Formula 1 — Lights Out

Commanded by partners Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, this Izzet (blue/red) 100-Card Commander Deck is about running order, and about a car being worn out by the act of racing. Nineteen drivers, from Fangio and Senna to Leclerc and Piastri, line up in a numbered order, and from then on every creature has two problems: where it is on the grid, and how much is left of it.

• The Grid: each creature enters with three grid counters; fewer is further ahead, zero is pole. A creature can only block something level with it or ahead of it. Overtake {1} removes a grid counter and adds a wear counter. Moving up is exposure: at pole you can block nothing, and everything behind you can block you. The rewards — cards, damage, evasion — are written on pole. Thirty-nine cards carry the rule.
• Pit Stop: at your upkeep every creature you control takes a wear counter, and at three it gets -3/-0. No opponent causes it; it arrives because it is your turn. To clear it you tap the creature for a turn — no attack, no block — and it keeps its position. This is a deck in which doing nothing is sometimes the right line.
• Two combos: Lights Out and Away We Go (DRS Zone, The Formation Lap and Max) turns free overtakes into unbounded damage; The Long Stint (The Pit Wall, Fernando Alonso and Lewis) ruins one car so the other can be repaired, for infinite draw and a drain.

Why Izzet

Blue is the pit wall: the screens, the sensors, the strategy simulation, the race director and the scrutineer. Red is the car: the start on five lights, the braking from three hundred and forty kilometres an hour, the overtake from further back than the other driver believed possible. The commanders are the two halves of the rule — Max deals 1 damage to an opponent on every overtake, Lewis drains 1 on every stop. One is paid for moving, the other for standing still, and fourteen cards carry Pit Stop.

A complete 100-card Commander deck plus 4 tokens, tuned for Bracket 4, available as a digital print-yourself edition or a printed physical deck, and offered in 10 languages.