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A deck of ice and fire

Commander / EDH* UR (Izzet)

Odyssey

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Instant (26)

Artifact (8)

Land (35)

Creature (11)

Commander (1)

Commander: Aegar, the Freezing Flame

Sorcery (15)

Enchantment (4)

Maybeboard

Creature (6)

Instant (6)

Sorcery (3)

What is this deck?

It's not giant tribal, that's for sure. Nor is it wizard tribal or red board wipe tribal or any other gimmick. It's a good old fashioned Izzet spellslinger deck that seeks to draw a lot of cards, zap monsters, counter some spells, and kill the table with a combo win condition. I'm aiming for a 7/10 on the power level scale, but you can tweak this build to make it anywhere from a 5 to an 8.

> "OK, so why Aegar, the Freezing Flame? Aren't you just doing what Izzet decks can already do?"

Fair question. This deck actually was actually inspired by a previous UR deck of mine, Jori En ∞, with Jori En, Ruin Diver at the helm.

As a combo-control deck, it had a similar plan. However, it was very blue heavy and would sometimes struggle against all the creature damage that would accumulate. There were also situations where you wouldn't want to cast a second spell in a turn (playing counterspells often encourages this), meaning Jori En was occasionally unimpressive. Finally, the deck could sometimes spin its wheels playing solitaire and digging for combo pieces. This wasn't terribly fun and it let the rest of the table progress their gameplans unimpeded.

This deck solves a few of the problems with the Jori En build. First, Aegar, the Freezing Flame turns all your removal spells into cantrips, provided you deal "overkill damage". As will be shown below, this is easier than you might assume. Killing enemy creatures while getting a free cantrip is a good way to slow down your opponents while you build towards a combo win condition. You still play a decent suite of counterspells, of course. But this blue deck can afford to be a bit less blue than many combo-control decks out there.

Why play this deck?

  • You like combos.
  • You think your opponents shouldn't be allowed to have creatures.
  • You like light control decks.
  • You miss a bygone era of Magic when spells were flashy and numerous.
  • When you Ponder you ask out loud, "So how does a flame actually freeze?

Why NOT play this deck?

  • You feel naked without multiple creatures on your side of the board.
  • You prefer games or decks without combos.
  • You want to play a long grindy game that's ultimately decided by ordinary creature combat.
  • You want a low budget EDH deck (note: cuts & replacements for budget reasons are suggested at the end).

Let's play Roast in EDH

Leave the staples at the office.

So we're going to kill creatures and draw cards, right? Might as well load up on red board wipes then! Right? Wrong. Sure, you could do that. It would probably work at more casual tables (5/10 power level or so). But there are a few problems.

First, most board wipes will kill Aegar, the Freezing Flame. Then you have to spend next turn re-casting him. Cast two board wipes "for value" and now you have a 7 mana commander that just draws you extra cards when you blow stuff up. Except if you pay 7 mana for your commander you're using all your mana to re-play him instead of sinking that mana into all the cards you drew.

OK, you say, maybe I only need to board wipe once to get sufficient value out of Aegar. Maybe so. But if you tap out to blow up a bunch of creatures you'll often find yourself with a dozen cards in hand and no board presence. Enjoy discarding down to seven and starting fresh. You may have felt good about your big turn, but you're hardly progressing your gameplan by doing this. You could play underwhelming cards like Reliquary Tower or Thought Vessel that sadly show up too often in EDH decks, but you'd have to play enough of those effects to reliably draw one before your big wipe. And then your deck contains a bunch of underwhelming, redundant cards that are only relevant in a special situation.

Finally, the board wipe plan assumes that your board wipe resolves in the first place. If it doesn't, your card draw engine is offline until you draw your next board wipe. How many do you plan to play? Five? Ten? Fifteen? Enjoy discovering that board wipes offer diminishing returns in EDH even when they resolve. Maybe you get the numbers just right and you never draw too many or too few. You always somehow draw your board wipe on time. Only to discover that players routinely play cards like Selfless Spirit, Boros Charm, Heroic Intervention, Flawless Maneuver, and Golgari Charm. And your board wipe is either useless or you get blown out. Or you have to wait until you have enough mana for spot removal + boardwipe or boardwipe + counterspell. I don't want to wait until turn 7 to get value out of my 3-drop commander.

A far more reliable plan is to just accept that Aegar turns all your spot removal spells into potential cantrips. Spot removal is sometimes considered a necessary evil since, in multiplayer, casting it leaves you relatively "down a card" with respect to several opponents. But with Aegar, that's no longer the case. Want to bolt their bird on turn 6? Go for it, it will only cost . The card is free.

Of course, some board wipes are still advisable. Certain decks can spew out creatures faster than any amount of spot removal can handle. But this deck plays an ordinary amount of board wipes--nothing crazy.

Let's look at some numbers. As of January 2021, the top 60 most commonly played creatures in EDH have the following toughness values:

  • 1 toughness: 24
  • 2 toughness: 12
  • 3 toughness: 7
  • 4 toughness: 7
  • 5 toughness: 5
  • 6 toughness: 3
  • 6+ toughness: 0

Additionally, one has variable toughness that is no greater than 4 while another has variable toughness because it copies another creature. So ignoring those two special cases and looking at only the 58 most common creatures in EDH, we can answer the question "How likely is a removal spell dealing X damage to have a viable overkill target among the 58 most common creatures?".

  • 2 damage: 24/58 (41%)
  • 3 damage: 36/58 (62%)
  • 4 damage: 43/58 (74%)
  • 5 damage: 50/58 (86%)
  • 6 damage: 55/58 (94%)

So if we consider only a single opponent who randomly selects an EDH deck from the whole metagame, randomly draws a keepable hand, then plays out a random creature from that deck, we can say that Squash will kill that creature and draw a card 94% of the time. Lightning Bolt will kill it and draw a card 62% of the time. And since only five of the top 58 creatures had flying, Roast will kill it and draw a card 78% (45/58) of the time.

If we repeat the same analysis above but just focus on the top 21 commanders (as of January 2021), here's what we get in terms of toughness. I'd prefer to use a larger sample size, but this is what EDHREC gives.

  • 1 toughness: 1
  • 2 toughness: 2
  • 3 toughness: 4
  • 4 toughness: 8
  • 5 toughness: 3
  • 6 toughness: 2
  • 6+ toughness: 1

So overall commanders are a bit tougher than the 99. Here's the "probability of overkill" just for the top 21 commanders.

  • 2 damage: 1/21 (5%)
  • 3 damage: 3/21 (15%)
  • 4 damage: 7/21 (33%)
  • 5 damage: 15/21 (71%)
  • 6 damage: 18/21 (86%)

There are a limited number of damage-based removal spells that can deal 5 damage, so it's still worthwhile to have some harder removal in the deck like Reality Shift and Blasphemous Act. However, if you ignore the overkill "bonus" that Aegar, the Freezing Flame gives you still get the following odds of being able to kill a meta commander.

Odds of killing an enemy "meta" commander:

  • 2 damage: 3/21 (15%)
  • 3 damage: 7/21 (33%)
  • 4 damage: 15/21 (71%)
  • 5 damage: 18/21 (86%)
  • 6 damage: 20/21 (95%)

The lesson from all the above is that doing three damage will allow you to overkill almost 2/3 of the creatures in a typical 99. Doing four damage will let you overkill 3/4 of them. This may seem surprising, since EDH is supposed to be the format of battlecruiser slugfests between giant monsters. Maybe EDH was that format at one point, but it is not so today. The tough, flashy creatures are often the commanders themselves, while the 99 is filled out with utility creatures and roleplayers that, as a whole, are more vulnerable to damage-based removal.

All of the above numbers are only for a single opponent. When you account for the multiplayer nature of EDH, the odds of being able to overkill a creature with a red removal spell increase dramatically. This means you don't need to bother with crazy spells like Star of Extinction or expensive removal like Volcanic Offering to get plenty of value out of Aegar, the Freezing Flame.

Win Conditions

Two independent infinite combos form this deck's plan A. Neither require the use of your graveyard. One is cheap and similar to Splinter Twin, while the other is expensive and circumvents the battlefield entirely. Non-combo winconditions exist but are plan B.

Dualcaster Mage + Twinflame produces as many copies of Dualcaster Mage as you like, each with haste. You must cast Twinflame first, hold priority, and only then cast Dualcaster Mage. When the Mage resolves, use its ETB to copy the Twinflame that's still on the stack. That copy makes another Dualcaster Mage, which copies Twinflame again...you get the idea. You can stop the combo because Twinflame lets you choose "any number" of creatures you control and 0 is a valid choice.

However, you must target a creature you control with Twinflame. This is a significant downside in a deck with few creatures and you might wonder why I'm not playing Heat Shimmer instead of, or in addition to, Twinflame. Since that's really two separate questions, I'll give two separate answers.

Q: Why not play Heat Shimmer instead of Twinflame?

A: Three reasons.

  1. It's more expensive
  2. It's slightly harder to tutor
  3. The ability to use Heat Shimmer on an opponent's creature as a non-combo line is minimally useful in a deck that doesn't do any real combat damage until the late game.

The fact that Heat Shimmer is only one mana more expensive than Twinflame may seem insignificant. It's a 5 mana combo vs a 6 mana combo. But this is also a 35 land deck. You'll sometimes need to go for the combo with counterspell backup, so saving a single mana may be quite significant. If you have this combo in your opener, it's nice to have the option to combo early. And you may not hit 6 straight land drops or 5 + a mana rock with a combo heavy opener. Some slots that might otherwise be card draw will be taken up by the combo pieces.

Spellseeker and Muddle the Mixture both find Twinflame but not Heat Shimmer. This also relates to point #1 above: if you have to tutor for Twinflame the same turn you combo, you want it to be cheaper.

Heat Shimmer does have utility when used on opposing creatures, especially since there are several ways to recur spells in this deck. You might get a sweet ETB trigger or a big attack with a copied fatty. The ETB trigger part is entirely up to your playgroup/meta, but generally I don't want to play a card because my opponent might have a creature with a useful ETB for me. The part where you can maybe copy a big creature and attack with it once doesn't matter if your plan A is to win with infinite damage.

Q: Why not play Heat Shimmer in addition to Twinflame?

A: Two reasons:

  1. Both are bad cards individually
  2. Adding Heat Shimmer is not the kind of redundancy that this deck is most interested in

Both Heat Shimmer and Twinflame are cards that you don't cast "for value". They are win conditions first and foremost and you only fire one off in other circumstances if you need to do it to survive. Dualcaster Mage, on the other hand, is a good card. It does lots of useful things for a good rate, and does them at instant speed. If there was a second card like Dualcaster Mage I would play that. Then and only then would I consider adding Heat Shimmer, since I would be more likely to find a Dualcaster Mage effect I'd want to also increase my odds of finding an effect that can copy him.

As for redundancy, it's definitely good, especially in combo decks. However in EDH the concept is widely misunderstood. You don't need 8 copies of an effect if you want to reliably find it. You need one copy that you can reliably find. Sometimes you don't even need card redundancy. What's more valuable in many cases is strategic redundancy--a seamless trainsition into a reliable Plan B in the event Plan A falls apart. This deck achieves card redundancy through a mix of tutors and card velocity. It achieves strategic redundancy through independent combos that benefit from the same supporting card clusters and several non-combo win conditions if both combos aren't viable.

So, with that explanation out of the way, the downside of Twinflame compared to Heat Shimmer still has to be respected. Sometimes your creatures will die and you'll have to cast a 5 mana Aegar and hope to survive until next turn to combo. But if you include the token-making potential of this deck, you should be able to stick a single creature for this combo most of the time.

It's probably not surprising that an Izzet deck can win a game of EDH with infinite mana. But in true Izzet style, this combo is a bit wacky because it's technically a three card combo but in practice it's more like a one card combo.

The actual combo is Reset + Reiterate + any infinite mana payoff. On an opponent's turn, you cast Reset, hold priority, and then cast Reiterate with buyback targeting Reset. Reiterate will come back to your hand as a copy of Reset is created. 8 mana to start it off, but only 6 mana to keep it going since you only need to cast Reset the initial time and after that you're only casting a 6 mana Reiterate. You need at least 7 lands or you won't net any mana, however.

Cool, so you have infinite mana and Reiterate in hand. What do you do now? What's the payoff? Well, here's a short list of cards that can finish the job:

  1. Lightning Bolt: infinite copies of it gives infinite direct damage
  2. Treasure Cruise: draw your deck
  3. Reality Shift: mill all opponents with at least one creature on the battlefield
  4. Azcanta, the Sunken Ruin: draw all your noncreature spells with copied Resets
  5. Expansion / Explosion/Fall of the Titans: just kill them
  6. Talrand, Sky Summoner/Metallurgic Summonings: infinite token army on their end step
  7. Archaeomancer + Twinflame: infinite 1/2s with haste.
  8. Swan Song. Yes, indulge your inner blue mage and make a counterspell your wincon. After making infinite blue mana, copy Reset as much as you want then cast Swan Song, copying it the same number of times, each targeting one copy of Reset. Enjoy your new swan army.
  9. Izzet Charm/Desolate Lighthouse + 1 card in hand: loot until you find any other win condition
  10. Spellseeker, Merchant Scroll, or any tutor capable of fetching one of the above win conditions is also a payoff card.
  11. Any cantrip or draw spell like Serum Visions or Glimpse the Cosmos can draw your deck and find a win condition of your choice.
  12. If you have a token maker (Talrand, Sky Summoner, Metallurgic Summonings) on board you can bounce Archaeomancer with Ghostly Flicker to create infinite 2/2 drakes or 3/3 constructs.

Even Snapcaster Mage or Mission Briefing serve as payoff cards if you have one of the above instants in your graveyard (though Expansion / Explosion doesn't work with flashback). It's very easy to find a payoff once you have the core combo assembled.

The reason this is often effectively a one card combo is because of Firemind's Foresight. It fetches Reset and Reiterate plus Lightning Bolt or Fall of the Titans. And it does so at instant speed so that you can untap and kill the table.

You can also make infinite mana with Dualcaster Mage and Ghostly Flicker. Just cast Ghostly Flicker targeting two lands, then cast Dualcaster Mage. When Dualcaster Mage ETBs, copy Ghostly Flicker and have the copy target Dualcaster Mage and a land that enters untapped. Float a mana with that land in response. Then resolve the copied Ghostly Flicker. Your land and Dualcaster Enter again for you to repeat the loop. In the process you've netted one mana.

If you go the Dualcaster Mage + Ghostly Flicker route, you'll need to have an infinite mana payoff available. If you have a way to draw a card and you have Temple of Epiphany on the board, you can first make infinite mana then scry to your chosen win condition. Then use your draw spell/permanent to get it from the top of your library. You can also use Desolate Lighthouse to dig to a win condition if you start this combo with an extra card in hand.

Seriously, this deck can do it. It won't happen often, but Talrand, Sky Summoner and Metallurgic Summonings can create an army quite quickly. Some of the Construct tokens from Metallurgic Summonings can be 8/8 or 7/7. Awoken Horror damage can also stack up quite quickly. You can even Giant's Grasp an opponent's fatty and beat them with it.

Having Future Sight on the field helps with either token plan since it helps ensure a reliable stream of spells. With all the shuffle, scry, and surveil effects in this deck, combined with a low average CMC, you can see a lot of cards if you untap with Future Sight in play.

If you can make infinite mana with Reset and Reiterate you can use the infinite mana to infinitely Ghostly Flicker Archaeomancer, producing infinite 3/3s with Metallurgic Summonings or 2/2s with Talrand.

If you find yourself in a long grindy game with both combos exiled, you can always go for a large burn spell. You may be able to burn out one or more players. Imagine you have 8 lands, two mana rocks, Reset, Expansion / Explosion, and Fall of the Titans in hand. With your mana sources, Reset, and a copy of reset produced by Expansion / Explosion you can net 22 mana. You can then surge Fall of the Titans for X = 21, which can be enough to kill two players who have accumulated some incremental damage throughout the game. This can happen as early as turn 8.

Alternatively, if you can make infinite mana with Reset and Reiterate, you can just use any X burn spell to burn out your opponents (Reiterate will be able to copy the burn spell multiple times). This also means that Reset + Reiterate + Merchant Scroll/Mystical Tutor is a win since either tutor can find Expansion / Explosion.

Jace, Telepath Unbound's ultimate can technically mill your opponents out. This is only really practical if you are looping Ghostly Flicker with Archaeomancer and infinite mana.

Tutors

It's a tuned combo deck, so tutors play an important role.

In a deck with as much draw power as this one, Long-Term Plans doesn't require as much patience as usual. If you know you'll have the mana for a combo on a particular turn but are lacking a piece, just tutor for it, tuck it under two cards, then draw it (frequently on the next turn, given extra draws). It also works nicely with Future Sight since you can often dig to the card you tutored on the same turn.

Mystical Tutor finds one combo (via Firemind's Foresight) or its pieces, Reset and Reiterate, and half of the other (Twinflame). With multiple draw options, including instant-speed ones, in the deck, you can often turn a topdecked Mystical Tutor into the card you want on the same turn cycle. Here are some example uses of Mystical Tutor besides the combos already mentioned.

Merchant Scroll is the most restrictive tutor, but it has surprising flexibility. It can tutor a combo piece (Reset), many counterspells, a board clear (Cyclonic Rift), bounce/flicker spells (Unsubstantiate, Ghostly Flicker), creature removal (Izzet Charm, Suffocating Blast, Reality Shift), a land (Silundi Vision  ), recursion (Mission Briefing), and of course other tutors like Mystical Tutor, Muddle the Mixture, and Firemind's Foresight.

If you take a look at the mana curve for this deck you'll see how flexible this card is. You will occasionally cast it as a counterspell, but most of the time it's a tutor. You can use Archaeomancer to retrieve it from your graveyard later if you have to cast it early on.

Muddle the Mixture can find:

  1. A land, Shatterskull, the Hammer Pass
  2. A combo piece, Twinflame
  3. Another combo piece, Reset
  4. A value engine, Isochron Scepter
  5. Multiple removal and board wipe options (Roast, Abrade, Mizzium Mortars, Cyclonic Rift, etc)
  6. Multiple counterspells (Counterspell, Izzet Charm, Unsubstantiate)
  7. Recursion (Jace, Vryn's Prodigy  , Snapcaster Mage, Mission Briefing)
  8. Another tutor, Vedalken AEthermage

Spellseeker is about as flexible as Muddle the Mixture here. A huge portion of the curve is 2 CMC or below, including several combo pieces and options for re-using spells.

There are few targets for this tutor, but those few are valuable. The Dualcaster Mage combo is often the main target, but if you have no means to retrieve Twinflame it's probably better to get Spellseeker, Archaeomancer, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy  , or Snapcaster Mage to retrieve or reuse an important spell.

One tutor can often fetch another, so if your opponents are not being very interactive or pressuring you much, you can get the card you need via a tutor chain. Here are some example ones.

In fact, if your opponents are letting you play solitaire, you can assemble the Firemind's Foresight combo starting with any other tutor:

It's even possible to assemble the Dualcaster Mage + Twinflame combo starting just with a single Spellseeker. The process is comically long so it's not practical unless you already have infinite mana, but here it is in all its convoluted glory.

  1. Cast Spellseeker, tutor Muddle the Mixture
  2. Transmute Muddle the Mixture to find Vedalken AEthermage
  3. Wizardcycle Vedalken Aethermage to get Archaeomancer
  4. Cast Archaeomancer and retrieve Muddle the Mixture
  5. Transmute Muddle the Mixture to find Merchant Scroll
  6. Use Merchant Scroll to find Ghostly Flicker
  7. Target Archaeomancer and Spellseeker with Ghostly Flicker
  8. When Spellseeker ETBs, tutor Twinflame
  9. When Archaeomancer ETBs, retrieve Ghostly Flicker from your graveyard
  10. Ghostly Flicker Archaeomancer and Spellseeker again
  11. Archaeomancer retrieves Ghostly Flicker
  12. Spellseeker tutors Mission Briefing
  13. Use Mission Briefing to re-cast Merchant Scroll from your graveyard, finding Long-Term Plans
  14. Use Long-Term Plans to tutor Dualcaster Mage to the 3rd card of your library
  15. Use Ghostly Flicker to flicker Archaeomancer and Spellseeker again
  16. Archaeomancer retrieves Ghostly Flicker
  17. Spellseeker tutors Ponder or a similar card
  18. Cast Ponder, get Dualcaster Mage from your library
  19. You now have Dualcaster Mage and Twinflame in hand

The only reason you would ever do this sequence is to cause pain to someone. Possibly yourself.

Budget & Power Level Tweaks

Like most EDH decks, the real wallet wompers are in the manabase. If you want to play a combo-oriented Aegar deck but are hesitant about the price tag, I'd start there. Like almost all budget-motivated tweaks, expect a decrease in either the consistency or power of the deck. All prices are as of January 2021.

Manabase replacements:

  1. -Flooded Strand, +Terramorphic Expanse (saves $22)
  2. -Polluted Delta, +Evolving Wilds (saves $26)
  3. -Prismatic Vista, +Flood Plain (saves $32)
  4. -Bloodstained Mire, +Bad River (saves $23)
  5. -Wooded Foothills, +Grixis Panorama (saves $26)
  6. -Forbidden Orchard, +Swiftwater Cliffs (saves $20)
  7. -Mox Amber, +Wayfarer's Bauble (saves $19)
  8. -Lotus Petal, +Sky Diamond (saves $9)

The manabase tweaks are motivated by a desire to maintain a critical mass of shuffle effects. Several cards in the deck use the graveyard as a resource (Treasure Cruise, Search for Azcanta  ) and Future Sight enjoys numerous free shuffle effects as well.

Additionally, some pricey spells can also be replaced without changing the core of the deck.

  1. -Cyclonic Rift, +Coastal Breach (saves $17)
  2. -Spellseeker, +Cloudkin Seer (saves $22)
  3. -Hullbreacher, +Grim Lavamancer (saves $24)
  4. -Mystical Tutor, +Invert / Invent (saves $22)
  5. -Jace, Vryn's Prodigy  , +Tectonic Giant (saves $18)

The above manabase changes alone will save you $177, while the spell changes will save you $103, for a combined total of $280 saved. Those changes amount to changing 13% of the deck, but more than halve its price. I'd estimate that these changes would take the deck from a 7 to a 6 on the power level scale.

If you want to take this deck down a notch, one easy way to do that is to simply make the changes suggested in the Budget section above. Alternatively, you could keep some of the haymaker spells like Cyclonic Rift and Jace, Vryn's Prodigy  , but remove most or all of the tutors, replacing them with card draw or additional interaction. Without Firemind's Foresight, assembling the Reset + Reiterate combo will be harder, of course. So if you drop the power level by decreasing the consistency of the combo plan, you might want to lean a bit harder into the token-making plan, perhaps by adding another token maker like Docent of Perfection  .

If, on the other hand, you want to increase the power level, assuming no budget constraints, here's what I'd do.

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90% Casual

Competitive

Date added 3 years
Last updated 3 years
Legality

This deck is not Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)

5 - 0 Mythic Rares

42 - 0 Rares

26 - 0 Uncommons

13 - 0 Commons
Cards 100
Avg. CMC 2.60
Tokens Bird 2/2 U, Construct */* C, Copy Clone, Drake 2/2 U, Emblem Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, Manifest 2/2 C, Spirit 1/1 C, Treasure
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