Izzet Prowess, Izzet Looting, Izzet Lute-ing, Izzet Lessons, Izzet Cauldron, Izzet Spellementals. Is it Izzet? Then it's probably a top tier Magic: The Gathering deck. The TCG has been dominated, for more than an entire year now, by this single pair of colors, and despite green landfall decks making a bid for top position, there's still a seething sea of red and blue decks bubbling up behind them.
In the recent SOS Pro Tour, Izzet didn't win first place, but it made up 50% of the meta, and every deck was designed with combatting it in mind.
The problems began as far back as April 11, 2025 with the release of Tarkir Dragonstorm. This was when we first saw aggressive Prowess decks becoming truly dangerous.
Pro Tour Final Fantasy was a two-deck tournament, and while mono red won the day in the end, the fact that a card as niche as Magebane Lizard was main-deckable showed just how prominent Izzet had become.
Cori-Steel Cutter and another card that helps this aggro deck, Monstrous Rage, would soon find their way to the MTG banlist, but by then we had the free mana of Vivi Ornitier to contend with. Wizards has been playing Whac-a-mole with deadly red-blue decks, ever since, and it's never caught up.
Izzet Looting relied on discard-draw effects to filter through cards quickly and power up creatures, Avatar The Last Airbender brought in Lessons, which were easily discounted to provide super strong effects for practically no mana, and Lorwyn Eclipsed gave us the broken elemental of Sunderflock.
Now Strixhaven has coughed up a load more Izzet - sorry, Prismari - effects that players are still exploring with. Early reports are: they're strong.
It's clear that there's a problem here. What has gone wrong with Magic: The Gathering design that has led to Izzet becoming so consistently busted? It's a hard question to definitively answer, but I believe it has something to do with the increasing size of Standard.
Between the longer rotation and the number of Standard sets released annually going up from four to six/seven, there are far more cards available in the format than ever before, which means decks have many more options when selecting cards.
This seems to give Izzet a leg-up more than other archetype. Partly I think that's because Wizards doesn't have a ton of different ideas for what to do with this color pair. It seems to return to the 'spellslinging' well for blue/red extremely often, releasing an efficient creature that has prowess or cares about spells in the graveyard every set, which can then be plonked right into the top Izzet deck.
Partly it's to do with what the Izzet colors are traditionally best at. Blue provides constant draw and cheap bounce, while red provides burn damage, cheap removal for smaller threats, and aggressive creatures. Together, the color pair runs lots of very low-cost cards, and its spells often give fleeting bursts of resources: plenty of impulse draw, looting, and temporary mana.
With more Standard sets available, Izzet players have more cards to choose between that can provide these same sorts of effects, and they can therefore select the most efficient options, or the ones that provide synergy with other top cards. It's very hard for Wizards to make new versions of staple red/blue effects like Shock or Unsummon without pushing them too far. If a designer wants a card to be usable, but there's already a one-mana spell that does much the same thing, how do they make a new version stand out without breaking it?
Izzet decks also don't have to play expensive creatures or really commit to building the board. Their biggest threats are usually small one or two drops that have the potential to get large very quickly, but often temporarily. Casting a two mana black removal spell on a Slickshot Show-Off or an otter token sets you back on tempo and doesn't feel like a good trade, but ignore it and it may take you out on the spot. Meanwhile, for an Izzet player, casting a one mana bounce spell on a four drop or a two drop loaded with +1/+1 counters is a great rate.
The upshot of this is that Izzet decks have become extremely efficient and fast-paced, able to keep up a never-ending torrent of threats and answers and win the game before high-cost creatures are even castable. This has warped the entire format. If you can't win by turn four or five, you don't have much of a chance in a format where Izzet is this strong.
Why hasn't anything been done about the problem? Well, like I said, it's as though WotC hasn't tried to apply the banhammer. Some of the biggest problem cards for Izzet have gotten the chop, like Vivi Ornitier and Cori-Steel Cutter. The trouble is that Izzet has so many hyper-efficient spells to play with that you can't really defang the colors just by removing one or two problem cards.
Bans may help a little, but the only way Izzet will get significantly worse, unless Magic's release cadence or rotation changes, is if Wizards designs weaker or dramatically different cards for it. WotC plans MTG sets a long way in advance, so even if they saw the writing on the wall back in April 2025, it would still be a couple of years before we saw any effects of a conscious effort to tune things down.
And of course, it's very difficult for Wizards to design weak cards. They're incentivized not to, in fact. Strong cards help to sell packs, and weak cards create weak sets that everyone complains about. So, there are no guarantees that WotC will have taken drastic measures to course correct.
Next year, when Bloomburrow rotates out of Standard, things may get a little better. Saying goodbye to Stormchaser's Talent will be no bad thing. for starters. However, a quick check of the MTG release schedule reveals we've got several more sets coming out before then - so who knows what new threats will have emerged.
If you agree with me or are feeling more sanguine about Izzet than I, let me know over on the Wargamer Discord.