The MTG 2025 World Championship breakdown is out, and it contains a lot of surprises. Thankfully, no deck looks potentially banworthy or overly dominant at the moment, which is certainly refreshing. Even Badgermole Cub, a card that many players worried about before this event, doesn’t seem to have completely dominated the field, either.
The real story of this event is just how powerful MTG Avatar: The Last Airbender is in general. Multiple breakout uncommons from the set, as well as an entire deck focused on new Lesson mechanics from the set, showcase some insane powerhouses that have been slept on somewhat by the majority of players.
Boomerang Basics in 52% of Decks
The biggest outlier from the new Avatar set is surprisingly not the $65 mythic rare Badgermole Cub, but instead a $0.75 uncommon. Boomerang Basics appears in many of the top archetypes for this event, including Izzet Lessons, Temur Otters, Izzet Looting, and all of the bounce and Prowess decks registered at smaller numbers. Overall, 153 copies of the card, all in the main deck, are present in the World Championships.
Boomerang Basics is best known for its incredible synergy with Stormchaser’s Talent, which appears to be taking a core role in the World Championship metagame. Getting an additional 1/1 with Prowess for two mana is a steal, not to mention the extra card draw. You can even recycle Stormchaser Talent’s Level Up effects later in the game, making your card advantage go further. Similar to Nurturing Pixie and Fear of Isolation‘s role in Bounce strategies, Boomerang Basics is also capable of recycling removal spells like Nowhere to Run to get additional value.
Of course, in a pinch, you can also use Boomerang Basics as a sorcery-speed Tempo play to slow down your opponent, or create a favorable board state to push tons of damage. This isn’t the ideal use of the card in most decks, but the top archetype, in particular, has massive synergy with this card that makes even this mode powerful.
The Unexpected Rise of Izzet Lessons
For this particular event, and perhaps for the future of Standard as a whole, Boomerang Basics being a Lesson is extremely important. An entire strategy built around a parasitic set-based mechanic is extremely uncommon to see at any competitive event, let alone the World Championships. This makes the appearance of the new Izzet Lessons deck particularly remarkable.
Even more bizarre is Izzet Lessons’ focus on more underrated MTG Avatar uncommons. Gran-Gran and Accumulate Wisdom, alongside Boomerang Basics, are the stars of the show in this archetype. In Accumulate Wisdom’s case, drawing three cards for two mana is an absolutely absurd rate, and the strength of Lessons in MTG Avatar makes this card surprisingly easy to turn on. Since Accumulate Wisdom just adds cards to your hand, you can’t counter this with draw hate, either.
Gran-Gran acts as a turbo button for the archetype, speeding up your spellcasting and the rate at which Accumulate Wisdom gets turned into Ancestral Recall. Thanks to Rummaging whenever Gran-Gran attacks, it becomes extremely easy to dump all of your Lessons into the graveyard. The entire deck is built around turning on Accumulated Wisdom, as well, which means Gran-Gran will act as a spell reducer more often than not. Some players are even referencing Gran-Gran as a Standard-legal Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer.
Finally, while Iroh’s Demonstration doesn’t play a big role in the new Izzet Lessons deck, the card is showing up at the World Championships in big numbers. With 62 maindeck copies and 35 sideboard copies registered, this is the third-most played MTG Avatar card at the event, which is highly unexpected.
Surprisingly, Gran-Gran, Accumulate Wisdom, and Iroh’s Demonstration are even cheaper than Boomerang Basics. At the time of writing, these cards have a secondary market value of $0.15, $0.57, and $0.15, respectively. Of course, the multiple other Lessons that appear in this deck, like Firebending Lesson and Combustion Technique, could also see some serious interest as a result of this archetype appearing so strongly at the World Championships.
These Cards Could Get Expensive
While it’s impossible to tell the future, past precedent suggests that Boomerang Basics, in particular, could see a significant price spike thanks to its massive appearance at the World Championships. Stock Up and Into the Flood Maw are two other Standard legal blue uncommons that have pretty big price tags, going for $6.89 and $5.40, respectively.
That said, these cards see a lot of multiformat play, which adds to their demand. Boomerang Basics is seeing decent Pioneer play and some fringe Legacy and Modern play, but it’s certainly not at the level of these other two multiformat juggernauts. After this weekend, this may change.
Boomerang Basics is now in the limelight, taking the lead at the 2025 MTG World Championships. Everyone will be aware of just how powerful this card is at the weekend’s end, which could inspire players to try Boomerang Basics all across Magic’s different formats.
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