Preparing to Light up the Stage with Izzet Delver with #SCGNY Champ
Editor's note: This article was submitted before SCG Syracuse, which RIch happened to win with Izzet Delver! These were Rich's thoughts pre-tournament and check out our social media outlets to hear about it his post-tournament thoughts later this week. Congrats Rich Cali!!
As alluded to in my last article, this week i’m going to talk about Izzet Delver. Specifically, the list that Kevin King took to a 14th place finish at the SCG Team Open in Baltimore:
Pteramander was constantly impressing me in the Izzet Phoenix deck and I was planning on building a Young Pyromancer-based Delver deck and see how effective it would be in that type of shell. Fortunately, this deck list was published around this time and I was enthralled right away. Not only would testing this allow me to further explore Pteramander’s effectivity, but Kevin included another uncommon from Ravnica Allegiance that looked promising: Light Up the Stage . While 4 of each seemed like a lot, at least it would help give me a deeper understanding of how these cards might fit into Legacy.
In the past, I haven’t gone out of my way to play various Izzet Delver decks. Usually they end up feeling like Pseudo-Burn decks to me, and that style of game play isn’t what i’m looking for in a Legacy deck. That’s not the case for this variant, and the play patterns of the deck are much more akin to Grixis Delver, as opposed to traditional Izzet variants.
I had a lot of fun playing this deck. I played it a lot on Magic Online and the deck performed really well. This week, I want to go over some individual cards in the deck and remark on how well they worked for me.
The Manabase
When i’m testing a deck, one of the aspects that I value the most is a stable mana base. Readers of this article series might remember that when I was testing Grixis Delver back in November I hated the manabase. It felt like its mana was stretched too thin for my tastes and I couldn’t get it to work for me at the time.
In contrast, Izzet Delver’s mana felt excellent. Being able to support 3 basic lands is a huge deal and it really allows the deck to play real games of Magic almost every time. Between Delver mirrors, Life from the Loam decks, and Back to Basics playing exclusively non-basic lands is very punishing in Legacy. There are sacrifices associated with cutting the third color, but i’m pretty enthralled with running basic lands at the moment, so the costs are outweighing the benefits for me.
Pteramander and Light Up the Stage
When I was testing Izzet Phoenix, I thought Pteramander was an incredible threat. That deck has the ability to freely dump spells in the graveyard and turbo out the adapt ability and it was trivial to make it a 5/5 most of the time.
This deck doesn’t have that capability, but the card serves a radically different role. While it is a relatively weak turn 1 play in terms of pressure, it is by far this deck’s best enabler for Light Up the Stage. This is because it such a weak threat in the early game that opponents don’t kill it, and who could blame them? 1 damage a turn isn’t much and by waiting it will allow them to safely play around Daze or save their removal spells when they’re ready to fight over it.
Fortunately, this is greatly beneficial to this deck’s gameplan and made Light Up the Stage more consistent. At the same time, activating the Adapt ability for 1 or 2 on turns 5 or 6 wasn’t that difficult, making Pteramander a relatively strong late game threat. I wouldn’t exactly compare it to Gurmag Angler as the play patterns of the two cards are really different, but as far as having a large threat is concerned, Pteramander does the job sufficiently, and also works very well with the deck’s overall gameplan.
As for Light Up the Stage, it isn’t too difficult to turn on Spectacle early, and it really allows this deck to pull ahead. While it is not exactly like drawing 2 cards, it is a pretty close approximation, especially in conjunction with Brainstorm and excess lands. All of the threats did a good job of turning on Spectacle so with a threat in play, I never had any issues casting the card.
While I didn’t have too much trouble turning on Spectacle, and the card was great when cast for 1 mana, that didn’t happen every time. Sometimes Delver decks have trouble sticking threats and Light Up the Stage was much worse at 3 mana. This created some amount of inconsistency that I don’t love in my Delver decks (or any deck, I suppose), but this didn’t come up as often as I feared. At least a few times, it allowed me to play really really long games and out-grind my opponents by just casting a lot of them for 3 mana. I didn’t really expect that to come up ever, and it was pretty cool that the card gives the deck some staying power, even at 3 mana.
There are also substantial deck building costs when including Stage. Counterspells are pretty poor when exiled with Stage. While it can help ensure you resolve a threat or slow down their gameplan by a turn, it’s pretty difficult to turn reactive spells into cards when exiled by Light Up the Stage. This came up a lot in the postboard games, and weirdly enough it felt worse against slower decks post board because my deck would more cards like Pyroblast or Flusterstorm in it. I was siding out a couple of copies against Miracles for this reason, which was kind of counterintuitive to me.
It also demands an effective means of turning on Spectacle. That cost isn’t too high, because a lot of the threats these decks want to play are good at that, but it still influences how the deck get built.
Overall, though, it was pretty effective for me and definitely outperformed my expectations. 4 did feel a bit excessive, so going down to 3 might be something that i’m interested in, but at least it definitely felt viable.
Young Pyromancer
I haven’t been so impressed with Young Pyromancer in a long time. I don’t think current iterations of Grixis Delver are amazing Pyromancer decks. I think they’re great Gurmag Angler decks, and Gurmag Angler is great, but Pyromancer doesn’t blow me away in Grixis.
In this deck, though, Pyromancer is an all-star. This is where Light Up the Stage really felt like drawing 2 cards, and drawing extra cards with Pyromancer in play doesn’t feel especially fair in Legacy. All of the pieces of this deck feel like engine pieces that enable Young Pyromancer to be its best, and I forgot how oppressive this card can feel.
Vapor Snag
Every time I would play a League and think about cutting this for another Chain Lightning, a game would come up where having this in the main deck was incredible. It is difficult to imagine that including a single copy is the optimal way to build the deck, but it has utility and the deck sees so many cards that a few choice 1-ofs isn’t that bad.
The Tough Matchups
One of the biggest issues I had was that the threat base is relatively slow overall, and this can be problematic against combo decks. Delver of Secrets is the only one that hits hard early, and the rest of them don’t really apply enough pressure to force them to act. At the same time, by making Light Up the Stage better by cutting soft permission and including cards like Chain Lightning that can be cast proactively, the combo matchups get even more difficult. The sideboard helps, but by not including Black all of the interaction is one-dimensional. Countermagic is great, but definitely something experienced combo players can navigate through, especially because the clock of the deck is relatively slow. I’ll be looking towards Vendillion Clique as a way of diversifying the disruption and applying pressure, but it does seem too slow most of the time.
The games I played against Miracles were all extremely close and I didn’t feel favored. Most of the games came down to my situation looking really dire, and then stealing it with a timely burn spell. There are a lot of cards I didn’t really want in my deck post-board, like Chain Lightning, Daze, and even some number of Light Up the Stage, but there wasn’t that much to board in. I don’t know if this matchup warrants including something specific, like Winter Orb, but I think at least warrants some more dedicated attention.
I thought Chalice decks would be more problematic, and I think I should have had more issues with them, but I didn’t. If a Chalice resolved, Young Pyromancer and Stage really went the distance a lot of the time. On top of that, it’s still a Delver deck, so playing a cheap threat and riding it to victory still happens a fair amount of time. I don’t think my experience necessarily reflects reality, so i’m going to test the matchup more to see what things look like when they don’t go well and try to learn if there’s a better solution in the sideboard than just bringing in Abrade.
The Future
Overall, the main deck felt very solid. I think I might trim a Stage and cut the Vapor Snag at some point, but I was very impressed with how it performed. As for the sideboard, I have just been making slight adjustments as I go along. Here is where i’m at now:
Blood Moon didn’t really feel necessary to me, and it was pretty expensive at 3 mana. If I start having trouble with Eldrazi, which I suspect might start happening, i’ll probably put them back in. Snapcaster Mage is a great card, but it just seemed like a half-measure sideboard card in this deck. Null Rod and Grafdigger’s Cage are nice tools to have against some combo decks because I didn’t want all of my interaction to be reactive countermagic and they have done well for themselves. As I mentioned, I want to work on a better plan against Miracles. It feels tough as it stands, and there weren’t enough good cards to bring in post-board. Vendilion Clique probably has some overlap there, but I don’t know for sure.
In the end, I really enjoyed this deck. Not only does it showcase cards from the new set beautifully, which was my goal from the onset, but it felt like a highly functional Delver deck. I’m going to keep playing this for a while and I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking to attack with a Delver of Secrets.
