Magic: The Gathering is an expensive hobby, and while the name ‘Standard’ suggests a baseline, entry-level format that’s easy to access, in truth it’s anything but. It can be hard to justify spending hundreds of dollars on decks that will be dubbed illegal in a few years time when the cards rotate out. That’s why it’s hella exciting to me that – for the first time in ages – there’s a budget deck beating out the competition.
If you want to get into paper Magic, this could be the Standard deck to do it with, simply because you can build it without breaking the bank – which is saying something for the most expensive trading card game on the market.
Izzet Spellementals has been on my radar since it made it to the top 4 in Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed. In the last few weeks it’s slowly climbed from a niche deck, to a serious contender, to the third most-played deck in the format. According to MTG Goldfish’s meta share calculator, which pulls its data from MTG Online tournaments, only mono-green landfall and Izzet prowess decks are seeing more play in competitive match-ups.
So let’s rip the band-aid off: deck’s still $253. But firstly, that’s half what you’d pay for mono-green landfall, which is full of expensive mythics; secondly, almost all of the expense comes from the manabase. Seriously, strip out the Riverpyre Verges and Steam Vents and you have a $69 deck on your hands. An unfortunate side effect of red and blue being the only playable colors for all of 2025 is that the Izzet dual-lands come at a premium.
Drop the sideboard and stick to best-of-one and you can bring your Izzet Spellementals deck down below $50. Stock Up is the costliest essential card, a $10 uncommon!
The lack of rares in this build means it’s also a good budget deck for MTG Arena. Assuming you’re swimming in common and uncommon wildcards like I am, you only need seven rare wildcards (aside from the lands).
So how does Izzet Spellementals actually play? Well as the name suggests, it’s basically a spellslinger deck, with an elemental twist. You shut down your opponents’ early game with a smorgasbord of counterspells, bounce spells, and red removal, then use the instants and sorceries in your graveyard to play a big elemental like Hearth Elemental or Eddymurk Crab at a major discount.
You may be thinking this sounds like nothing to write home about. After all, players have been doing this sort of thing with Tolarian Terror for years. But what sets Izzet Spellementals apart is a single new card, Sunderflock.
Sunderflock is a blue 5/5 flier that bounces every non-elemental creature from the board. It costs a horrifying nine mana as a result, but that’s reduced by the mana cost of the most expensive elemental you control. Therefore, with Eddymurk Crab on the battlefield, you can cast this for just two blue, a massive tempo swing that your opponent will struggle to come back from. Trust me, it feels great.
The good thing about this deck – if you’re cash-strapped – is that you can build it for cheap and then gradually improve it, swapping mountains out for those more valuable lands. And if this recommendation gets you caught in Standard’s web, you’ll get plenty more use out of those red-blue lands, too. Izzet may have been nerfed by the MTG banlist, but it’s not going anywhere. Of course, you could also just proxy, making the whole budget question an irrelevance.
What do you think of this deck? Let us know what you’re playing over on the Wargamer Discord.
Source: Wargamer
