For a long time, my favorite card was Necravolver.

But that has nothing to do with today’s article. A year or so ago, I decided my favorite-card position needed revision, and the best candidate was Future Sight. I love playing with it, it’s very powerful, and somehow, it’s still not very popular, meaning my Johnny/hipster Magic instincts allow me to like it still. Another card I quite like, as you may know, is Pyromancer Ascension.

I am also a fan of instants and sorcery spells, and while Izzet is no Simic in terms of guild awesomeness, they’re right up there. When I saw Melek, Izzet Paragon, I knew I was looking at a legendary creature that I wanted to become a commander.

The amazing thing about Future Sight (and its successor Magus of the Future) is that you can play the top card of your library—whatever it may be. The more popular top-of-library-playing card Oracle of Mul Daya is extremely powerful as well, though it only allows you to play land cards off the top. And Garruk's Horde, another piece of the extremely loose Future cycle, allows you to play creatures off the top. The problem with the Oracle and the Horde is that when you hit a card you can’t play, you’re stuck, presumably until your next draw step, when you shake that stickler loose and try to play a steady stream of library cards again, all while keeping a full grip. Future Sight just lets you keep going and going. (Well, I guess hitting that second land is a bit of a disappointment.)

Melek has the same problem as the Oracle and the Horde. Once you run into that land, creature, artifact, enchantment, or planeswalker card, the fun stops. And that’s especially disappointing with Melek, as instants and sorceries on the top of the library are doubled. Oh yeah. That’s a little deviation from the Future Sight formula by the way.

One technique could solve both our problems. If only we could control the top card of our library, we could ensure a steady stream of spells in addition to a steady stream of spell-doubling. Unfortunately, that’s not quite as easy as we might have hoped. Brainstorm and Jace, the Mind Sculptor both do relatively good jobs, but they’re unique, and Jace can only be activated once per turn, while Brainstorm is a one-shot.

Mystical Tutor is nice, and if we cast it from the top of our library with Melek, we can have the copy fetch an instant, and then we can cast that instant from the top of our library, double it, and then finally resolve the initial Mystical Tutor and enjoy another instant or sorcery. Personal Tutor can do the job okay, but its not being able to find an instant messes up our trick.

Scroll Rack is one of Melek’s best friends. This is the single card that helps him out the most. By setting aside a group of instants and/or sorceries from our hand, replacing them with cards from the top of the library, and then putting the set-aside instants and/or sorceries on top of the library in an order we choose, we are able to cast a good string of spells with the double factor activated—and if any of them happened to untap the Scroll Rack, we can repeat the process with whatever spells we just drew from it. Sensei's Divining Top also plays well with the top of the library, and this could end up being the first Commander deck I decide to actually run the Top in.

Ancestral Knowledge sorts the top of the deck however we want it as well, and since we can probably go through those seven or fewer spells much more quickly than the expected seven turns, we won’t have to worry much about the cumulative upkeep. In fact, we can just choose when to sac the enchantment based on when we no longer like our top card.

Mana Severance is also a nice little trick—removing all the land cards from our library will definitely prevent Melek’s humming engines from stalling out due to one pesky mana producer. Just make sure you have enough lands on the battlefield first!

But all of this is just leading up to the real gem I have to share today. I was searching desperately for a way to put cards on top of my library, and honestly, Leashling just didn’t do it for me. If only it said, “Leashling gets +1/+1 until end of turn,” or even, “Leashling gains defender until end of turn,” I’d be happy, but instead, it makes me, “Return Leashling to its owner’s hand.” And 6 mana is just too much to repeat the effect. Sure, it still works well with instants, but I don’t want to be restricted like that, and even with a Leyline of Anticipation, having a huge stack of built-up Leashling triggers would be annoying.

However, consider Catalog. We draw two cards and then discard a card: the one we want to subsequently cast and then double with Melek. But what if we want to put more than just one card on top of the library (a.k.a. the doubling queue)?

With Library of Leng and Trinket Mage or Fabricate to find it, we can go a little deep on discarding cards in hopes of setting up awesome turns of instants and sorceries. Magus of the Bazaar will dig us a little deeper in the deck and then let us set up our next several doubled spells from our hand. The other exciting possibilities are Laquatus's Creativity and Breakthrough.

Breakthrough we can cast for just in order to draw four cards and then dump our whole hand. The cards we don’t want end up in the bin, and the cards we do want we can put into our doubling queue in the order we choose—as long as they’re all instants and sorceries. And if there’s a card or two we know we want to keep, we can always pay , , or more.

As you may have been able to tell, my idea here is that we’ll be casting a lot of spells in a single turn. That means we’ll want things like Seething Song, Snap, Turnabout, and the made-for-Commander rituals Inner Fire and Mana Geyser. Also, the strange Energy Tap can do some work here, comboing quite nicely with Melek, Izzet Paragon to generate 12 colorless mana. Now that’s a Dark Ritual!

So, after all this spellcasting, I suppose we’ll also need a win condition. Assuming we were able to put together a nice string of spells, a storm spell could work quite nicely, but as I mentioned with regard to Mind Over Matter, that just seems too easy. (Though Mind's Desire is pretty awesome and lets us keep casting spells instead of winning!) Instead, I’ve included Inexorable Tide and Tezzeret's Gambit along with several planeswalkers to shoot for a few ultimates. The new Ral Zarek could give us a few extra turns—especially with the coin-flipping subtheme it would seem criminal not to include in an Izzet deck like this one. Stitch in Time and Squee's Revenge can be quite useful, and Krark's Thumb will help us pull off that ultra-exciting Fiery Gambit for multiple untaps and a ton of mana for continued spellcasting.

But eventually, people will want to slit their card sleeves and hang their deck boxes, so to reward us for all of our spells and to eventually end the game, Guttersnipe, Talrand, Sky Summoner, and Sphinx-Bone Wand will be around to handle the cleanup.

There are some more goodies tucked away in the decklist below, but with so many sweet singletons, there just isn’t enough time to talk about them all. I guess that’s what extra turns are for. If you’ve always wanted to discard to the top of your library for value—or just double up on an Epic Experiment—this just may be the deck for you.

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com

"Izzet Library"

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (7)
• 1 Djinn Illuminatus
• 1 Enclave Cryptologist
• 1 Guttersnipe
• 1 Magus of the Bazaar
• 1 Survivor of the Unseen
• 1 Trinket Mage
• 1 Talrand, Sky Summoner

• Planeswalkers (3)
• 1 Chandra Ablaze
• 1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
• 1 Ral Zarek

• Spells (55)
• 1 Brainstorm
• 1 Catalog
• 1 Desperate Ritual
• 1 Frantic Search
• 1 Fire // Ice
• 1 Glamerdye
• 1 High Tide
• 1 Mystical Tutor
• 1 Pyretic Ritual
• 1 Radiate
• 1 Reality Spasm
• 1 Seething Song
• 1 Snap
• 1 Steady Progress
• 1 Thirst for Knowledge
• 1 Thoughtflare
• 1 Turnabout
• 1 Twitch
• 1 Breakthrough
• 1 Compulsive Research
• 1 Energy Tap
• 1 Epic Experiment
• 1 Fabricate
• 1 Faithless Looting
• 1 Fiery Gambit
• 1 Ghastly Discovery
• 1 Inner Fire
• 1 Laquatus's Creativity
• 1 Mana Geyser
• 1 Mana Severance
• 1 Mind's Desire
• 1 Mystic Retrieval
• 1 Omen
• 1 Ponder
• 1 Preordain
• 1 Seismic Spike
• 1 Serum Visions
• 1 Sleight of Hand
• 1 Squee's Revenge
• 1 Stitch in Time
• 1 Tezzeret's Gambit
• 1 Time Spiral
• 1 Ancestral Knowledge
• 1 Arcane Melee
• 1 Inexorable Tide
• 1 Druidic Satchel
• 1 Everflowing Chalice
• 1 Gemstone Array
• 1 Gilded Lotus
• 1 Isochron Scepter
• 1 Library of Leng
• 1 Scroll Rack
• 1 Sensei's Divining Top
• 1 Sphinx-Bone Wand
• 1 Krark's Thumb

• Lands (34)
• 15 Island
• 15 Mountain
• 1 Steam Vents
• 1 Sulfur Falls
• 1 Vivid Crag
• 1 Vivid Creek

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