When You Have a Deck That's Amazing When It Works... About 10% of the Time

The free Izzet deck you can get in MTG Arena is generally themed as "instants and sorceries matter" and gives you a bunch of red burn spells and blue card-draw spells, and creatures like Wee Dragonauts and Crackling Drakes that get boosted as you cast those cards.

But there are two really exciting spells in the deck that, when they go off, are the exact sort of feedback loop combo the Izzet would be fascinated by.

One, the one that's more straightforward, is Niv-Mizzet, Parun, the legendary guildmaster. He's a 5/5 flyer that can't be countered - pretty good to start - and then he's got the following: each time you draw a card, he deals 1 damage to a target of your choice. And then, any time you cast an instant or sorcery spell, you draw a card (and thus proc that damage.)

With cards like Radical Idea and Chemister's Insight, you can draw several cards to ramp up and then Jump-Start them later in the game. So when you have enough mana, you're getting two cards (one for the card and one from Niv) for a single Radical Idea, and thus two damage, not to mention the chance to cast more spells that you've just drawn.

Now, let's talk Thousand-Year Storm.

TYS is trickier, but its eventual effect is astounding. Each instant or sorcery you cast, the enchantment will allow you to copy it for every other spell you've cast. So, let's say you hit a target with Lava Coil. Then you shock another one - you now get two Shocks. Then, if you have the mana, you cast Radical Idea - which is now 3 of them. And if you have Niv out, you're getting a card for each of these casts, not to mention all those cards from that triple radical idea, which is turning him into a machine gun.

The problem, of course, is actually surviving to the point where you can get this off.

While it's been glorious when I've actually managed to get to this point, it's pretty rare. Being red/blue, and without much in the way of bounce/counterspell, there's nothing you can really do about Enchantments (Underworld Dreams, which punishes you for each card you draw, is a real hoser.) Also, with red removal, unless you get Niv into his machine gun mode, it'll be hard to take down anything really big (like some Ikoria behemoth mutant.)

I'm tinkering with the deck (I added another TYS and Niv, for one thing) but while I'm worried the archetype isn't going to work all that well in this format, it's so fun when it actually goes off that I want to try to make it work.