Tireless Pilgrimage: Standard Gran-Gran's Shrine Tour

Note: This article was translated from Chinese by AI and may contain errors. Read the original Chinese version.

Introduction

At the recently concluded 2025 Magic World Championship 31, Seth Manfield won the title with an Izzet Lessons deck, and the prices of the related cards skyrocketed overnight. Although the new set’s low-rarity cards have since pulled back, the rare components from older sets remain stubbornly expensive, making them hard to add. Is there a cheap and fun way to build it?

Card Analysis

Browsing the Avatar: The Last Airbender card list, the low-rarity finishers the designers prepared for the Lesson theme are Dragonfly Swarm and Serpent of the Pass, letting players build by reference to past Izzet Drakes and Izzet Serpent decks, but finishers of this type are easily dealt with by spot removal, which really tests the pilot’s skill. In fact, the designers prepared another low-rarity strategy as well:

Aang’s Journey　／／　White Lotus Hideout

These two Lesson-related cards also support the Shrine theme. Aang’s Journey fetches a land to your hand and gains 2 life, and when kicked it can also fetch a Shrine. The any-color mana from White Lotus Hideout can pay for Lesson costs and also for Shrine costs. Add the Lesson deck’s star creature Gran-Gran, which reduces the cost of noncreature spells rather than simply instants and sorceries, and it’s clear the two themes are linked. But since Shrines are all legendary, with only one per color, and their effects get stronger the more Shrines are on the battlefield, fully realizing the Shrine theme requires reaching five colors. Can it be assembled using only low-rarity cards? The decklist is as follows:

Decklist

This is a five-color Lesson Shrine deck I built as a challenge to use no rares. The spell structure basically follows the cards used in the current Izzet Lessons deck: the one-mana burn spell Firebending Lesson, the one-mana bounce Boomerang Basics, the discard-one-draw-two Abandon Attachments, Accumulate Wisdom, which draws three cards once you meet the condition of three Lessons in the graveyard, the main removal Combustion Technique, whose damage grows with the number of Lessons in your graveyard, and Iroh’s Demonstration, which handles both spot burn and small sweeps. On top of that come the basic land / Shrine tutor Aang’s Journey and the green Lesson Origin of Metalbending, which can deal with your opponent’s artifacts and enchantments. Of course, four Gran-Gran are also indispensable.

As for the Shrine designs this time, they are all effects that trigger when the Shrine itself enters and when another Shrine enters. When the Shrine itself enters it looks at the number of Shrines you control, while other Shrines entering count as one each. They are the four-mana Southern Air Temple, which puts counters on your whole team, the three-mana card-drawing The Spirit Oasis, the one-mana draining Northern Air Temple, the four-mana Crescent Island Temple, which creates prowess Monk tokens, and the four-mana land-fetching Kyoshi Island Plaza. Considering this deck’s tutors, mana curve, and the importance of the Shrine effects, I only put two copies each of the blue card-drawing Shrine and the red Monk-making Shrine, which is the win condition, and just one of each in the other three colors.

Last is the color fixing. Besides the dedicated five-color land White Lotus Hideout mentioned earlier, this deck adds two sets of uncommon three-color lands with red and blue, Frontier Bivouac and Mystic Monastery, and the rest are basic lands for Aang’s Journey and Kyoshi Island Plaza to search up for fixing.

Gameplay Demo

Shrines need a certain amount of board accumulation to come together, so compared with other builds it is a bit slow, but once it gets going the resource and board advantage are very considerable. In particular, Kyoshi Island Plaza fetching lands to expand your mana, combined with Gran-Gran’s cost reduction, easily leads to the thrilling blowout where Gran-Gran leads a band of pilgrims to run your opponent over, and if your opponent lacks multiple sweepers or several answers to enchantments, it’s very hard for them to suppress it effectively. And with a five-color base, you can put in whatever Lessons you like, leaving plenty of room for adjustment.

Conclusion

Although the Avatar: The Last Airbender Lesson cards are quite rich and powerful, there are still quite a few limitations, such as having no answer to planeswalkers or graveyards, the only cheap counterspell being the feeble It’ll Quench Ya!, and the high-range sweeper Reckless Blaze not being printed in Standard. Perhaps that’s why they dared to print a super-strong resource card like Accumulate Wisdom. But for budget-limited entry-level players, this deck is cheap to build, relatively easy to pilot, and quite fun, and I hope you readers enjoy it.