these colors contain the most potent enablers and payoffs for the archetype (there arent really any green Young Pyromancers or white Treasure Cruises, for example)
Cost 1 Cards 3x Captain Hook, Forceful Duelist 3x Develop Your Brain 3x Fire The Cannons
Foil treatment was added to plenty of low-rarity cards
With this in mind, lets dig into the decks themselves
Izzet Phoenix 4 Fiery Impulse 4 Riverglide Pathway 4 Spirebluff Canal 4 Steam Vents 4 Treasure Cruise 4 Picklock Prankster 4 Arclight Phoenix 4 Consider 4 Ledger Shredder 4 Sleight of Hand 4 Opt 4 Lightning Axe 3 Island 2 Hall of Storm Giants 2 Spell Pierce 1 Otawara, Soaring City 1 Stormcarved Coast 1 Galvanic Iteration 1 Temporal Trespass 1 Proft's Eidetic Memory 3 Mystical Dispute 2 Brotherhood's End 2 Crackling Drake 2 Young Pyromancer 2 Thing in the Ice 1 Ashiok, Dream Render 1 Negate 1 Brazen Borrower 1 Aether Gust Izzet Phoenix, with a 14.8% share of the winner's metagame, is the obvious deck to beat in Pioneer after the bans
The pull rates back then for these cards were incredibly tough and there was even a limitation of only one Gold Star card per competitive deck at the time