How To Build An Izzet Lessons MTG Deck

A deck so dominant it won the Magic: The Gathering World Championship in 2025, Izzet Lessons is a spell-heavy deck that revolves around activations of Monument to Endurance, which can be triggered three times per turn for additional card draw, treasure tokens, or to take three life points from your opponent.

Despite this reliance on an artifact, the deck still has more than one way to win matches, but the deck itself is quite rigid and difficult to make minor tweaks to without killing the synergy.

Izzet Lessons Deck List

This deck contains four copies of just one creature, with the rest of the deck being instants, sorceries, enchantments, and artifacts. While that isn’t 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 Lessons Deck Works

Izzet Lessons is a mix of an aggressive and controlling deck. However, it can often depend on the match-up you find yourself in as to how your overall strategy plays out.

Against control decks, you want to be more patient to ensure you’re not casting key cards into counters, while against aggressive creature-heavy decks, you’ll want to ramp up your mana efficiently and get Monument to Endurance on the battlefield as soon as possible while protecting yourself with creature damage spells.

Monument allows you to pick one of three actions when you discard a card: draw a card, create a treasure token, or have the opponent lose three life points. 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 surrounding lessons, with multiple cards offering enhancements based on how many lesson cards you have in your graveyard.

Ideal Starting Hands

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

This is enough to get the deck moving and start building towards finding and playing your first Monument to Endurance. An ideal board state when you play your first Monument is to have an upgraded copy of Artist’s Talent, a Gran-Gran, and a few spells in your hand.

This helps reduce the cost of casting Monument to Endurance while also letting you discard a card each time you cast a spell, thanks to Artist’s Talent, while Gran-Gran provides another discard opportunity when tapped.

Changes You Can Make

Before addressing the issue with changes you can make to Izzet Lessons, we first need to point out one change not worth making at all, and that’s to the land structure.

Trying to swap out lands, be it because you don’t own copies of the ones in the deck list, or are trying to push for more lands that don’t enter tapped, isn’t a good idea. We initially tried it because there were no wildcards to build the deck on MTG Arena, and found that no combinations ever stacked up to what the deck list above provides.

Unfortunately, this deck doesn’t handle minor changes well unless you restructure the entire deck, which means dropping Monument to Endurance and the enchantment cards for creatures such as Sunderflock, Eddymurk Crab, Dragonfly Swarm, and Tolarian Terror.

However, you’ll find that these tweaks have the deck becoming more of a brute force deck with creatures supported by spells, which is a big U-turn from the original structure. In truth, if you’re struggling with the deck in its original form, you’re best looking toward another deck archetype entirely.

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