“Greetings, citizens! The Azorius guild, led by its illustrious parun Isperia, is responsible for bringing law and order to Ravnica. With the Azorius Lawbringers
deck, you’ll be in charge of a formidable bureaucratic apparatus. You’ll use a remarkable suite of flying creatures to punish the lawbreakers while your powerful control spells keep your opponents from causing any mischief. First, we will take the fight to the biggest mischief makers on Ravnica - the Rakdos.”I had two goals when building this deck: make a deck that captures the feel of Azorius as policemen, bureaucrats, and overseers, and make a deck that feels sufficiently like a preconstructed deck that players would want to buy. To address the latter goal, I deliberately gave the deck two themes (both of which fit the Azorius): tempo flyers and UW Control. While splitting the deck like this will likely cause me to take a hit in the power level department, I feel like it plays into the challenge’s injunction to “make a precon”. Precons historically have not been very powerful and have been designed as entry points for newer players. As part of that, they typically present several different themes to help make the task of deck building and customization easier for people with less experience; players can choose the subtheme they like, swap cards around to support that, and end up with a much better deck than they had before – all without needing a mastery of deckbuilding fundamentals. Thus, in order to capture that feeling, I deliberately toned down the deck’s power level and included weaker cards in each theme to allow players to both streamline (choosing one or the other theme to support) and to power up (replacing weak cards like
Shackles with better spells from their collections). Luckily, the two themes chosen here complement each other since the control spells buy time for the flying creatures to chip away at your opponents, and there’s considerable overlap between the two decks (
Prognostic Sphinx, for example). Players can choose to double down on the control deck by removing some of the smaller tempo creatures and adding more Wraths, card drawing, and big finishers, or they can follow the tempo build by removing some of the weaker control spells in favor of mid-sized evasion creatures, more ways to blink creatures for value, and more countermagic. To further solidify this, each of these subthemes has its own legendary creature included in the deck: Lavinia will help as a tempo beast while Ith can passively beat down and still provide good defense.
However, the challenge was not simply to make a precon, but to make a precon that captures the fundamentals of a guild. When I think of the Azorius, I think of dispassionate do-gooders who fundamentally just want to make the world a better place and understand that the way to do that is to develop a process and stick to it. Granted, over the (many) years since the guild’s founding the process has become an end rather than a means, but for all their potential to oppress and stifle the Azorius are not, in their hearts, bad guys. They just wish people would behave themselves more. The key here, though, is regulation: laws, codes, processes, and paperwork all exist to make sure that only the things you want to happen, can happen.
However, giving players a dedicated WU Control deck out of the box would probably be too fun-wrecking, so I gave the deck another subtheme to temper the desire to make nothing happen. The targeted and mass removal spells allow the Azorius Lawbringers player to dictate the pace of the game by keeping unruly creatures in line, but there aren’t enough of them to consistently shut down the board; thus, your opponents can have your fun things as long as they use them responsibly. The tempo aspect of the deck allows it to go on the warpath without having to give up its ability to regulate broken things or needing to pull the trigger on a Wrath that ends up eating a ton of its own creatures. The size of the flying creatures (including Isperia) means you can kill opponents quite rapidly once you start attacking them, giving players the tools they need to bring the game to a swift close once they get a handle on it.
There were a few other thematic decisions worth mentioning. With few exceptions, I tried to avoid using creature types or cards that mentioned entities that don’t fit in the Azorius, and focus on once that do; hence, the heavy use of Sphinxes and near-absence of Angels, since the latter are Boros’s and Orzhov’s thing. Non-Ravnican creatures like the Soratami are mostly excluded, as good as something like Meloku or Uyo would be here. Rare reprints were also chosen based partly on excitement factor and partly on Constructed playability: Vedalken Shackles, for example, makes sense on multiple levels since it’s a control spell, mentions Vedalken (who are at home in the Azorius, see
Fall of the Gavel among others), and sees some Constructed play without being something like True-Name Nemesis that would cause players to snap the decks off the shelves for non-EDH reasons.
