Teaching Decks: Izzet Burn

Without a single spell in the main or side board that costs more than 2cmc, I'm just not convinced there's a point to playing electromancer. I also kind don't want the deck to be too reliant on the curiosity combo, since I'm not even sure the deck should be running it. Think Twice and Chemister should be a workable amount of card draw on their own. None of the card choices are ideal, but they're simple, they're cheap, and I think they're good ways to learn. And Ilike having Chemister as a more expensive top-end to the deck.

So do you think that Choice cards like Charm and Chemister are too much for trying to teach like this? You might be right, the Charms do kinda look like an intimidating block of text if you don't get a version with the new bullet-point formatting. Do you remember any specific issues your friends had with the decks? Did Evolve turn out to be a bit much to learn with? I could see that happening. Do you remember any specific cards or interactions they had trouble with that I should avoid using for this project?

I hope you get another chance to teach them, and if you want to try one of my decks for it, please do.

I gave one player a gruul stompy deck (https://www.mtgvault.com/muktol/decks/rg-gruul-beginners-deck/) and the other got a simic evolve deck (https://www.mtgvault.com/muktol/decks/ug-simic-beginners-deck/). The learned the basics fast enough, the only issue being the manabase, learning that they untap at the beginning of a new term and can be re-used every turn. The problem I/ they ran into was in the last turn: Simic hasd some creatures with +1/+1 counters on them out and played an Overrun, which was too much and too complicated for the other player to calculate. The simic-deck was played by someone who plays a lot on the computer and is a technician, tough I thought that he might have more problems with this as he never had played anything like magic before. But the problem occurred with the player that already had played Yu-Gi-O...but only on the computer where the machine did all the calculations for her.

I try to limit the number of different mechanics I use in a beginners deck to a certain amount and use only cards that have one use/ ability. As I'm printing the cards it's no big deal to have two decks, or some replacement-cards, if the player learns faster than I thought and is ready for some advanced cards. I also don't include sideboards because for that you need to play at least 2 games against the same player and the same deck, and you need to know your deck and you opponents to decide what to remove and what to add.

That makes sense- between keeping track of the counters on all the different creatures, on top of Evolve creatures having really weird and uneven stats in the first place, so they cause eachother to evolve more often, PLUS the overrun effect, I can see that getting out of hand. A good lesson there- Creature buffs can be intimidating, don't put too many all together.

Yeah, my thought on the sideboards was that they'd serve less like a real sideboard and more like just your pool of cards to modify your deck with- If someone likes the sideboard cards and just wants them maindeck always, that's their choice. I would also encourage them to essentially sideboard before matchups, since I'm running the assumption that these games are all being played among my Teaching Decks, either me using them against someone I'm teaching, or me teaching a club or something together. It's fair to be able to ask "What deck are you on?" and both players to give a strait answer, then swap a few cards out based on what they think will help.