) but I do not know if that is a needed move right now as the deck’s win rate isn’t particularly impressive overall at this point in time.

The deck is powerful but at the end of the day it mostly plays removal spells and cantrips like Consider and Opt all held together by Treasure Cruise, otherwise it wouldn’t function at all. I do think that it is one of the strongest plans the format offers but since the deck has a target on its head it is more than manageable and after the initial dominance of Artist’s Talent Phoenix in Washington DC we saw a pretty wide open Pioneer format at the more recent Regional Championships of every other region as a result. The deck also didn’t perform that well online afterwards.

Treasure Cruise is a powerful Magic: The Gathering card, as close to Ancestral Recall as we can get in Pioneer. Arclight Phoenix helps facilitate the cards drawn by turning cheap removal spells like Fiery Impulse and Lightning Axe into quite advantageous tempo-swings for the Phoenix player, often very combo-like (sometimes accompanied by Temporal Trespass plus Galvanic Iteration to effectively combo-kill). The way the deck works is that it has to spend a lot of mana on “air”, effectively going down tempo for card quality so that it can then later regain the tempo lost with said removal spells and Phoenixes. None of this would work without Treasure Cruise. The reliance on this one card is also not a huge issue, as Picklock Prankster and Artist’s Talent help to find it and fuel it pretty reliably, and it’s not uncommon to have turns where multiple Treasure Cruises are cast for a single blue mana.

Now you might think graveyard hate poses a problem. And while it is a concern, the natural make-up of the deck leads to also being able to pivot quite easily: Cantrips help consistency not only with the plan A of Phoenixes and Cruises, but also to find and set up whatever existing sideboard we have. Generally speaking, the deck is strong against strategies that rely either on small creatures or reactive strategies that play many removal spells and a bit weaker against strategies that go over the top (e.g. decks like Lotus Field Combo). Though, the deck can improve and adapt in whatever way it wants due to the flexibility of cantrips postboard so no single matchup can be too bad for it.

RC Lille

Mostly I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for this tournament since I was busy testing for the World Championship instead where I finished in 17th place playing Domain Ramp. 

Luckily, I have a lot of experience with the Izzet Phoenix deck from past Pioneer events. I have been playing it actively ever since Wilderness Reclamation got banned from the format, often working with other Phoenix enthusiasts to innovate on the deck. I had previously helped the System Magic group prepare their Phoenix list for the Regional Championship in Washington DC which was briefly before Worlds, so I had done some theory based homework at least. Eventually I just played a single league on Magic Online and exchanged a lot of thoughts with Andreas Reling who also played Phoenix and Max Penzkofer, my roommates for this event. Max piloted the 4-color Zur deck and even top 8ed the RC as well, a nice conversion rate for our 3-person hotel room I’d say!

For reference the list I played in the tournament:

I don’t want to go too much into detail about specific card choices of that list, since the metagame will slightly shift with Foundations and my RC was without that set being legal, so it’s not exactly going to be up to date for your upcoming tournaments, a few comments though:

I chose to not play Temporal Trespass + Galvanic Iteration for the specific reason that I thought my sideboard plan would give me an edge in the mirror match already and I was okay with being disadvantaged in game 1s. Also I did think that at the time I wouldn’t want those cards in many matchups. This has likely changed with Foundations but I’m not sure yet.

The mana base has been worked on by multiple people and I just changed a small detail at the end (Sokenzan over 2nd Storm Carved Coast). I do believe that you need all these red sources for the Anger of the Gods from the sideboard to be castable, and as long as GW Company is a deck, I also don’t want to cut any of the Angers. For anyone wondering about the 1 Shivan Reef, I am “responsible” for everyone playing it currently because I initially brought up that it should be at least tried out for DC and it ended up being quite good so far. I don’t think you can play 2 and if we ever get the blue-red Verge we might have to rebuild the mana base anyway. If you don’t like Shivan Reef you can come fight me over it though!

Thassas’s Oracle won me 4 games in the RC Lille. I don’t know if it’s necessary going forward but it has quite a few applications, namely the mirror and Enigmatic Incarnation decks where it shines. Some people are also playing Jace, Wielder of Mysteries now which I personally don’t like as much but it’s reasonable since it is a more real card vs Rakdos Demons. I do think Oracle is better because in the matchups where I want this effect, my opponents usually have Dovin’s Veto. Now with Artist’s Talent, it is very easy to get two Talents down and then draw the rest of your library to win the game with an Oracle effect.

Third Path Iconoclast was mostly meant to be a way to sidestep Vanishing Verse, it’s nice to have alternative win conditions but I personally don’t love it. Might not be needed in the future, but recent online results have shown that Zur and Niv-Mizzet decks with Verse are still quite popular.

The tournament essentially went my way in many scenarios, but most impressive were the Anger of the Gods from the sideboard, helping me win a total of 5 matches vs GW Company in the tournament! Eventually I fell to Marc Tobiasch’s Golgari Food deck in the semifinals since my sideboard had not been prepared for that matchup. If you want a card that helps here it would be Pithing Needle.

Why is Phoenix’s win rate currently low?

Despite me personally doing well in that event, the overall win rate of the deck wasn’t impressive.

In recent Regional Championships and other tournaments Phoenix has shown to have a below 50% win rate while always being the most or second most played deck. Why is that? Well for one thing, the most played deck often has a deflated win rate since a wide variety of players picking it up also means that some inexperience is guaranteed and baked in. Usually the winrate of such decks is lower, unless it is truly overpowered (as we can see with Boros and Mardu Energy in Modern currently).

The other reason I suspect is that the deck has been quite targeted since Regional Championship DC and people developing ways to attack it warrants more adaptation from the Phoenix lists, which a lot of players might not have gone through before their tournament. Always playing the same list with a deck like Phoenix is dangerous, as every card we put into our deck changes the whole a lot more than with decks that don’t have so much card draw and selection. For example, if half the mana of the game is spent on cantrips and then the cards we find off our cantrips are situationally not good or don’t help as much as we need, we will likely just lose the game. A failure of deckbuilding/tuning in that case.

Despite all that, the winrate being lower also is a possible hint at many things:

The deck is not “too good” for the format. That doesn’t mean it can’t be the best deck to play, but it means that even if it is the gap between it and the second best deck is possibly not as large.

Phoenix is hard to play and requires repetitions.

There are ways to beat it, if people really want to

The Phoenix lists are currently in flux, and even though most people now finally agree on 4 Artist’s Talent, there isn’t much consensus on the rest of the list. They vary a lot in functionality and plans I’d imagine and that also hurts the win rate.

Nonetheless, this shouldn’t be discouraging you from picking the deck for a Pioneer tournament you care about. It just means that some preparation is required to not fall in line with all the other Phoenix players who were not as successful. After all, the deck is very malleable and there is more room to maneuver in tuning it than it might seem.

How to play with Artist’s Talent?

Artist’s Talent has now probably become the single most fun card in the deck to play with for me at this point, and it is also extremely powerful. Many games where the deck is allowed to untap with a Talent in play on turn 2 feel strongly in Phoenix’s favor, it’s “the real deal” and it accelerates the deck to another level that wasn’t there before.

Before going further, I would like to credit my former teammate Tristan Wylde-LaRue specifically with most of this movement. There have been other players playing the Talent before but he was the first one to convince me and also a larger group of players to come to the conclusion that the card is what you should be doing if you wanted to win. It was a heartfelt goodbye to the playset of Ledger Shredders and I still think Shredder is a pretty good card in the deck and can still have some applications, but there is only so much room so we had to part ways.

The Talent is often a complicated card to play with, having to “rummage” instead of “loot” (discard first as opposed to draw first) poses a lot of tough questions and will often require impossible calculations to do for you in the moment. While you sometimes can just power through all the combinatorial possibilities and figure out the numbers, the sheer amount of triggers makes it not very reasonable for you to do so, you will often have to rely on feeling. Obviously this all goes a lot better if you are well practiced in playing with the card. Here are my tips and tricks that should help you to become a talented artist:

The most important Rule: Discard/rummage as many cards as reasonably possible. The card is in the deck to fuel Treasure Cruise and to lead to explosive turns with multiple Arclight Phoenixes resurrecting. Every time you don’t use the trigger on it you are basically giving up value and potential looks towards having more Phoenixes and key cards earlier.

Don’t be too afraid to bin cantrips. They do represent more potential Talent triggers in theory but mana is limited in practice and often you should aggressively cycle your cantrips with Talent since you wouldn’t have time to cast all of them anyway.

It should be somewhat more obvious which cards to not discard. For example: If you are in a spot where it is crucial to have a Brazen Borrower at a given time to deal with a 6/6 Demon token or a High Noon later, surely you want to think twice before binning your important answer. Sometimes you still want to rummage it away, especially in spots where it seems like you need to get your engine going to end up ahead. In this situation it helps if there are more Brazen Borrowers or answer cards in your deck. Which brings us to the next point which is:

Consider what is left in your deck. Sometimes it is totally fine to discard our Lightning Axe because we can find another one soon enough. Other times it is one of our last pieces of interaction and discarding it would be foolish. Sometimes you don’t even have enough cards left in total to risk rummaging, you could be at risk of milling out.

Oftentimes you have to make estimated guesses on your discards early in the game. This is basically just an emphasis on the first point I made with how aggressively you have to use the Talent. To really get your Cruises and Phoenixes rolling as soon as possible, you will have to discard cards that could look nice to hold sometimes. It’s good to already have all the answers you want lined up in your hand in the current matchup, but if you are not progressing your game plan that can be very costly. It gives your opponent time to find answers to the Talent or graveyard hate which then complicates the whole game needlessly, if you had just binned cards more aggressively earlier to pull ahead. If you already resolved a Cruise or 2, chances are that you simply don’t care if your opponent deals with your Talent after. 

Usually Cruise first unless you want to save it for Proft’s triggers or are worried about discarding end of turn. Drawing more cards first gives you more options on what to discard later. In this sense, if you want to maximize looking for a certain card while also at the same time not being forced to discard cards that you might want to keep, cast your Treasure Cruises before your Opts/Considers/Sleight of Hands and cast those before your other spells. You are looking for a Phoenix to discard? Cruise before your Opt, but then Opt before your Fiery Impulse, simple as that, same as you would do it without talent. Conversely, sometimes looking for a specific card is not the goal and you should just cast your removal spells that affect the board. Either way, mindlessly jamming cantrips one after another can easily cost you a game if you hadn’t planned a turn or at least a little bit.

When playing with Thassa’s Oracle or Jace, Wielder of Mysteries you can count ahead how many cards deep you can dig with Talent + cantrips before your turn if you know about your library size, this can result in surprise wins.

Playing multiple Talents can let you enter an almost “turbo” mode, where Proft’s Eidetic Memory pumps for almost always a lethal number of stats and Cruises are basically free. It also makes it very easy to win with Thassa’s Oracle. Keep in mind, that this isn’t always a good play to make as putting a Talent in play at first only means that you went down a card. The card advantage is recouped once you cast Cruise or brought back Phoenixes, but until then it’s mostly a way to get there faster and increase the quality of your cards. If you don’t have many cards in hand, it might be better to discard the second Talent to the one in play in the first place.

You can level up your Talents! Don’t forget that the card has other abilities, even if they don’t come up as often. Sometimes the best play is to level up your Talent on turn 3, and even more so when your opponent doesn’t play any answers for it. It not only makes your instants and sorceries cost 1 less, it also reduces the cost of Proft’s and other Talents which can make for really explosive Proft’s turns. The 3rd level allows for Lightning Axe to kill 6/6 Demons or for Fiery Impulse to get rid of Sheoldred. Sometimes it also matters for Torch the Tower on Planeswalkers or even Anger of the Gods.

Don’t always play Talent on turn two. It is true that in game one of the match and most of the time you would play it on that turn but oftentimes your opponent will be prepared and try to not let you untap with a Talent early in the game. So if you can avoid it and have enough lands to play, sometimes it is worth it to play around Spell Pierce or save your Talent until you can get a couple triggers out of it before they Vanishing Verse it. This is especially relevant if you have a Phoenix in hand that would otherwise be stuck there.

As mentioned before, Artist’s Talent is card quality in exchange for a card. This has side effects like making multiple Talents and Lightning Axes worse on low resources and should be considered before casting Talent. Sometimes it is better to Cruise first and then play Talent later, for instance when you also need to cast Lightning Axe or trade cards by other means.

Keep track of how many cards you have drawn with Talent during long turns, since it can be important to know for Proft’s Eidetic Memory. Either track it with dice, in your head or by other means, depending on whether you are willing to reveal to your opponent that you are doing that.

Setting the Foundation - What does the Future hold for Pioneer and Phoenix?

First of all, I don’t think there are many interesting cards for Izzet Phoenix itself in Foundations but the set has an impact on how we want to build our deck. Boltwave makes it so that there is now an actual Burn deck in the format. Yes you heard it right, Burn not Prowess. The RB Prowess matchup was good for Phoenix but it’s much harder to interact with Boros Charms and Bolt Waves so time will tell if and how Phoenix can adapt (potentially with cards like Thing in the Ice, Tablet of the Guilds -  or other means).

Flashfreeze got a reprint in Foundations and is now Pioneer legal as a result, potentially a card to look at for exactly these matchups. It will probably turn out to be worse than Change the Equation and Aether Gust, but there is a chance that it has new applications that the other two lack. For example, Flashfreeze can deal with an Atraxa for good, whereas Change the Equation can’t counter it and Aether Gust only delays the inevitable.

Lotus Field based decks got Expedition Map as a new way to find their centerpiece, which is also of concern as that archetype has usually been the natural predator of Izzet Phoenix.

Recently, Niv-Mizzet or also called Niv to Light decks have become quite popular on Magic Online and done somewhat well which shifted the metagame a bit.

Elenda, Saint of Dusk is a card Niv-Mizzet strategies have adopted as a target for Bring to Light. While usually Phoenix can ignore 4 mana 4/4s, the games vs Niv-Mizzet often slow down due to exile removal spells and then a big lifelinker that we can’t even answer with Lightning Axe of Petty Theft can become an issue. Due to the popularity of Niv-Mizzet and Demons, I suggest trying a single Beacon Bolt in the sideboard as it can answer otherwise hard to deal with threats like Elenda and Niv-Mizzet Supreme and plays quite well together with Artist’s Talent.

From what I suspect is about to happen, Temporal Trespass is probably even better going forward due to these changes but I’m still a bit hesitant since there is quite the cost attached to it. It’s also possible that Ledger Shredder will make a comeback but Artist’s Talent is likely still not going anywhere, which means not a full playset of Shredders regardless. 

Conclusion

Despite the win rate numbers and its metagame position, Izzet Phoenix is still an inherently powerful and very adaptable deck that could become the best choice for a given tournament very easily. It plays powerful cards in Treasure Cruise together with Artist’s Talent and it also rewards practice and sticking to the deck quite a lot.

While some of the newer developments in the metagame are of concern, decks like Niv-Mizzet being popular and the consequences from that means neither the worst nor the best for Phoenix. I would say we are in an okay spot, barring the Burn problem that Foundations brought to us. Only the future can tell us more.