Melek Big Spell Slinger

Commander / EDH Burn Scry UR (Izzet) Wizards

Artificer12

Instant (19)

• 1x AEtherize
• 1x Brainstorm
• 1x Chaos Warp
• 1x Comet Storm
• 1x Counterspell
• 1x Expansion / Explosion
• 1x Frantic Search
• 1x Izzet Charm
• 1x Jaya's Greeting
• 1x Mission Briefing
• 1x Muddle the Mixture
• 1x Narset's Reversal
• 1x Negate
• 1x Pongify
• 1x Prismari Command
• 1x Rapid Hybridization
• 1x Seething Song
• 1x Telling Time
• 1x Wizard's Retort

Artifact (10)

• 1x Izzet Signet
• 1x Mana Geode
• 1x Primal Amulet  ^Flip
• 1x Pyromancer's Goggles
• 1x Scroll Rack
• 1x Sensei's Divining Top
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Sphinx-Bone Wand
• 1x Thought Vessel
• 1x Twinning Staff

Sorcery (15)

• 1x Banefire
• 1x Bond of Insight
• 1x Brass's Bounty
• 1x Experimental Overload
• 1x Foresee
• 1x Jaya's Immolating Inferno
• 1x Jeska's Will
• 1x Mana Geyser
• 1x Mizzium Mortars
• 1x Ponder
• 1x Preordain
• 1x Reckless Endeavor
• 1x River's Rebuke
• 1x See the Truth
• 1x Tamiyo's Epiphany

Land (34)

• 1x Castle Vantress
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Emergence Zone
• 1x Halimar Depths
• 13x Island
• 13x Mountain
• 1x Mystic Sanctuary
• 1x Prismari Campus
• 1x Reliquary Tower
• 1x Temple of Epiphany

Enchantment (5)

• 1x Arcane Melee
• 1x Aria of Flame
• 1x Double Vision
• 1x Firemind's Research
• 1x Jace's Sanctum

Commander (1)

Creature (14)

• 1x Archmage Emeritus
• 1x Baral, Chief of Compliance
• 1x Bloodwater Entity
• 1x Burning Prophet
• 1x Crackling Drake
• 1x Goblin Electromancer
• 1x Guttersnipe
• 1x Harmonic Prodigy
• 1x Hypersonic Dragon
• 1x Niv-Mizzet, Parun
• 1x Storm-Kiln Artist
• 1x Vadrik, Astral Archmage
• 1x Veyran, Voice of Duality
• 1x Zaffai, Thunder Conductor

Planeswalker (2)

• 1x Ral Zarek
• 1x Ral, Storm Conduit

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Melek, Big Spell Slinger

Big spells are cool. Big spells are fun. Lets cast a bunch of big spells, copy them, and maybe win the game?

The big plan is to copy as many of our spells as possible to generate value and eventually damage, with Melek, Izzet Paragon a) giving us access to the top of our deck and b) copying spells from there. By copying draw, mana and eventually damage instants and sorceries, we try to just bury our opponents in huge value. Sure, we could instead copy a bunch of cheap stuff and storm off the normal way, but it's way more fun to throw out several copies of a 20 damage spell.

The deck is divided into a few key goals:

1) Start Small

Controlling what cards we draw and when is the key to making this game plan work. We want to churn through our deck using a bunch of copied cheap draw/scry/card selection spells, that we can copy multiple times for even more value, so that we can find all of our important tools to stop us from losing and build our fiery engine.

• Brainstorm: as basic as it gets. A cheap way to see a few cards and control our next few draws
• Frantic Search: Card selection that is, at worst, mana neutral and more often mana positive when copied
• See the Truth: With just Melek, and nothing else, on the board, See the Truth on top of our deck is a two mana draw 6

2) Big Spells, of course

Both X cost and your standard high CMC instants and sorceries we want to cast and hopefully copy. These are the cards that should be ideally finishing people off or setting up victory, by virtue of getting twice your mana's worth. Dumping a bunch of mana into Banefire is nice, but getting a second one for free is even better. these include, but are not limited to:

• Banefire: Duh
• Jaya's Immolating Inferno: Can kill three people when cast of the top with Melek, but also can be used to clear more than a few threats
• Expansion / Explosion: Might kill someone. Definitely drawing us some cards or can help us with our copy game plan in a pinch

3) Make those spells cheaper

We want to be chucking spells as often as we can, and that means we want to cast them for as cheap as possible. A few cards a dedicated to this effect in order to help us compensate for Izzet not having access to normal ramp

• Arcane Melee: Right there on the card
• Primal Amulet  : Cost reduction that flips into another copy effect, both side are excellent
• Baral, Chief of Compliance: Also gives us value for protecting ours (or maybe even someone else's?) stuff

4) Top Deck Manipulation

We want Melek to be able to copy spells regularly to increase our value, so controlling what's on top of our deck allows us to have greater agency in what gets copied

• Scroll Rack: Just because the card is in our hand doesn't mean we won't be able to cast it from our deck
• Foresee: Scrying and drawing!
• Sensei's Divining Top: 1 mana, repeatable almost-scry 3 is pretty solid when we care about the top of our deck

5) Spell Insurance and Recursion

Sometimes things happen, and we lose key spells, or a situation requires us to use one of our big spells to protect ourselves. Some spell recursion is going to increase our reliability and resiliency by allowing us to regain access to the spells we need when we need them

• Bloodwater Entity: Normally putting something from our graveyard on top of the deck is less powerful than putting it into our hand or cast outrighht, but for us this is better because we can copy it with Melek
• Experimental Overload: Same as above, but we can also copy it, giving us more recursion, and even building us a bit of a board
• Bond of Insight: Definitely gives us one of our spells back, possibly gives us some valuable card selection from the mill, and possibly denies resources to our opponents

6) Fast mana/ramp (kinda)

Big spells need big mana, and we can make great use of fast mana spells with our ability to pretty reliably copy them, giving us a big pool to pull from when we get a chance to blow someone up

• Reckless Endeavor: Possibly a board wipe, definitely some treasures. Maybe we can do it twice in a row?
• Jeska's Will: More mana, and more spells to cast with it
• Storm-Kiln Artist: Magecraft triggers on casts and copies, so we can pretty easily turn all over our cheap spells mana positive.

7) Wizards (and Shamans, a little bit)!

Many wizards (and certain spell inclined shamans) like when we cast spells, and if the deck is playing the way it's supposed to, we'll be doing a fair bit of that. So I've included a bit of a side theme of Wizards/shamans to take advantage of that value and give us some level of board presence

• Harmonic Prodigy: This thing is an rock star, generating us a ton of value from most of our creatures
• Zaffai, Thunder Conductor: More top deck control from small spells, more board from small big spells, and more damage from big big spells
• Guttersnipe: Like Guttersnipe isn't gonna be in a spell slinging deck

Narset's Reversal and Copying effects

Narset's Reversal is in this deck, and things can get funky, but very cool, when you find a way to copy it, like casting it off the top with Melek or if Double Vision is in play. The short result is that we can "steal" an opponents spell and still keep Narset's Reversal in our hand for additional use. Here's how it works (If you ever need to explain it to your table):

1. Opponent casts an instant/sorcery we want (or that we don't want them to have)
2. Cast Narset's Reversal (NR1) targeting that spell
3. Something (like Double Vision) puts a copy of Narset's Reversal (NR2) on the stack
4. Target NR1 with the NR2
5. NR2 resolves, copying NR1, resulting in NR3 on the stack, returning NR1 (the card), to our hand
6. NR3 targets the opponent's spell
7. NR3 resolves giving us a copy of our opponents spell, returning the original card to their hand

Date added	4 years
Last updated	2 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	6 - 0 Mythic Rares 31 - 0 Rares 18 - 0 Uncommons 19 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.17
Tokens	Ape 3/3 G, Elemental 4/4 UR, Frog Lizard 3/3 G, Treasure, Weird X/X UR