How to Build an Izzet Lesson MTG Deck

A deck so dominant it won Magic: The Gathering World Championship 2025, Izzet Lessons is a spell-packed deck that revolves around Monument to Endurance activations that can be triggered three times per turn to gain additional cards, treasure tokens, or take three life from your opponent.

Despite this dependency on the artifact, the deck still has more than one way to win matchups, but the deck itself is pretty rigid and it's hard to make small adjustments to it without killing synergy.

List of Izzet lessons

This package contains four copies of just one creature, with the rest of the deck being instants, sorcerers, spells, and artifacts. While it's not technically the only creature you'll use, it can be daunting for inexperienced players to use a deck like Izzet Lessons.

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How this Izzet lesson pack works

Izzet Lessons is a mix of aggressive and control deck. However, it can often depend on the matchup you find yourself in how your overall strategy plays out.

Against control decks you want to be more patient to make sure you don't drop key cards into tokens, while against aggressive creature heavy decks you'll want to mana efficiently and effectively. get Monument to Endurance onto the battlefield as soon as possible while protecting yourself with creature damage spells.

Monument allows you to choose one of three actions when you discard a card: draw a card, create a treasure token, or let your opponent lose three life. Each action can only be activated once per turn, so in an ideal world you want to find a way to discard a card three times per turn.

This deck also has synergies around lessons, with several cards offering boosts based on it how many lesson cards you have in your graveyard.

Ideal starting hands

There is no perfect starting combination for Izzet lessons, but ideally you want to three lands, a copy of Gran-Gran, some card draw potential, and at least one enchantment.

That's enough to get the deck moving and building towards finding and playing your first Monument to Endurance. The ideal board state when playing your first monument is to have an upgraded copy of Artist's Talent, Gran-Gran, and a few spells in your hand.

That helps reduce the casting cost of Monument to Endurance while allowing you to discard a card every time you cast a spell thanks to Artist's Talent, while Gran-Gran provides an additional discard opportunity when tapped.

Changes you can make

Before dealing with the changes you can make to Izzet lessons, we need to point out one change first No it's worth doing at all, and that's part of it ground structure.

Trying to switch lands, either because you don't own copies of those in the decklist or trying to push for more lands that don't go in tapped, is not a good idea. We initially tried this because there were no placeholder cards to build a deck in MTG Arena, and we found no combinations have ever stacked up to what the deck list above provides.

Unfortunately, this deck doesn't handle small changes well unless you change the structure of the entire deckwhich means discarding Monument to Endurance and enchantment cards for creatures like Sunderflock, Eddymurk Crab, Dragonfly Swarm, and Tolarian Terror.

However, you'll find that these tweaks make the deck more of a brute force deck with creatures supported by spells, which is a big turnaround from the original structure. actually if you're fighting a deck in its original form, you're best looking at a completely different deck archetype.

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