The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Decks (July 23-29, 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 spice for Standard, Explorer, and Pioneer! What sweet brews 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

First up in Standard, we've got an interesting deck built around Eater of Virtue from Curran L. Eater of Virtue itself is a super-unique equipment, starting off as a legendary Bonesplitter but stealing abilities from the creatures it equips as they die until it eventually becomes very above the curve. The idea of Curran's deck is to use Fighter Class to find Eater of Virtue and start equipping it to creatures with abilities like Fleetfoot Dancer, Lizard Blades, and Fang of Shigeki. As the game goes along, those creatures will naturally die to opposing removal spells or in combat (we can also wrath them away with Doomskar in a pinch). Then, the next creature we equip will be even better, sort of making Eater of Virtue a weird build-your-own Soulflayer that's legal in Standard!

Explorer

We did a viewer battle stream last week, and one of the decks we played against was a really sweet Yidaro, Wandering Monster brew from xgolt01! Yidaro, Wandering Monster is a really interesting card. It's fine as a seven-mana 8/8 trample, haste, but it becomes pretty absurd if we can get it for just two mana by cycling it a few times. The problem is that drawing four copies just isn't very likely, but xgold01 has a plan for this: cards like Kolaghan's Command and Omen of the Dead that can get Yidaro back from the graveyard at instant speed. When we cycle Yidaro, Wandering Monster, it will put a trigger on the stack to shuffle into our library, which gives us a window to cast an instant-speed Raise Dead effect to put it back into our hand. This allows us to cycle the same copy multiple times until we eventually hit the fourth cycle and get a free 8/8 trample, haste! The deck in practice actually looks very solid when seeing it work, in part because it's built off the solid foundation of Rakdos Midrange and in part because the Yidaro plan actually worked and killed us by surprise! 

A while ago, we played Widespread Thieving in our Standard Meeting of the Five deck, and it might have been the most impressive card in the list. Well, now, NobleRooster has a sweet plan for taking advantage of the card in Explorer: Song of Creation! Song of Creation itself is an incredibly powerful card-advantage engine, drawing two cards whenever we cast a spell, but it has a problem: you need mana to keep casting spells and drawing cards. This is where Widespread Thieving comes in. The deck is overloaded with multicolor cards, so Widespread Thieving will make a Treasure when we cast them, which, combined with Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy's mana-producing power (doubling up our Treasure mana), makes many of the spells in our deck free. Some spells, like Flower // Flourish and Incubation // Incongruity, will actually generate mana if we have Kinnan and Thieving on the battlefield. The idea is that once we get things set up, we should be able to draw through our entire deck with Song of Creation until we eventually win with Thassa's Oracle. The main challenge with decks like this is finding our combo pieces—we're playing a lot of underpowered cards if we don't have Song of Creation and / or Widespread Thieving. While Commune with Spirits should help find our enchantments, I'm not sure just how consistent the deck is. But what I do know is that it will be spectacular when it goes off!

Pioneer

Meanwhile, in Pioneer proper (although it is worth mentioning that the deck is also legal in Explorer on Arena), Stone Stokes is looking to fizzle some negative enters-the-battlefield triggers with Tocatli Honor Guard and Hushbringer in 8-Hush. The idea is that if we can stick either of our Hushbringer effects, we can play things like Clackbridge Troll without giving the opponent tokens, Hunted Nightmare without giving an opposing creature death touch and Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger as a two-mana 6/6 without having to sacrifice and escape it into play from the graveyard. We might also get some extra value by shutting down our opponent's enters-the-battlefield triggers, considering cards like Cavalier of Thorns, Crackling Drake, Rattlechains, and Meteor Golem are all among the 25 most played creatures in the format. The rest of the deck is mostly dedicated to protecting our Hushbringers with things like Selfless Spirit and Alseid of Life's Bounty because the blowout potential of having a Hushbringer die with something like Clackbridge Troll on the stack is pretty high. The end result is a super-unique take on Mardu Midrange that seems like it should be pretty powerful when the plan comes to fruition!

We played an Unexpected Results deck in Modern a long time ago, and while the results were, well, unexpected, it was super fun and actually somewhat competitive. Well, now, Kevin D.'s looking to bring the four-mana sorcery to Pioneer! The idea is simple: ramp into Unexpected Results and hope for the best. Since our deck has a ton of expensive finishers like Omniscience, Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, and Genesis Ultimatum (among others), the odds aren't that bad that we'll hit something huge that will essentially win the game on its own. If we whiff, we'll hopefully hit a land, which will ramp us into hard-casting our finishers and also let us spin again with Unexpected Results. On the other hand, the deck has a handful of whiffs, like Elvish Mystic, Opt, and Turn the Earth, so we'll be sad and probably lose if those end up as our Unexpected Results. But in general, the math is in favor of us either hitting something good or having Unexpected Results return to our hand from hitting a land. The deck looks super fun if you want to embrace the chaos, and it could even be pretty strong with a bit of luck!

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. Make sure to let me know in the comments if you have an idea for how to improve these decks, and leave a link there as well if you want your own deck considered for a future Fish Tank (or email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com). As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.