The Fish Tank: Ikoria Edition (April 19-25, 2020)
Welcome back to The Fish Tank, the series where we peek at sweet viewer-submitted decks and maybe, with our powers combined, turn them into real, fun, playable lists! This week, we're right in the middle of Ikoria spoilers, and people seem hyped to build around the new set, so we'll be focusing exclusively on decks featuring Ikoria cards! Oh yeah, and to have your own deck considered for next week's edition (and for our Fishbowl Thursday Instant Deck Tech), make sure to leave a link in the comments or email them to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
Standard
While companions and mutate have overshadowed the return of cycling, Juan Pablo R. has a sweet cycling-themed deck that doesn't just look fun but is also incredibly inexpensive, with zero rares or mythics and a total cost of about $15! The deck's main goal is to cycle as many cards as possible, which grows Flourishing Fox, pings with Drannith Stinger, and gains us life with Drannith Healer. Eventually, we can get enough cycling cards in our graveyard that Zenith Flare will represent 20 or more damage, killing our opponent for just four mana! While the deck looks a bit strange (especially having just 14 lands), it's hard to go wrong when the cost is so low!
When I first saw Illuna, Apex of Wishes, it seemed like a solid value-generating midrange threat, but I completely missed its combo potential. Well, Connor M. didn't. The way Illuna, Apex of Wishes is worded, if you can mutate it with no non-land permanents in your deck, you exile your entire library. Why would we want to exile our library? Thassa's Oracle, of course! The plan of Illuna combo is to use Shared Summons to find our one copy of Thassa's Oracle and one Illuna, Apex of Wishes—the only two non-land permanents in our deck—and then mutate Illuna onto a token from Stolen by the Fae or Honor the God-Pharaoh to exile our entire deck and win with Thassa's Oracle! The downside of our plan, of course, if that if things go wrong, we could risk losing on the spot (similarly to Dimir Inverter in Modern), although this hasn't stopped Inverter of Truth from developing into a Pioneer staple. I have no idea just how good the deck is, but it is super unique and takes advantage of an aspect of Illuna, Apex of Wishes that most people probably missed!
Everyone is trying to figure out the best way of comboing off with Song of Creation, but DETHTAX offers a really unique take on the deck for Standard. While Thassa's Oracle is still the win condition, rather than trying to play as many cheap or free spells as possible to power up Song of Creation, Storm of Creation is trying to tap and untap creatures that make multiple mana, like Incubation Druid and Faeburrow Elder. Once we have a mana dork that taps for three mana, cards like Claim the Firstborn, Stony Strength, and Sudden Spinnerets suddenly become Standard-legal versions of Dark Ritual that also do a good Divination impression, assuming we have a Song of Creation on the battlefield. The end result should be that we draw our entire deck (while also making semi-infinite mana) and then win with Thassa's Oracle or by discarding all of the cards we draw to Channeled Force for a huge chunk of damage at our opponent's face. While creature removal is a problem, Claim the Firstborn is key since it not only untaps a creature but also gives it haste, which potentially lets us combo off from an empty board all in one turn! While I'm not sure how competitive the deck will be, mostly because removal spells seem so brutal against our primary plan, when it wins, it will win big!
There is more than one way to build a cycling deck in Standard! Unlike the budget cycling deck we looked at a minute ago, Karnatheon's Turtle deck is on the more controlling end of the cycling scale. The main game plan is to use removal to stabilize the board in the early game, hopefully after sticking a nOminous Seas on Turn 2 to start building up counters toward an eventual 8/8 Kraken, and then start cycling Yidaro, Wandering Monsters until we are eventually getting 8/8 hasty tramplers for free! The other key card in the deck is Rielle, the Everwise, which doubles the card draw from cycling while also adding some extra power to cards like Thrill of Possibility, Chemister's Insight, and Radical Idea. All of this extra card draw helps us make 8/8 Krakens with Ominous Seas faster and more often, hopefully allowing us to overwhelm our opponent with massive creatures. In general, the combination of removal, payoffs, and card draw makes the deck look like it should be fairly consistent and maybe even pretty powerful, especially considering it's fairly inexpensive (especially on Magic Arena). If you're a fan of cycling or just 8/8s (of which the deck has a ton), it's probably worth testing, at the very least!
Modern
Perhaps rather than Ikoria week, it's actually just Song of Creation week! James M. comes through with another build of Song of Creation, this one for Modern. Here, the main idea is to use creatures that are mana-neutral (Wild Cantor, Burning-Tree Emissary, and Priest of Urabrask all make as much mana as they cost) and Runaway Steam-Kin as a super-repeatable ritual to power through our deck with Song of Creation, with free spells like Manamorphose and Gut Shot backing up our plan. Then, after we draw our entire deck and have a massive board of janky creatures, we haste them all up with Reckless Bushwhacker and win the game with a big attack! While the deck looks super fun and like it should be competitive enough to win some games (in spectacular fashion), I do wonder if free creatures like Memnite and Ornithopter could be better than Lava Dart or Gut Shot. With Memnite and Ornithopter in the mix (possible with some more Bushwhackers), it seems like we could have a pretty solid backup plan of beating down like a weird 8 Whack deck while still having crazy combo turns with Song of Creation.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for this week! If you have any ideas on how to improve these decks, make sure to let us know in the comments, and if you have a deck you want to be considered for a future Fish Tank, leave that there as well! Thanks to everyone who sent in decks this week! 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.
