The Fish Tank: Dominaria United Week (October 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're bouncing around from Pioneer all the way back to Legacy! 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.

Historic

Oracle of the Alpha is a flashy card. Shuffling the Power Nine into your deck is an exciting ability, and a bunch of people have sent me brews built around the card. The problem with Oracle of the Alpha is that the Power Nine get shuffled into your deck rather than ending up in your hand, which means you might not ever draw them. Even if you do, is drawing a Mox Pearl or Mox Jet on Turn 4 or 5 really that helpful? Well, ccigog seems to have solved both of those problems with Cap'n Crunch, which combines Oracle of the Alpha with Song of Creation combo! The idea is to play Song of Creation and start casting zero-mana spells like Chamber Sentry, Ornithopter, Stonecoil Serpent, Tormod's Crypt, and Mox Amber to draw through our deck with Song of Creation. Assuming we played a Oracle of the Alpha first, this means we should be able to draw into the Power Nine cards. The somewhat underpowered (in the late game) Moxen become absurdly strong since they are additional zero-mana spells to trigger Song of Creation, helping us keep our combo going until we draw through our entire deck! To win the game, we can use our Moxen mana to cast a lethal Grapeshot. Or, if that won't work, we can use the Moxen to cast a Sai, Master Thopterist to turn on our Mox Ambers and make blue mana so we can cast Jace, Wielder of Mysteries and win with its static ability once we run out of cards! While the deck should have some awesome turns when it goes off, it does have a weakness: if we can't find or resolve Song of Creation, we won't do much of anything at all. While card filtering like Faithless Looting and Prismari Command help, it is worth keeping the importance of Song of Creation in mind if you decide to take the deck out for a spin and maybe even mulligan fairly aggressively to find it. Regardless, the ability to win with the literal Power Nine on Arena is pretty sweet!

Pioneer

One of the exciting changes to Magic in recent days was the Surveil errata, turning cards with unkeyworded Surveil like Consider into actual Surveil cards. Why does this change matter? Well, a few cards in Magic specifically trigger based on surveiling, like Enhanced Surveillance. Fb51 is looking to take advantage of this change with a surveil-heavy pseudo-Dredge Arclight Phoenix deck for Pioneer! The goal is to fill the graveyard as quickly as possible and hopefully mill over cards like Narcomoeba, Prized Amalgam, and Arclight Phoenix, which come back from the graveyard for free. While we can do this with mill cards like Merfolk Secretkeeper, the main plan is to use Enhanced Surveillance, which increases our surveils by two every time we surveil, along with some new surveil cards like Consider (which can now mill three cards with the help of Enhanced Surveillance) and Otherworldly Gaze (which now surveils five cards deep!). When things go well, we should be able to build a massive board for free early in the game and then finish our opponent off with some free damage from Creeping Chill, although it is worth pointing out that graveyard hate more or less ruins our deck. Still, the new surveil cards massively power up the deck, and it looks like it should be a blast to play and maybe even competitive, assuming we can dodge the hate!

Modern

One of the weird twists of the Modern format is that the Commander all-star Cabal Coffers has developed into a legitimate card in the format since being released in Modern Horizons 2. But, brandonsempire has a really sweet prison-y take on a Cabal Coffers list in Mono-Black Prison! The idea is to slow the game down early with prison pieces like Chalice of the Void and Trinisphere along with plenty of removal and discard. Eventually, we'll find (or tutor up with Profane Tutor) Cabal Coffers and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth to make oodles of mana, which we can use to cast big finishers like Sundering Titan or Possessed Portal after tutoring them from our sideboard with Karn, the Great Creator. If you'd like to take the spicier path to victory, we can use our Coffers mana to literally curse our opponent out of the game! We can use Curse of Misfortunes to tutor up our other Curses, with Curse of Death's Hold and Overwhelming Splendor giving us an additional lock. With both on the battlefield, we essentially lock our opponent's creatures out of the game by making them 1/1s and then giving them –1/–1! Then, we can find Cruel Reality to drain our helpless opponent out of the game since they won't have any creatures to sacrifice. If you like Prison-style decks but also ramping, Mono-Black Prison looks like a blast to play, and your opponent should be absolutely miserable when it works! 

Meanwhile, in Modern, Anguepa has a really spicy take on Zombies featuring Mirrorweave: Zombieweave! At a glance, the deck looks like a weird take on Zombie tribal, with cards like Champion of the Perished to grow as we play our Zombies, Diregraf Captain as a lord, and Plague Belcher as a Blood Artist–style payoff. But the real plan is a lot sneakier: we're trying to build a big board of Zombies with the help of our actual tribe members and decayed Zombie tokens from Jadar, Ghoulcaller of Nephalia and Rotten Reunion and then turn all of our creatures into a Diregraf Captain or Plague Belcher, letting us swing in for a huge attack. If our opponent doesn't block, we should be able to win with combat damage, and if they do block, then we should be able to win by draining our opponent out of the game with a bunch of Diregraf Captain triggers!

Legacy

In Legacy, we have a spicy take on Storm from ExtraMSG in PITA Mastery! The main goal is to use Mizzix's Mastery to cast Peer into the Abyss on the cheap from the graveyard to draw half of our deck, which should give us more than enough fuel to finish storming off with fast mana and rituals and win the game with Tendrils of Agony. There are also some neat synergies in the deck, like the discard of Gamble potentially being an upside since we want cards in our graveyard anyway to cast with Mizzix's Mastery. With the best draws and enough fast mana, the deck can theoretically win on Turn 1, which is pretty absurd! If you like the idea of storming off but are looking for a spicier way to achieve that goal, PITA Mastery looks like a really fun way to go about it, at least on Magic Online, where it only costs $263, rather than $5,000 in paper.

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.