It’s rare that a new meta deck explodes as violently onto the scene as Izzet Lessons has in the MTG World Championships this year. Despite two bannings of Izzet strategies in recent Standard, yet another deck utilizing the color combination has risen to the top again. Interestingly, this time, it’s due to a bunch of new cards from MTG’s Avatar: The Last Airbender coming together and absolutely breaking one innocuous uncommon.
It was made pretty clear to players drafting the Avatar set that Accumulate Wisdom was one of the most broken payoffs that you could chase. It was so broken that, after trying it in Standard, the card consistently turned into Ancestrall Recall, a Power Nine Vintage staple.
Accumulate Wisdom MTG
Accumulate Wisdom is, essentially, an Anticipate-style effect that heavily rewards you for playing a Lesson-focused strategy. Looking at the top three for one card is rather underpowered in any competitive format nowadays, but drawing three cards for two mana is absolutely absurd. In fact, in the breakout Izzet Lessons deck, Accumulate Wisdom commonly costs even less.
Gran-Gran, the face card of the strategy, both accelerates the rate at which you fulfill Accumulate Wisdom’s condition and makes it cheaper to cast. Thanks to Looting whenever tapped, Gran-Gran can dump your Lessons into your graveyard. Better yet, when you have three Lessons, Gran-Gran reduces the cost of all noncreature spells you cast by one.
This makes Accumulate Wisdom a literal Ancestral Recall effect legal for players to use in Standard. Team TCGplayer’s build of the deck utilizing Artist’s Talent and Monument to Endurance pushes things even further, both enabling a ton of discards and rewarding the user for doing so. This makes it extremely easy to turn on Accumulate Wisdom, and very difficult to stop.
At the time of writing, four Izzet Lessons decks are queued up to play Top 8 Sunday at Worlds, but we don’t know who the winner will be yet. That said, it’s clear that Izzet Lessons is the breakout deck of the weekend and the clear frontrunner in the format coming out of the World Championships.
The Spike
Accumulate Wisdom hasn’t even been available for players to buy for very long, which makes this price chart rather strange-looking. Like most MTG cards nowadays, Accumulate Wisdom first had to come down from some serious preorder price inflation before finding its true price point upon release. After dropping to 40 cents, Accumulate Wisdom quickly climbed above even its previous preorder prices this weekend. After just a few days, Accumulate Wisdom’s near mint variant climbed from a market average of $0.40 to $2.49, representing a 522.5% price spike.
Despite Accumulate Wisdom’s massive price increase, demand for the card has remained steady since its launch. While Izzet Lessons has exploded in popularity as a result of the World Championships, this deck has been putting up consistent results since Avatar: The Last Airbender became Standard legal. Due to this, a staggering 5636 near-mint copies of the card have been sold on TCGplayer since it was released a few weeks ago.
For savings-savvy players, there are some copies of Accumulate Wisdom available on the cheap, but they’re vanishing quickly. A few lightly played and moderately played copies of the card can be found for around $1, excluding shipping, but these appear to be outliers from available listings. Similarly, some near mint foil copies of Accumulate Wisdom are slightly cheaper, but as many players know, foils aren’t preferred for competitive play because of how easily they can become marked cards.
The Future
As a featured card of the breakout World Championship deck, Accumulate Wisdom’s short-term future seems incredible. This will be the deck to beat in Standard for the coming weeks, sending players scrambling to build the Izzet Lessons deck for the current Regional Championship Qualifier season. This should create significant demand for the already popular Accumulate Wisdom.
All of that said, I personally think this deck isn’t going to hold the metagame hostage like past variants of Izzet. This was an excellent choice for the World Championships, but the Monument variant of Izzet Lessons is not only easy to adjust towards, but it has some bad matchups that didn’t show up heavily in the tournament. This deck got a lot of mileage out of players not packing a ton of enchantment and artifact hate, which will certainly change after Worlds. Otherwise, Lessons’s expected meta share will make the deck’s bad matchups a lot more popular.
Sultai Reanimator, in particular, is extremely difficult for Izzet Lessons to beat, which will likely cause the deck to take a big metagame share post Worlds. Otherwise, various Insidious Roots builds, which are starting to become popular online, have a very good matchup against all the Izzet-colored MTG Standard decks. If Izzet cannot adapt to these matchups, it could reduce the deck’s dominance somewhat.
For now, though, Accumulate Wisdom has successfully broken Standard, allowing players to play something that feels like it’s right out of Legacy. If these decks prove consistent enough at pulling off their conditional Ancestral Recall through targeted hate, we’ll likely have another banworthy problem on our hands.
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