You know what guild’s passionate about analysis? The Izzet. As I’m not much of a U/R player and my Azorius Week contribution involved U/R, reviewing Izzet flavor on the theme week seems useful given that I’ll be flexing creative muscles down that road soon.

For this exercise, I’m discussing only the sixty-four cards with an Izzet watermark (counting the faux-Gruul Hypervolt Grasp). I’m selecting my favorite and least favorite bits of Izzet flavor over Guildpact and Return to Ravnica, using that opportunity to give you a sense of how I intend to write names and texts whenever that happens.

Firing up my Izzet playlist,¹ here goes.

Getting Steamed

Izzet Guildgate’s flavor text is a perfect example of recent Izzet nuance:

The Guildpact Izzet seem as though they don’t have enough attention span to sustain a creative vision. The Guildgate’s description makes the guild more believable: Blue is for knowledge, and red is for boldness. Even better, the flavor text explains every relevant part of the card. It’s clearly referring to the ability to make blue and red mana, and the attributes of vision and daring are listed in the order blue and red are listed on the card. The flavor text integrates with the rules text; it’s not memorable by itself, but it serves its card neatly. (For a recent example on a nonland, try Crippling Blight—Vish Kal’s explanation covers both the -1/-1 and the inability to block.)

That feels disproportionate—surely the Izzet are more academically diverse—but the main issue is that the guild’s led by Niv-Mizzet, who’s never shown using electricity, and the guild draws its best power from Steam Vents. Steam obviously can power electricity, but it’s far more versatile than that. Apart from Steamcore Weird, however, the Izzet don’t seem to use steam as steam; it’s only fuel. If it’s only for fuel, it seems that a Van Der Graaf generator is more the Izzet’s style, not steam. I guess if Ravnica lacks natural lightning, it makes more sense, but either way, Steam Vents feels as though it’s not as connected to its guild as it ought to be. I get that feeling from Hallowed Fountain sometimes, as the Azorius often show themselves to care more about laws than hallowing anything, but I get it most off Steam Vents. I would love to have seen more Izzet cards showing uses of steam instead of fire and lightning (not the Premium Deck), but such is not to be.

The Power of Flavor Is the Flavor of Power

This is as good a spot as any to give my take on flavor texts. To me, flavor texts are a lot like advertising copy: The best ones stick with you so well that you forget how few make the grade. Common flavor text pitfalls include:

• Vestigial words and phrases – Some texts have a whiff of catchiness about them but too many words obscuring the theme. Izzet Chronarch is a good example:

It isn’t terrible, but it’s easily improved. The problem is in the verb “ensures.” The clear idea is that the Chronarch has some control over repeated lightning—undoubtedly a core Izzet function. “Control” is a better verb than “ensure” here because it says more about what the Chronarch does. Consider this revision:

I cut five words and preserved the meaning. An entire clause—“not only whether but also”—could have its meaning encapsulated in the verb, and there was every reason to do so. Word choice goes a long way in flavor texts, whether that’s choosing memorable words or eliminating dead space, and Izzet Chronarch’s a good example of how it can matter.

• Eloquence Emanating Erroneous Erudition – by which I mean disguising a lack of content in some florid language because it sounds cool. Call it the Gladiator flaw: Take someone with a British accent, make everyone sound dramatically authoritative, and presto! You have a Roman historical epic. That works reasonably if you’re making a film to be consumed in a couple hours, but Magic on the whole is designed for replay value, which heightens the necessity for correctly executed details, such as believable world-building.

Drama and a sense of the epic are incredibly easy to manufacture. If you don’t believe me, watch here or here. Authenticity and internal consistency are much harder. Magic’s general themes and card artworks normally can convey the epic without flavor text piling it on. Because so many Izzet flavor texts are short (and because the long ones get to be fun, like Gelectrode and Wee Dragonauts), they lack egregious offenders. Leaving the set for a moment, Magic 2013’s Glorious Charge is a problem:

When I think of Ajani Goldmane, the first thing I think of is avoidance of personal pronouns. Don’t you? Well, you shouldn’t, because he uses them on Show of Valor and Silvercoat Lion within the set. The flavor text scores well on concision and clarity, but the random formality sends it downward. It sounds more warrior-like, but only in the way Russell Crowe sounded Roman. You might even run random flavor texts through my patented Gladiator test: If it only sounds right when you read it in an authoritative British accent, it’s more dramatic than believable.

• Mechanical Problems – Not every flavor text can describe mechanics properly—that’s more on game complexity than linguistic difficulty—but some texts seem out of place with their cards, usually due to a size mismatch. This normally is a problem on small creatures. It’s not part of the guild, but Ravnica’s Grayscaled Gharial is in the right colors and the wrong weight class for its text:

I like the feel and level of detail, but this is a 1/1 islandwalker. Slight evasion says it’s not killing people too often, and all those teeth should make it more powerful than, say, a Fugitive Wizard or a Seller of Songbirds. The Izzet score well here, largely because they aren’t flavored with RAWR. Nivix, Aerie of the Firemind probably shouldn’t reference “Niv-Mizzet’s genius” while being a terrible card, but that’s because I question Niv-Mizzet’s genius if that’s all he can come up with. It isn’t the flavor text’s fault.

To sum up, in my view, a good flavor text should be concise, credible, and correctly scaled. A magical world is extraordinary to us, but it’s relatively normal in a given plane. Some spells will still inspire awe, of course, but there are, for example, several Izzet Signets out and about in Ravnica. Nobody is amazed simply because it’s magical. Putting everything together, here are my top five Izzet flavor texts:

Blistercoil Weird

This does several things well. It could be a little tighter, but it’s designed to discuss the Azorius–Izzet conflict rather than be pithy. It describes something I can imagine the Azorius doing. Last, by using this card to talk about something else, the flavor text sidesteps the it’s-a-1/1 issue by world-building instead. That’s a great thing for texts on this class of creatures to be doing, so points all around.

Electrolyze

The mechanics are described perfectly, as the spell deals damage while drawing a card. You can see the teaching and learning in the spell; syncing flavor and rules texts is useful wherever possible. There’s also a symmetry to the concision; “from” is the middle word, and the balance makes it feel as though the Izzet value each half of the spell equally.

Mizzium Transreliquat

It’s a Johnny card, and the flavor text points to how open-ended it is. It’s believable language from a tinker, it wastes no words (and does a great job of showing a bigger picture through an implied conversation), and it indicates that the guild prioritizes creation over application. Everything’s a hit here.

Petrahydrox

Maybe it’s because I’m partial to the card, but this is an excellent example of how imagery should be employed. As an urban landscape, Ravnica gets to use a relatively unique group of nouns. We get streets and gravel and ponds (as opposed to large bodies of water), all things you could see in Ravnica but not as much in other planes. The sentence is also a fantastic description of the mechanic—Petrahydrox doesn’t cease to exist; it just hides when convenient. The text is imagistic, it describes something unusually magical, it uses plane-appropriate words, and it’s still plain English.

Wee Dragonauts

Yes, Juzba’s on my list twice. But Wee Dragonauts, for many the quintessential Izzet card, hits the flavor just right. Using wordiness as an advantage, the text namedrops several sciency words while talking about an invention that’s a “simple concept.” It’s impressively crazy, and it’s language that’s unique to the Izzet in all conceived Magic worlds. Taking advantage of those unique points is crucial to conveying a world, and Wee Dragonauts nails it.

Iz Good as It Zets

I want to see how the Izzet use steam other than for electricity, but the guild as a whole avoids common flavor pitfalls, keeping distinctive and flavorful. They were too one-dimensional before Return to Ravnica, but they make a lot of sense now. I hope this has given you a good sense of what flavor texts are supposed to accomplish, and I hope my take on it is something you’ll enjoy whenever I end up converting my views into words on cards.

¹ I have hour-long playlists for every color combination from zero to three colors based on color pie philosophy and how those ideas are expressed in music. My Izzet playlist is:

• “Le Nocturne de Lumiere” by BT
• “The Tower of Naphtali” by CJ Bolland
• “New Family” by Plaid
• “Tux and Damask” by Mouse on Mars
• “Polynomial-C” by Aphex Twin
• “Deep Arch” by Underworld
• “Dandelion” by Boards of Canada
• “A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain that Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld” by The Orb