Izzet League

The Izzet League is in charge of maintaining city infrastructure, including running water, heating, roads and magical transports. They kind of have a mad-scientist approach to researching and developing their magical machinery. Magical explosions and unexpected results are commonplace, but that's just part of the creative process!
Those that dislike the Izzet would say their useful creations are made by accident, and aren't worth the collateral damage they cause, however while they're difficult to control, the Izzet have developed an impressive repertoire of magical knowledge.
The Izzet are obsessive experimenters, combining a keen creative intellect with a short attention span. The original mandate of the Izzet guild was to provide solutions for public works projects (sewers, boilers, and roadways), but their increasingly far-fetched experiments satisfy only their insatiable curiosity. Sometimes their experiments yield useful technological advancements; other times they produce unintended mana geysers, spatial rifts, arcane portals, or huge explosions — all of which can be useful in their own way.
The league’s most grandiose experiments typically concern public works projects and elemental experimentation. These efforts use a methodology that relies on unexpected outcomes: all results are informative, even if they completely defy expectations. For example, an experiment that begins as the creation of a “hypermana focusing lens” might be renamed a “scram-range teleportal” once the researchers discover more properties of what they have fashioned. Then, after a few goblin volunteers vanish inside it, the apparatus gains the designation of “universal refuse disintegrator” — until the goblin volunteers are discovered alive, having been teleported far from the workshop. This sort of adjustment is par for the course in Izzet experiments; the “fiddle and find out” method is favored over any process of systematic scientific research.
The Izzet League is one of the few guilds whose founder, the dragon Niv-Mizzet, remains its guildmaster, just as the guild continues to fulfill its original mission (even as its experiments go far beyond the guild’s original mandate).

THE IZZET VIEW ON OTHER GUILDS
To the lively intellect of the Izzet, the members of Ravnica’s other guilds seem slow, dull, and utterly lacking in the spirit of scientific inquiry and experimentation.
Azorius. “The Azorius create regulations for everything, including freedom. What dull, shackled lives they lead.”
Boros. “All too often when we’re on the verge of setting off a little explosion or a spell that tears a hole in reality, the Boros show up to spoil the fun.”
Dimir. “The less we see of the Dimir, the more we know they are monitoring us.”
Golgari. “They keep to themselves and clean up our messes. As long as they stay out of sight, it’s hard to view them as a threat.”
Gruul. “They’re even better at wrecking our laboratories than we are!”
Orzhov. “Progress means taking risks. But when you gamble with the Orzhov, you always wager more than coin.”
Rakdos. “Steer clear of these senseless riot-fiends. Their enthusiasm is best appreciated from a distance.”
Selesnya. “These zealots run with beasts and worship figments of the past. They would be wiser to embrace the wonders of the future.”
Simic. “The Simic are inventive, but their creations are bereft of soul and fire. They tinker with life but lack the inspiration to breathe true spirit into their inventions.”

Culture

The Izzet League thirsts for knowledge, cherishes intellect, and speculates about the secrets of the multiverse. It brings to its scientific pursuits a flaming passion that turns its search for knowledge into an insatiable hunger, makes its cold intellect brilliantly fruitful, and widens its speculation into a search for connections between wildly disparate objects or concepts. It is manic in its expressions of creative energy, shifting from careful analysis to intuitive leap seemingly for no reason, always thinking outside the proverbial box. As the Izzet see it, unpredictable action, far from being antithetical to methodical research, has experimental value. In the words of one researcher, “The only action worth taking is one with an unknown outcome.”
As Ravnica descends into increasing turmoil, the Izzet have further intensified their frenetic research, though now their efforts are mainly directed toward one outcome: the development of super-weapons. The suspicion that festers in the mind of the Izzet guildmaster, the ancient dragon Niv-Mizzet, urges him to push his guild’s research toward increasingly dangerous and volatile experimentation.

Public Agenda

For the rest of the guild members, the search for bigger and better weapons is mainly an opportunity to engage in all sorts of wild research while abandoning all outward pretense of safety or reason. Much of the guild’s laboratory space has been converted into testing grounds that are capable of withstanding great discharges of magical energy.

Type

Corporation, Research & Development

Leader

Niv Mizzet

Location

Nivix

Controlled Territories

• Nivix

Notable Members

• Niv Mizzet