The Fish Tank: Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Edition (October 3-9, 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, our focus is on new Innistrad: Midnight Hunt decks! What shenanigans do the new cards enable? 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
Slogurk, the Overslime is one of the more unique build-arounds from Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, and Regolith has the perfect combo piece to support it in Standard: Nahiri's Lithoforming! The idea is to stick a Slogurk, sacrifice all of our lands to Nahiri's Lithoforming, grow Slogurk, the Overslime into a massive threat, and draw a bunch of cards. Backing up Slogurk are a bunch of landfall payoffs for Nahiri's Lithoforming, ranging from Brushfire Elemental to hit for a ton of damage to Valakut Exploration for more card advantage and damage and Lotus Cobra to ramp into our top-end threats like Wrenn and Seven and Alrund's Epiphany.
There are two big reasons why I wanted to show off DistrurbedCannon's Orzhov Hush Puppies deck (not including the name, which is perfect for the deck). On level one, Orzhov Hush Puppies is basically a black-white Werewolf-ish deck, which is pretty unique considering that most Werewolf decks are green-based for Tovolar, Dire Overlord. However, the most interesting part of the deck is Revel in Silence. Not only does the Standard Silence give us a way to stop big Alrund's Epiphany turns (at least, temporarily), but it also works really well with daybound / nightbound Werewolves. Since the new Werewolves only care about players casting spells during their own turn, we can Revel in Silence our opponent on their upkeep to ensure our opponent doesn't cast any spells and then flip our Werewolves to their more powerful nightbound side; then, during our turn, we can (hopefully) cast two spells to flip them back. If we have another Revel in Silence, we can do it again the next turn! The tech of Revel in Silence in Werewolves is really interesting. While I'm not sure whether more traditional Gruul Werewolves decks can take advantage of it because of its double-white mana cast, if the mana could work, it could be quite powerful in the current meta!
Pioneer
Meanwhile, in Pioneer, SirEklz is working with Old Stickfingers in a graveyard value deck. The main "combo" of the deck is using Old Stickfingers to grow Fiend Artisan, giving us two massive two-mana threats to use to win the game. We've also got plenty of backup ways to fill the graveyard, like Stitcher's Supplier and Satyr Wayfinder to help grow our payoffs. The other really cute aspect of the deck is that since Old Stickfingers is technically just two mana, we can play Lurrus of the Dream-Den as a companion. Usually, Lurrus decks are built around small, efficient permanents because of its mana-value restriction, but in Golgari Stickfingers, we're playing two-mana 5/5s and 10/10s once the deck gets going. Plus, we're not just playing Lurrus of the Dream-Den because we can—it actually works incredibly well with the deck's theme since we're all about filling our graveyard as quickly as possible. While graveyard hate like Leyline of the Void is a concern, the deck looks really powerful and fun as long as our graveyard remains online!
Modern
Meanwhile, in Modern, Curb Bros has a really sweet new take on Mono-Green Devotion built around Storm the Festival. In the early game, the idea is to add green mana symbols to the battlefield, mostly in the form of ramp, like Utopia Sprawl, Arbor Elf, and Noble Hierarch. Eventually, we'll find Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx to make a bunch of mana. This is where things get pretty crazy thanks to Storm the Festival, which we can cast to find things like Garruk Wildspeaker (to untap Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx and flashback Storm the Festival), Nissa, Who Shakes the World, and Nissa, Vital Force. Mono-Green Devotion seems like the perfect Modern home for Festival, mostly because the best cards in the deck are lands (like Nykthos) or planeswalkers, which we can't hit with something like Collected Company. My only question for the deck is whether we really want spells like Abundant Harvest or Explore. While both cards are solid, they don't add green mana symbols to the battlefield to support Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, which seems like a problem. Either way, Storm the Festival seems really sweet in Mono-Green Devotion, and I'm excited to try it out sometime soon!
Last but not least, we have a really unique take on Poppet Stitcher from Tim G. The deck looks really strange—you don't see cards like Myr Sire all that often in Modern decks—but the plan seems pretty solid and, outside of some expensive dual lands, very budget-friendly. The main goal is to flood the board with tokens as quickly as possible, from things like Young Pyromancer and Poppet Stitcher, tricks like sacrificing Myr Sire to Kuldotha Rebirth (which makes more than enough tokens to flip Poppet Stitcher all by itself), escaping Satyr's Cunning (which is especially sweet with a Poppet Stitcher or Young Pyromancer on the battlefield), and Hard Evidence. Once we build up a big board of tokens, we can flip Poppet Stitcher, turn all the small tokens into 3/3s, and potentially kill our opponent in one attack! Personally, I'd be most excited for the deck as a budget build with cheaper dual lands—the non-land cards are so cheap that it's hard to pass up the opportunity to make the deck budget, although the more untapped dual lands you have, the better your deck will be.
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.
