The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Decks (February 27-March 5, 2022)

Welcome back to The Fish Tank, the series where we sneak a peek at sweet viewer-submitted decks and maybe, with our powers combined, turn them into real, fun, playable lists! This week, we've got decklists for Standard, Historic, and Modern! What spice did you all send in? Let's find out. Oh yeah, if you want your deck considered for next week's edition of The Fish Tank, leave a link in the comments, or you can email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.

Standard

One of my biggest criticisms of the new Shrines of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is that "Shrine" looks like a creature type, but it's an enchantment type in reality, and the new Shrines don't have a creature type at all. Rather than complaining, Towan is looking to use this rules quirk to their advantage with Volo's Shriney Mirror Box! Volo, Guide to Monsters is a powerful card, copying each creature we play as long as we don't already have a creature of the same type. Since Shrines don't have a creature type, we can cast as many of them as we want and always get a copy. Of course, the new Shrines are legendary, which presents a problem, but thankfully, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty offers a solution: Mirror Box. We can play Mirror Box first to eliminate the legend rule, follow it up with Volo, Guide to Monsters, and then quickly build an overwhelming board of creature-type-less Shrines! Is the plan competitive? Maybe not, but it is hilarious and should be pretty spectacular when it goes off! 

Historic

Last week, Fires of Invention returned to Pioneer in nerfed form, costing one more mana, and Pie4man's already brewing around the enchantment with Ral Fires. The good news is that the deck looks very powerful, with a bunch of strong planeswalkers, good creatures, and even a companion in Keruga, the Macrosage. The bad news is that its main plan for winning the game is casting Ral, Storm Conduit to copy Karn's Temporal Sundering in order to bounce multiple permanents and take two extra turns. And there's nothing players love more than decks looking to chain together extra-turn spells (shout-out to Nexus of Fate and Alrund's Epiphany for ruining turns decks for many players). Still, from a competitive perspective, Ral Fires looks like a really solid Fires of Invention build, so it seems like a good place to start if you're looking to try out the enchantment!

Also in Historic, StoneRainProductions is brewing around The Reality Chip. The goal is to reconfigure The Reality Chip so we can play from the top of our library, Future Sight style, and then hopefully churn through our entire deck with the help of Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain to draw cards as well as Mox Amber and Enthusiastic Mechanaut for mana. If we have Sai, Master Thopterist on the battlefield, we'll make an absurd number of Thopters as we cast all of our artifacts. If that isn't enough to win, we've got a literal storm kill with Grapeshot! The deck looks like an absolute blast when it goes off, although it might be a bit weak to removal, especially if the removal prevents us from getting The Reality Chip attached to a creature so we can play cards from our library. But the big turns it offers when the stars align should be a sight to behold!

Modern

First up in Modern, we have a deck from Audrick Mochel that's built around one of my favorite sleeper picks from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty in Anchor to Reality. Tinker is one of the most broken cards in the history of Magic, and even though Anchor to Reality is definitely a fixed version, costing an additional mana and only tutoring up vehicles and equipment, it still has the potential to be quite powerful in the right deck. The idea is that we can play cheap mana-producing artifacts like Gold Myr and Silver Myr on Turn 2; then, on Turn 3, we can Anchor to Reality and grab something like Kaldra Compleat, Elbrus, the Binding Blade (which we can equip for just one mana once its on the battlefield), or Parhelion II (which is a bit risky because we'd need a way to crew it). Backing up Anchor to Reality are Stoneforge Mystic and Arcum Dagsson, as additional ways to tutor up our finishers. While I really like the idea of the deck, I do think it could be improved a bit. I'm not really sold on Barbed Spike or Servo Exhibition. They just don't seem very impactful in a format as strong as Modern. Replacing them with some sort of removal or interaction seems wise. But the deck looks really fun in general and, with a bit of tuning, might be pretty powerful too!

Meanwhile, in Modern, eg_ville has a really fun combo brew built around everyone's favorite overrated Commander equipment, Sunforger! The main goal is to equip Sunforger for free, either to Fervent Champion or to anything else with the help of Puresteel Paladin and metalcraft. For our combo to work, we need Sunforger, a way to equip it for free, and four mana. This allows us to equip Sunforger, remove it to cast a Repeated Reverberation from our deck, re-equip Sunforger for free, and remove it to tutor an Unexpected Windfall from our deck. Unexpected Windfall will be copied twice thanks to Repeated Reverberation, drawing us some cards but also, more importantly, making six Treasure tokens, which amounts to three more Sunforger activations. At this point, we use Sunforger to tutor up two more copies of Repeated Reverberation and then a Lightning Bolt. Thanks to all of the Repeated Reverberations, we'll end up with seven Lightning Bolts, enough to throw 21 damage at our opponent's face. If this isn't exciting enough, we can just keep tutoring up Repeated Reverberations and Unexpected Windfalls until we draw our entire deck and then tutor up Lightning Storm to close out the game! The biggest weakeners of the deck seems to be removal. Our plan fizzles if our opponent can keep Fervent Champion and Puresteel Paladin off of the battlefield, but it makes up for this by being both fast (winning on Turn 3 or 4) and consistent thanks to all of the tutoring. We might have to try this one on stream or for Much Abrew because the idea is really sweet!

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. Thanks to everyone who sent in decks this week! If you have a deck you want to be considered for next week's Fish Tank, make sure to leave a link in the comments, or you can email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com. If you have some ideas on how to improve this week's decks, make sure to leave them in the comments too!