The Fish Tank: Dominaria United Week (October 1-7, 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 sweet brews for Standard and all the way back to Pioneer! 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
When The Phasing of Zhalfir was spoiled, I thought it was unplayable in Standard, but I apparently wasn't thinking about it hard enough because Roshel K. has a really sweet brew built around the saga. The goal is to flood the board with small tokens from cards like Join the Dance, Wedding Announcement, and Resolute Reinforcements and then use The Phasing of Zhalfir to upgrade them to 2/2s while presumably downgrading the bigger threats on our opponent's side of the battlefield to little Phyrexians. But it actually gets even better. The real goal is to play Rite of Harmony the turn when The Phasing of Zhalfir blows up the board so we can draw a new hand of cards from all of the Phyrexian tokens entering the battlefield! While I'm not sure how the deck will hold up against The Meathook Massacre, which can be brutal against decks looking to go wide with small creatures, it is—by far—the best looking The Phasing of Zhalfir deck I've seen for Standard, and it seems like it should be super fun to play!
Speaking of tokens in Standard, pricerange has a very different plan: turn real creatures into 1/1 Frog tokens with Croaking Counterpart. The main idea is to get a Poppet Stitcher on the battlefield and then copy it a few times with Croaking Counterpart, which will let us build a massive board of 2/2 Zombies as we sling out other spells with Poppet Stitcher's ability. Eventually, we'll flip our Poppet Stitchers and win by beating down with a huge board of 3/3s!
Last but not least in Standard, we have a sweet budget deck from Potatobrik built around turning lands into creatures and sending them to the air with Tatyova, Steward of Tides! While Tatyova, Steward of Tides can turn lands into creatures itself, this is more of a late-game plan since we need seven lands on the battlefield before Tatyova will start triggering. Thankfully, we've got a bunch of other ways to animate our lands, like Primal Adversary, Llanowar Loamspeaker, and Harmonious Emergence and Crackling Emergence. While the deck does look fun, and it's super cheap to put together, I do have one suggestion: the Streets of New Capenna common fetch lands seem perfect for the deck, giving us multiple land drops for our landfall synergies like Tatyova, Steward of Tides and Roaring Earth and also filling our graveyard with lands for Splendid Reclamation!
Historic
Meanwhile, in Historic, Johnny R. has a really unique take on superfriends built around Displacer Kitten and read-ahead Sagas. The main goal is to play a planeswalker or two and then use Displacer Kitten to keep resetting Urza Assembles the Titans for digging, ramp, and extra planeswalker activations as well as The Cruelty of Gix to tutor and reanimate. Eventually, this should let us overwhelm our opponent with planeswalker value! One possible addition to the deck is Mox Amber. With Displacer Kitten, Teferi, Time Raveler, and Mox Ambers, we can generate infinite mana and draw our deck by casting a Mox Amber to trigger Displacer Kitten in order to blink Teferi, Time Raveler, which can then bounce the Mox to draw a card and repeat the process. (If we happen to have Sheoldred, the Apocalypse on the battlefield, we'd also gain an absurd amount of life along the way.) Either way, the synergy of Displacer Kitten, Sagas, and planeswalkers looks super sweet!
Pioneer
In Pioneer, Nate W.'s going to Value Town with Wizards! One of the most interesting parts of the Wizard tribe is that we can do pretty much everything with creatures thanks to the absurd number of enters-the-battlefield triggers the tribe gets. This is nice because it allows us to play Thalia, Guardian of Thraben with no downside, to help slow down control and combo. Need removal? Deputy of Detention, Reflector Mage, and Ertai Resurrected. Card draw? Gadwick, the Wizened and Elite Guardmage. How about a counterspell? Obscura Interceptor and Ertai Resurrected. Once we build up a big battlefield, we can even use Eldrazi Displacer to blink our Wizards to reuse whatever ETB trigger is best for the situation. I'm not sure just how good the deck is against the top tier of the Pioneer meta, although Pioneer Wizards looks like a blast if you like creature-heavy tempo decks. If you're looking for even more fun, I might consider throwing in a copy or two of Naban, Dean of Iteration as a Wizard Panharmonicon, to get even more value from our endless enters-the-battlefield triggers.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today! Thanks to everyone who sent in their sweet and spicy brews! If you want your own deck considered for the next edition of The Fish Tank, leave a link in the comments, or you can email me the deck at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
