Reid Duke won Pro Tour Philadelphia this weekend with our team deck – Izzet Creativity. Today, I want to share with you how to play the deck, what some of the most important interactions are, plays you should know and how to sideboard against all the popular decks in the format.
We arrived at our testing house in Philadelphia a week before the Pro Tour, with Mike Sigrist (Siggy) being the only person pretty much locked on Creativity, as he was the one who did most of the tuning and tested the important matchups early on.
It didn’t take much time for others to slowly get on the Creativity train as well, as we found out that the deck didn’t really have any horrible matchups.
What sold me on the deck was that I previously liked Izzet Phoenix and this deck did pretty much the same thing but 10 times better. With Phoenix, you spend the early turns defending yourself with cheap removal and setting up with some card draw spells and eventually get a couple of Phoenixes into play around turn four or five. This deck does exactly the same, but then it just wins instead… without having to worry about graveyard hate cards.
We felt like we had good sideboard plans and our team even recorded over 600 games (!) in our testing spreadsheet with the deck. Data from a large sample size usually doesn’t lie and it seemed like the deck was very well positioned.
In the end, even Reid, who seemed to have been leaning towards the Lotus Field combo deck and still had it sleeved and ready to go a few hours before the end of deck submission, joined us and played Creativity as well. It paid off big time.
Pioneer Izzet Creativity by Reid Duke
Sorcery (4)
Instant (25)
Land (24)
Something our team did particularly well for this event was predicting the metagame perfectly. Getting the metagame numbers right certainly helped us a ton when deciding on a deck and which sideboard cards to prioritize. Here is the metagame share for each deck that we predicted vs what actually showed up at the PT:
https://twitter.com/MartinJuza/status/1628796341622042625