Blue/red or ‘Izzet’ has been a dominant color pair in Magic: the Gathering’s Standard format for more than a year now. Even with regular bans hitting key cards like Vivi Ornitier and Cori-Steel Cutter, Izzet decks have shown an incredible degree of resilience and just keep bouncing back. Cards from Marvel Super Heroes are now beginning to make their way into the Standard meta, and it looks like Izzet decks are getting a new Merfolk friend in the form of Namor the Sub-Mariner.
Namor is a mythic rare MTG card [1]from Marvel Super Heroes. He’s flying merfolk villain with four toughness and power equal to the number of merfolk under its controller’s command. Whenever Namor’s controller casts a noncreature spell with at least one blue pip in its mana cost, they create a number of 1/1 blue Merfolk tokens equal to the number of blue symbols in that spell’s mana cost.
If there’s one thing that Izzet decks love, it’s noncreature spells, it’s famously the spellsinger color pair. This means that Namor is able to easily slot into a number of pre-existing deck archetypes. He can provide both a board full of Merfolk attackers, while also being a powerful flying beater in his own right.
Namor eliminates a fundamental tension in the mind of an Izzet player. With Namor onboard, there’s less of a need to finely tune the ratio of creature spells to noncreature spells in a deck. Since Namor ensures that every blue instant, sorcery, enchantment, artifact, and planeswalker that’s cast comes with a host of free Merfolk tokens.
Have you played any games with or against Namor? And do you think he’s a new standard mainstay, or a flavor of the month that will be gone by the time the next set rolls around? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord.
Source: Wargamer
