Cracking the Cauldron: Taking Down the Boogeyman of Standard in Magic: The Gathering
You’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times, Izzet Cauldron, or even Vivi-Cauldron is the top deck in Magic: The Gathering Standard. With the engine of free mana, harmonising spells, digging through the deck at fast speeds, and quickly buffing low-cost creatures, the deck seems to do it all. So what is there to do? How do we beat Vivi?
Alex Kivitz
Stirring the Pot - What Makes Izzet-Cauldron Tick?
To know how to beat the best, we first have to understand just how the deck works. The Izzet Cauldron deck is an efficient and highly tuned engine that builds around low cost spells to cycle cards, and has payoffs for either discarding or drawing cards. Additionally, the deck takes advantage of utilizing Agatha’s Soul Cauldron to give Vivi Ornitier’s mana generation ability to all creatures with +1/+1 tokens.
In this deck, those +1/+1 tokens are handed out like candy. Even without utilising the eponymous combo, the deck scales very quickly and generates some evasive heavy hitters, dishing out devastating damage relatively quickly. But let’s break down the individual pieces so we can exploit chinks in the deck’s armour.
Cast Iron Shell – Core Cards of the Deck
Let’s step away from Vivi Ornitier and Agatha’s Soul Cauldron for a moment. What makes the shell of the deck, and what do the turns look like? The classic build of Izzet-Cauldron starts off fast with Marauding Mako. A red 1/1 creature that gets a +1/+1 counter for every card you discard. Already you can see where the deck can quickly get out of hand. Especially so with creatures like Fear of Missing Out, Steamcore Scholar, and Tersa Lightshatter in some versions. Suddenly you’re quickly filtering through your deck, turning on Delerium and other graveyard based synergies, digging for your combo pieces, and buffing your creatures.
No Cauldron deck is complete without 4 copies of Proft’s Eidetic Memory, further distributing +1/+1 counters to your creatures, allowing them to benefit off of Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, and squeezing even more value from your inherent card cycling. Winternight Stories is also ubiquitous throughout the deck lists we’ve seen, allowing for easy card draw early on and free, or nearly free, card draw while it’s in your graveyard, utilising the mana from Vivi or just a high powered creature.
The deck is a streamlined engine that flows seamlessly through game states, utilising the powerful hand-sculpting to dig for cheap answers like Abrade, Torch the Tower, or Into the Flood Maw to deal with threats as they come up.
And finally, there are the two headliners of the deck, Vivi Ornitier and Agatha’s Soul Cauldron. Vivi himself is powerful enough to be played, offering a source of free mana to cast your card cycling spells, all the while growing in size and pinging damage to the opponent. And even in death Vivi has his uses. When paired with Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, suddenly your entire board is generating free mana, because of all the +1/+1 counters spread among them, and you can quite feasibly draw most of your deck. Allowing your opponent’s Agatha’s Soul Cauldron to resolve while a Vivi is in either graveyard, while your opponent has multiple creatures with counters on them, often is just game over.
If you want a sample Vivi deck, we have Jack Potter’s finalist deck from SCG Con Orlando, notably running Quantum Riddler and no copies of Tersa Lightbringer.
But you’re not here to listen to us ramble on about how good Izzet Cauldron is. You want to know how to beat this meta-game powerhouse. Well, we’ve combed over several tournaments recently and saw some promising results. Here are two decks that saw consistent victories, not only over Izzet Cauldron, but also across a good portion of the field.
Playing With Fire - Mono Red Aggro
We’ve seen one deck consistently beat out Izzet Cauldron decks in tournaments, with a Mono-red aggro deck even taking down the Magic Spotlight event at SCG Con Orlando. In a top 8 containing SIX Izzet Cauldron decks, Brennan Roy emerged victorious, taking down droves of Vivi decks.
Curve, Burn, Repeat – Low to the Ground Threats
We’re not going to beat around the bush here, Mono-red aggro beats out Izzet-Cauldron decks by applying consistent fast pressure and removing key creatures for cheap. Most Izzet-Cauldron games see a standard game-plan of playing 2-3 creatures and supplementing them with removal spells, card cycling, and enchantments. The goal of this deck is to apply enough pressure that they’re forced to keep removal options available, and discard more of their card draw spells, all the while punishing them every step of the way.
Starting out we see Burnout Bashtronaut, a 1 mana 1/1 creature with menace and Start you engines! At max speed it gains double strike and offers a good mana sink when you’re low on cards to maintain its relevance throughout the game. In this deck reaching max speed is easy and if the cauldron deck wants to utilise a card to remove your 1 drop, you’re not complaining.
Hired Claw is another 1 drop that right off the bat applies pressure, dealing additional damage whenever you attack with one or more Lizards. You can then pay 2 mana to give it a +1/+1 counter after the attack trigger to get in even more damage on the attack.
Most variations of the deck run 4 copies of Emberheart Challenger because prowess on a 2 cost 2/2 with haste is almost too good to pass up on. It’ll likely punch in for 2 damage immediately, and allows your removal spells to also get in for additional damage to face. Speaking of removal spells, Burst Lightning removes those pesky Makos and Steamcore Scholars immediately for one mana, and offers end game burn when you need that extra bit of damage to close out a game. Lightning Strike offers the same options while reaching 3 damage for 2 mana.
The Melting Pot – Primed to Punish
Mono-red aggro, while having a fairly straight forward game-plan, does have quite the number of tech cards to give an edge in the match-up. Probably one of the best cards in the deck is the Razorkin Needlehead. Having first strike on your turn is an added bonus, allowing you to freely attack even if your opponent has a 2/2 Mako or Steamcore.
The best part is that it punishes the cycle-heavy game-plan by burning your opponent for 1 for every card they draw. You’ll often see this creature burn 2-3 damage before getting removed, as this is often a kill on sight card for the cauldron deck.
Screaming Nemesis aims to punish the +1/+1 portion of the Izzet-Cauldron deck by dealing damage no matter what they do to it. While black decks can kill this creature without dealing damage, Vivi is in a lose-lose scenario. Do they let you hit them for 3 every turn, or block it and take damage directly through its effect? It kills 3/3s and lower while still applying burn damage, or deals 4+ damage when blocked by larger creatures.
In case you didn’t think we could punish the cauldron more, we see 2 Sunspine Lynxs in the mainboard with 2 more in the sideboard in Brennan’s deck list. This adds some more incidental burn damage on a large creature. Mono-red doesn’t mind this as they’re only playing mountains, but on turn four this is potentially a 5/4 that deals 20% of their starting life total when it enters. Magebane Lizard sees play to deal scaling damage over time, and having 4 health makes it a little harder to remove, requiring Obliterating Bolt from Vivi’s side most of the time, if they even run it. We even see 1 Abrade in the mainboard as more multipurpose removal.
What we see here is a finely crafted deck, specifically to punish each aspect of Vivi’s game-plan, while also proving to be a fast aggressive deck with a lot of game into the rest of the field. While it may have some bad match-ups here and there, if you’re expecting 50% of the field to be on Vivi, it makes for quite the promising deck. You can find the full decklist here.
Chocobo Charge - Stomping the Competition
With an endgame engine as powerful as Vivi and Soul Cauldron, it makes it quite difficult to play the long game. So, it’s no surprise we see another variation of an aggressive deck that looks to end the game as fast as possible. We’ll be looking at the Mono-green landfall/aggro deck from the Special Qualifier in Kichijoji Japan, and how it managed to take down a diverse field. In fact, I do want to point out that not only did this deck take down Izzet-Cauldron, but despite a 54% representation, it seems the top 8 decks listed only had 2 Izzet-Cauldron decks among them
Tifa the Mean Green Machine
If Mono-red wins through speed and burn, mono-green wins through power and consistency. The main source of power comes from Tifa Lockhart as the main source of damage, supplementing it with powerful landfall beaters like Mossborn Hydra and Sazh’s Chocobo. The deck accelerates in mana and drops multiple lands a turn consistently. While Tifa can be easily dealt with through removal spells, Sazh’s Chocobo and Mossborn Hydra can quickly get out of reach of cards like Obliterate and Lightning Strike.
What the deck lacks in card draw it makes up for in consistency and deck-thinning. Four copies of Fabled Passage and Escape Tunnel are a double barreled threat offering instant speed landfall triggers and doubling up on effects. They also go through the deck and remove lands, increasing the chances of drawing more relevant cards. Escape Tunnel also offers the ability to give Tifa unblockable, allowing her to get in and end the game on the spot.
Travelling Chocobo allows you to play lands and birds off the top of your deck, while also doubling the landfall triggers. Pair this up with Icetill Explorer which can come down consistently on turn three thanks to Llanowar Elves, and you have the makings for some powerful attacks. Having a Tifa, Traveling Chocobo, and Icetill in play, and either a Fabled Passage or Escape Tunnel in graveyard can have Tifa swinging in for 128 damage with trample. Now, of course that’s not going to happen often, but with your whole deck built around landfall and growing creatures, you’ll be swinging for 8-10 damage a turn by turn 3 relatively consistently.
With all these extra lands, it’s easy enough to keep up a single green mana for Snakeskin Veil, providing cheap protection and additional +1/+1 counters. All that extra mana has to go somewhere, and Bristly Bill, Spine Sower not only gives you more +1/+1 counters but also doubles the counters on all your creatures later in the game.
Landfall Lethality – Anti-Vivi Technology
Probably the tech card I find the funniest is the sideboard inclusion of Agatha’s Soul Cauldron itself. With the amount of +1/+1 counters generated by the deck, it’s very easy to make use of abilities gained. In this case, if you were to exile an opponent’s Vivi from their graveyard, suddenly you’re generating massive amounts of mana to potentially feed into your Bristly Bill. Repulsive Mutation and Frenzied Baloth help into more control heavy match-ups where you need to counter board-wipes, or just get around blue decks with their own counter spells.
Overall, we see a lot of tech options in sideboard in the likes of Seedship Impact and Into the Flood Maw, being able to deal with versatile threats. The inclusion of Genemorph Imago in conjunction with Fabled Passage and Escape Tunnel provides a decently-sized flying blocker early, and a large 6/6 blocker later if needed. It also buffs itself to swing in for big damage if that’s needed as well.
This is a fun, straightforward deck that looks to get its creatures out of range of removal spells early, and protect them with cheap interaction that it can afford with all the mana acceleration. If you want to see the full deck-list you can find it here.
Cracking the Cauldron - Final Thoughts
Vivi Ornitier and Agatha’s Soul Cauldron remain Standard’s reigning powerhouse, but that doesn’t mean it’s unbeatable, and that’s the beauty of the game. We’ve seen tournaments where it was toppled, where players hedge their bets on the expected field, and emerge victorious. The meta is constantly evolving, and experimentation and deck-building prove to be an ever-important factor in testing. Even with the upcoming Magic Spotlight Series Liverpool, we expect large changes and adaptations to be made. As one of, if not the last major event before the November 10th B&R announcement, we’re excited to see exactly which decks show up and perform well.
This is an amazing reminder of what makes Magic: The Gathering so exciting: even when one deck seems unbeatable, innovation and adaptation push the format forward. Vivi may still be the king of Standard, but the hunters are closing in.
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