Welcome Magic lovers!
With the release of Outlaws of Thunder Junction, one of the most powerful sets we've seen in a long while, a veritable cornucopia of crazy combos can be found crawling all over the Magic Arena ranked ladder, as players test and tune different ideas in their never-ending quest to discover the next 'best deck'.
While the preliminary results from the few Magic Online challenges that happened over the weekend have been decidedly less exciting, with format stalwarts Domain Ramp, Esper Midrange and Boros Convoke simply slotting a couple of new additions into their existing shells and calling it a day, there have been one or two spicy new entries into the Standard metagame that may warrant further investigation.
The staggering number of insanely powerful artifacts that emerged from the Big Score addition to Outlaws of Thunder Junction had many players wondering if an artifact-based deck could be viable in the hotly contested top tier of Standard. One player piloting just such a deck managed to capture a top 8 spot in the 87-player Magic Online Challenge 64 that occurred over the weekend, catching the eyes of many other magicians also looking to take Standard in a new direction.
The Deck
Presenting, Izzet Artifact Control:
While Standard did briefly see a similar big-mana Izzet Artifact Control deck pop up shortly after the artifact-heavy The Brothers' War set dropped at the end of 2022, it quickly became apparent that control decks simply weren't viable with powerhouse cards Fable of the Mirror, Invoke Despair and Reckoner Bankbuster running around, and Izzet Artifact Control quickly faded into obscurity. Fast forward to 2024, however, and Outlaws of Thunder Junction has breathed new life into this metallic shell, as we saw the deck quickly adopt Simulacrum Synthesizer, a card which a lot of players were buzzing about before the set released, and to a lesser extent, the blue-red fast land, Spirebluff Canal.
How it Plays
The deck operates in traditional control fashion, using blue countermagic like Essence Scatter and Negate combined with red removal such as Ill-Timed Explosion and Lithomantic Barrage to keep the opponent's threats in check. Lithomantic Barrage may seem like a strange choice to play in the main deck here, but it makes sense if one is expecting to face a lot of Esper Midrange, as its by far the best option for dealing with a Raffine, Scheming Seer, Dennick, Pious Apprentice, Deep-Cavern Bat and new addition, Duelist of the Mind. It also does an acceptable job against the other two top decks, Boros Convoke and Domain Ramp, taking out Warden of the Inner Sky and Knight-Errant of Eos in the former, and Archangel of Wrath in the latter.
However, unlike other control lists, such as Azorius, the Izzet Artifact deck can accelerate its mana rather quickly by producing powerstones with three-mana cards like Stern Lesson and the absolutely perfect, Thran Spider, which not only ramps one's mana and digs up additional artifacts in the late game, but also provides an excellent defensive body on turn three. From there its simply a matter of resolving The Mightstone and Weakstone to not only remove a threat from the opposing side of the board or draw more gas for the tank, but also to get up to eight or nine mana in order to slam a massive Cityscape Leveler or Skitterbeam Battalion.
While all of this delicious artifact nonsense was certainly possible before Outlaws of Thunder Junction dropped, it was the new addition of Simulacrum Synthesizer that really brought it all together, elevating the deck's power level to something very potent indeed. Getting a 'SimSyn' (please don't sue us, Matt Groening), into play early means that every single artifact in the deck now produces a construct creature once it enters the battlefield, quickly snowballing into a board of enormous threats out of nowhere. Remember, all of the powerstone tokens from the Spiders and Stern Lessons also contribute to pumping these constructs that the SimSyn produces. For the real coup de grace, try resolving even a prototyped Skitterbeam Battalion with SymSyn in play, creating no less than six constructs (three of which have haste), and putting twenty-four power onto the battlefield. Throw in a Bitter Reunion to give everything haste and its lights out for the opponent.
The Lands
The mana requirements here are very minimal, considering all the colorless cards in the deck, which allows one to get away with jamming plenty of sweet utility lands into the list. The full playset of Field of Ruin plus an additional couple of Demolition Field means it's a trivial matter to keep an opposing Mirrex or creature lands in check, or to demolish the opponent's colored mana if they're skimping on basic lands, the way decks like Esper Midrange tend to do. The Mycosynth Gardens is a no-brainer here, as the deck generates a ton of colorless mana from its powerstones (yes, they can be used to activate abilities), and lands like Sunken Citadel, making it easy to copy a SymSyn for value, or something huge like a Skitterbeam Battalion or Cityscape Leveler to end the game. One thing to note is that Cityscape Leveler only triggers on cast or attack, not enter-the-battlefield, so one can't blow something up by simply copying it.
The Sideboard
The sideboard has plenty of additional controlling tools, in sweeper Brotherhood's End and countermagic such as Disdainful Stroke and additional Negates. Unlicensed Hearse is still one of the best ways to combat graveyard-based strategies like Temur Fireballs and reanimation decks, plus its an artifact, which can be fetched with Thran Spider's activated ability, as well as playing perfectly with what the rest of the deck is doing. The full four Faerie Mastermind is a nod to Dimir Tempo and Esper Midrange, clearly one of the deck's more difficult matchups. Finally, Cryptic Coat is an excellent alternate win condition against slower, more controlling decks like Azorius and Domain.
Conclusion
While this list is certainly still in need of further testing and tuning, the core of the deck is definitely doing something quite powerful and consistent, and therefore deserves further study. When every threat in the deck passively dodges the most ubiquitous removal spells in Standard such as Cut Down and Go for the Throat, it starts to feel like Izzet Artifact Control is actually in a pretty good position with regard to the established tier 1 decks. With a plethora of powerful artifacts still legal in Standard, and more getting added every new set, perhaps there are new ways to reconstruct this list into something even greater that haven't been explored yet, so get out there are start testing!
