The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Submitted Decks (November 7-13, 2021)
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 a bunch of sweet Standard and Modern decks, including a few brews with new Innistrad: Crimson Vow cards! What craziness did you all send in? Let's find out! Oh yeah, if you want one of your decks considered for next week's Fish Tank, make sure to leave it in the comments, or email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com, and your deck could be featured next week!
Standard
First up in Standard is one of the sweetest takes on Standard Mill that I've seen, from quilljoy! What makes the deck so interesting is that, along with the good blue mill spells (Ruin Crab, Maddening Cacophony, and Tasha's Hideous Laughter), the deck reaches into red for some cards that aren't normally thought of as mill spells but do help empty the opponent's library, like You Find Some Prisoners and Tibalt's Trickery! Technically, You Find Some Prisoners mills three cards while also giving you one of those cards to cast, while Tibalt's Trickery is a hilarious answer to cards like Alrund's Epiphany that also puts somewhere between one and three cards into the opponent's graveyard from their library. I have no idea how well the deck lines up with the current meta, but I will say that it looks like a blast to play and features a bunch of really cool cards that normally don't show up in Standard decks.
Death's Shadow in Standard? WonderousIdeals thinks it's possible, thanks to some new Crimson Vow cards! The idea is to use Cemetery Gatekeeper and Graf Reaver, as good threats that can help lower not just the opponent's life total but ours as well, which in turns grows Scourge of the Skyclaves into the biggest two-drop in the format! Backing up our two-are also have Agadeem's Awakening and Shatterskull Smashing to Lightning Bolt our own face (and helpfully grow our Standard-legal Death's Shadow) and Infernal Grasp in our removal suite! While I'm not sold on Dread Fugue in Standard, in general, the deck looks super aggressive and solidly built! If you're looking for a very different take on aggro in Standard, Rakdos Death's Shadow seems worth testing, at the very least!
Last but not least, we have a sweet Crimson Vow build from Halfwing (who always send in sweet brews around set-release time): Azorius Dolls! Dollhouse of Horrors is one of the Crimson Vow cards I'm most excited to brew around, and Azorius seems like a really solid color combination to take advantage of it. The Celestus, Faithful Mending, and Devoted Grafkeeper help us fill the graveyard; then, we can reanimate cards like Elite Spellbinder and Skyclave Apparition, which are almost as powerful as 1/1 Construct tokens as they are in their original form. While there are a bunch of possible ways to build around Dollhouse of Horrors, Azorius Dolls seems like a really fun, solid starting point for our new Standard format!
Modern
Void Mirror has quickly developed into a popular sideboard card in Modern since it shuts down free spells like Living End and Crashing Footfalls, along with taxing evoke Elementals like Grief, Solitude, and Fury, all of which are super popular in the format. Townsee takes Void Mirror a couple of steps further, not just playing it in the main deck but also building around it! Esper Void is, in some sense, an Esper control deck, although many of its choices are designed to power up its namesake artifact, Void Mirror. With a Void Mirror on the battlefield, Delay becomes an upgraded Counterspell (since when our opponent casts the spell that's suspended, Void Mirror will counter it), and Suspend really does become the blue Swords to Plowshares. Void Mirror also erases the drawback of Spell Queller: even if our opponent kills the three-drop, the spell underneath will get countered when the opponent tries to recast it! Toss in the fact that Void Mirror is a powerful hate card against several of the top decks in the meta even without extra shenanigans, and not only is the plan hilarious, but it might even be competitive!
Meanwhile, in Modern, Beebop has a pretty hilarious and (outside of Polluted Delta) budget-friendly Modern deck: UB Terraform. The idea is to turn the opponent's lands into less useful types with cards like Evil Presence, Sea's Claim, Contaminated Ground, and Spreading Seas. Assuming the opponent isn't a Dimir deck, we should be able to start color-screwing our opponent as soon as Turn 1 (according to Beebop, you should choose to play last with the deck so you can Evil Presence or Sea's Claim your opponent's first land drop). Then, we can use Genju of the Falls and Corrupted Zendikon to turn our opponent's Swamps and Islands into creatures so we can kill them with Fatal Push. Eventually, we win by beating down with a huge Nettlecyst, which should be massive thanks to all of our cheap enchantments messing with our opponent's lands. Of course, the deck does have one big problem: our plan falls apart if we run into an opponent that wants Islands and Swamps. Is UB Terraform competitive? Maybe not, but it is super unique, super funny, and, assuming you're willing to budgetize the mana base, super cheap too!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for this week! Do you have some ideas on how to improve the decks we looked at today? Let us know in the comments! Have a deck for next week? You can leave it in the comments too! Thanks to everyone who submitted lists this week, and as always, you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
