Magic World Championships reveal surprising Avatar card's dominance

The Last Airbender's Gran-Gran becomes an unlikely Magic: The Gathering hero

Nobody had a better time at the Magic: The Gathering World Championship in Bellevue, Washington this past weekend than Katara and Sokka’s sweet old grandmother from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Except maybe Seth Manfield, who won the championship and took home the $100,000, thanks in no small part to running four copies of the Gran-Gran creature card from the Avatar crossover set. She’s become a staple in competitive blue-red (Izzet) decks that leverage the Lessons mechanic. Even after the November bans to Vivi Ornitier and Proft’s Eidetic Memory, Izzet remains the most powerful color combo in Magic.

Across the standard decks submitted by the 126 participants were 90 copies of Gran-Gran — and she popped up in four of the five top overall decks, according to official data from Magic.gg.

A very cheap 1/2 human peasant ally at a cost of one blue mana, Gran-Gran has the player draw then discard a card every time she’s tapped. Her big boon, however, is that she reduces the cost of noncreature spells by one colorless mana as long as there are three or more Lesson cards in the player’s graveyard. Lessons debuted in 2021’s Strixhaven: School of Mages set as a subtype on some noncreature spells, and the label returned in the Avatar set. Plenty of creature cards, Gran-Gran included, interact with lessons in some capacity.

Gran-Gran’s top ability also feeds into the bottom one: if the player runs a lot of lesson cards in their deck and decisively discards enough of them into their graveyard, then all noncreature spells get a little bit cheaper.

When you look at some of the other most popular cards used in the championships, you see just how prominent lessons have become in the competitive standard meta. Among the top 10, six of them were lessons. Across all decks, there were 253 total copies used of Boomerang Basics. For one blue mana, it returns a target nonland permanent to its owner’s hand, and if the caster controls it, then they draw a card. There were also 92 copies of Accumulate Wisdom, another blue lesson that, with three or more lessons in the graveyard, lets the caster draw the top three cards of their library.

Also hugely popular were red damage-dealing lessons like Iroh’s Demonstration, Combustion Technique, and Firebending Lesson to complement the driving draw mechanics of the blue lessons. Out of 126 competitors, 23 (or 18.3%) of them focused on this “Izzet Lessons” deck structure.

The final match between Manfield and Akira Shibata saw two remarkably similar decks face off. In both cases, Gran-Gran stood alone as the only creature card to appear. (She also appeared in two more of the top five decks.) Both Manfield and Shibata made up for creature scarcity with cards like Stormchaser's Talent and Artist's Talent to generate Otter tokens to fill up the board. Both also used cards like Monument to Endurance from the Aetherdrift set to beef up the core draw strategy. A 3-cost artifact, whenever the player discards a card, they can choose one of three options that hasn’t already been chosen this turn: draw a card, create a Treasure token, or each opponent loses three life.

Broadly speaking, the new Avatar set dominated all the most successful decks, with blue as the single most popular color used in some capacity. Badgermole Cub, a standout green creature from Avatar that Earthbends and helps generate extra mana, was the one exception to the blue lessons rule with 183 copies in the tournament, making it the second most popular card.

The Avatar set didn’t just shake up Standard — it redefined it, even if that new definition remains focused on blue-red decks. Complemented by a stack of lessons, Gran-Gran seems like the unlikely creature card that’s going to dominate the competitive Magic scene for months to come. Blue-red might have lost its overpowered black mage with the Vivi ban, but it gained a sweet old lady from the Southern Water Tribe who’s ready to teach Team Avatar and the rest of the world a few lessons.