Izzet Phoenix in Legacy
Too often when new sets come out I am slow to adapt. It’s easy for me to get stuck in my ways, especially since Legacy can be slow to change. I decided that I don’t want to fall too far behind and will try to forcibly overcome my tendency to be an old man, resistant to change.
Fortunately, the last two Ravnica sets have been awesome and have given Legacy a fair amount of new tools to work with. Among the cards that excite me Pteramander is very high on the list. Being part-Delver and part-Tombstalker sounds like the makings of a good card and I really want to push it to see how good it is.
Recently, a really nice looking deck top 4’d the Legacy challenge, sporting a full set of Pteramanders and everyone’s favorite Phoenix from Guilds of Ravnica:
This has the appearance of being an interactive deck but in practice it feels more like a linear combo deck. Occasionally it has traditional Delver draws; Dazing, Bolting, and Wastelanding opponents into the dust. However, Plan A in this deck is always to turbo out as many Arclight Phoenixes as possible. The cards that do this (Careful Study and Thought Scour) also happen to be good at moving Instants and Sorceries into the graveyard. This enables the Adapt on Pteramander very quickly and legitimately makes it feel like a Blue Tombstalker.
The core of the deck is extremely powerful and it has the ability to kill fairly quickly. This forces opponents to act quickly lest they die, which mitigates our need for interaction. I really like that aspect of the deck because Legacy can be a brutal environment. Playing a relatively slow clock and trying to disrupt opponents can sometimes be a difficult task. This deck is proactive enough to ask the questions, not wait for answers, and that’s a good starting point.
I did feel like some of the draws were non-functional, though. There are a fair amount of ways to get the Phoenix into the graveyard but if I ever drew a Phoenix without having a discard spell on hand I would often find myself without much to do. On the other side of things, if I was attempting to play the “Delver Game”, drawing Manamorphose felt really bad. While it is free as a spell to enable Pteramancer and Phoenix, it was a pretty bad cantrip when you need to dig for anything.
In many ways, the Delver aspect of the deck is more of a distraction: Your opponents spend time and resources making sure that Delver doesn’t kill them while you quietly set up a huge Phoenix turn. I don’t love the idea on paper, but it did work well in practice.
While it is very powerful, some of the deck felt weird. Manamorphose and Careful Study are the biggest reasons for this. If you cast them without a Phoenix, it’s a big risk that you won’t draw one or have enough spells to get them back. Not being able to get any extra value off of them felt pretty bad, but sometimes you just need to actually cast your spells. In the deck’s defense I wasn’t exactly sure how to sequence my spells optimally and didn’t have a full and total grasp of what my game plan should be every turn. I essentially played the deck as linearly as I could in every game, which is likely not the optimal was to play the deck. Perhaps this is the kind of deck that rewards patience, which is a weak-point in my game.
The deck did perform really well for me, though. As people are learning in every format at this point, putting Arclight Phoenix into play for free is a great way to steal some games. Even more interesting was how good Pteramander was. Honestly, Pteramander probably stole about as many games as Phoenix did. It was incredibly easy to turn on adapt with this shell. On top of that, it’s way less awkward in multiples than the various delve creatures running around and also pitches to Force of Will. I’m completely sold on it at this point, and I won’t be sleeping on it any longer.
Sideboarding with this deck felt really complicated. There are a lot of cards in the deck that are just engine pieces and trimming any of the enablers made me want to trim on Phoenixes, as well. Due to being a proactive deck by design, siding in the reactive cards made me want to be less of a Phoenix-based combo deck and more of a traditional Delver deck. While having access to the Phoenix engine did speed up the clock a bit, it also left me drawing some dead Phoenixes at times.
I generally had 2 approaches in sideboarding:
- Against combo, trim some Manamorphose, Phoenixes, and Bolts for interactive cards.
- Against fair decks, trim some Forces and Dazes for cards like Abrade and Pyroblast.
I know how broad that is, but that’s almost exactly what I did every time. It worked out often enough, but this can’t be the best approach. I would love to hear what other people have been doing with the deck.
There was only one sideboard card that kept beating me consistently: Leyline of the Void. I lost almost every game that a Leyline of the Void was played against me. If you’re trying to defeat this version of Phoenix, that seems like a good direction to go. As for beating Leyline i’m not sure what to do yet. There are a lot of threats in these colors that don’t use the graveyard, so perhaps a sideboard plan involving Young Pyromancer or True-Name Nemesis could work out. I don’t want to dilute the deck too much, though, so this suggestion comes with a grain of salt. Maybe it might just be better to replace the Snags in the sideboard with Echoing Truth, but Truth seems pretty mediocre.
Overall, there were a lot of things to like here. I think Phoenix isn’t just a flash in the pan and some version of this deck is going to be around for a while. I don’t know if this is better than Grixis Phoenix, but I think this has merit as an alternate version (Grixis Phoenix does look quite good, though).
At the moment, i’m a bit more interested in exploring what Pteramander can do.. Fortunately for me, Kevin King just did well with an amazing looking Pyromancer list that I think will keep me occupied for a while...
