The Fish Tank: Commander Edition (January 9-15, 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! As you might have heard, this week, we were taking submissions for a viewer-submitted-deck episode of Commander Clash. One of the hardest parts of viewer-submitted week is that we get a ton of cool decks but can each only choose one to play. Well, today, we're going to have our first-ever Commander-only edition of The Fish Tank so I can show off some of the sweet Commander lists all of you sent in!
One reason I don't do more Commander decks on The Fish Tank is that I find it difficult to break down a 100-card singleton deck, often with a bunch of cool synergies and plans, into one paragraph. As such, I'm not going to bother to even try to write about this week's decks in-depth. Instead, I will just share the general theme and anything that immediately jumps out as important. If you like the idea of a Commander-focused The Fish Tank, let me know in the comments, and maybe we can do it more often. 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!
Commander
One of my favorite sub-archetypes of Commander decks is a popular theme shifted to a strange color combination. Reanimator is super popular in Commander, but most reanimator decks are black-based since you get all of the most efficient reanimation spells and tutors like Entomb. TubaPride90 is reanimating with a Boros deck led by Hofri Ghostforge. White has a surprisingly amount of reanimation, and while it's not as efficient as black reanimation, it's good enough to build a deck around; plus, cards like Avacyn, Angel of Hope, Gisela, Blade of Goldnight, and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite are really solid reanimation targets!
Yarok, the Desecrated is my all-time favorite commander. I've played it a bunch of different times. But Pie4man has a unique take on Yarok that I've never seen before: Yarok Enchantress! Since Yarok, the Desecrated doubles up anything that triggers from a permanent entering the battlefield, it gives us a way to double up constellation abilities like Eidolon of Blossoms, Doomwake Giant, and Setessan Champion as well as some interesting enchantments like the Trial cycle (see Trial of Ambition and Trial of Knowledge), the Omen cycle, and more! While it's weird to see an Enchantress deck with almost zero creatures with enters-the-battlefield triggers, the constellation enchantress plan actually looks really powerful and super fun!
Speaking of enchantments, rmpimenta sent in a really cool five-color Saga deck—The Saga Never Ends—with Kenrith, the Returned King leading the way. The idea is to abuse and reuse Sagas in basically any ways possible, with cards like Hex Parasite and Chisei, Heart of Oceans to remove lore counters and reuse the best Saga abilities, Brago, King Eternal and Yorion, Sky Nomad to reset Sagas by blinking them, Ghen, Arcanum Weaver to reanimate Sagas once they leave the battlefield, and some enchantresses like Sythis, Harvest's Hand and Mesa Enchantress to draw cards as Sagas enter the battlefield.
Meanwhile, Tlur sent in a mono-red deck that I wanted to show off, mostly because I don't think I've ever seen a Zalto, Fire Giant Duke deck in Commander. The idea seems to be to make Zalto indestructible and then damage it a bunch of times with things like Cunning Sparkmage, Pyrohemia, and Kumano, Master Yamabushi to venture through dungeons swiftly. There's also a pseudo-Storm plan to generate a ton of Treasure tokens, which I assume we will use to ping Zalto, Fire Giant Duke even more to win with our dungeon venturing. Looking at the list, I feel like there's probably an infinite combo or two that I'm overlooking. If you can find one, let me know in the comments!
Finally, we have the ultimate Commander Clash meme deck—Clash On Tribal!—a deck from bosmadsen that's built around the literal clash mechanic. If you're not familiar with clash, don't worry—it's a very forgettable mechanic, offering you a reward when you resolve a spell and the top card of your library has a higher mana value than the top card of an opponent's library does. The main plan for winning the game is actually an old Legacy trick: getting Omniscience on the battlefield (maybe with Show and Tell), putting a super-expensive card on the top of your library (like Commit // Memory or Connive // Concoct) to be able to win the clash, and then casting Release the Ants for free a ton of times until you burn the entire table out of the game!
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.
