The Fish Tank: Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Edition (September 12-18, 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, mostly for post-rotation Standard. What craziness can we pull off in our new format? Let's find out! Oh yeah, we'll probably do another Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Fish Tank next week, so if you have a spicy list (for any format!) featuring a new Innistrad: Midnight Hunt card, 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
I've gotten quite a few Delver of Secrets submissions over the past couple of weeks, and while I'm a bit skeptical that the one-drop will be good in Standard this time around (last time Delver of Secrets was in Standard, it found a home in a deck that looked more like a Modern deck than a Standard deck, with Ponder, Mana Leak, Snapcaster Mage, Gitaxian Probe, and Restoration Angel), DrMfmango113's list is—by far—the most competitive looking I've seen so far. While we don't have a Ponder-like spell to set up our Delver flips, the deck has 31 spells, which means our odds of blind flipping Delver of Secrets is slightly over 50%, which is solid. The problem with needing so many spells to support Delver is that we don't have much room for creatures. But DrMfmango113 gets around this by playing Poppet Stitcher and Sedgemoor Witch—creatures that can make a huge board full of creatures by themselves as long as they stick on the battlefield. So even though we might not have a ton of creatures in an absolute sense, we can still build a massive board. Backing up our threats are all of the best cheap Grixis card draw and removal in the format! While I'm still not fully sold on Delver of Secrets being good in Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Standard, if it does end up working, it will likely be in a shell like this!
The combo of Moritte of the Frost and Harald Unites the Elves has been around for a while. The idea is that if we can get two Moritte of the Frosts in our hand or graveyard, we can play Harald Unites the Elves, mill some cards, and reanimate Moritte of the Frost to copy Harald Unites the Elves. The new version of the saga reanimates the second Moritte of the Frost (which legend rules the first one, putting it back in the graveyard) and again copies the saga to keep the loop going. Basically, the loop allows us to mill our entire deck. In the past, the deck typically won with Thassa's Oracle, but with Oracle (thankfully) rotating from Standard, we need a new plan for winning the game, and Halfwing has one! While there are a few finishers in the deck, the best is Willow Geist. If we can play it before we combo as we infinitely loop Moritte of the Frost from the graveyard, we'll make the one-drop infinitely big, which, combined with the Treefolk Spirit's trample, will allow us to swing in and win with a single attack. If we don't have Willow Geist, we can grow a massive Slogurk, the Overslime or Old Stickfingers as we mill our entire deck. In general, the biggest issue with Morrite Dredge is consistency. It's not always easy to find multiple Moritte of the Frosts and a copy of Harald Unites the Elves (although Old Stickfingers can help here too by getting copies of Moritte in the graveyard). But thanks to cards like Old Stickfingers and Slogurk, the Overslime, we have a decent-ish backup plan if we can't assemble the combo. Is Morrite Dredge a new tier-one Standard deck? Probably not, but it looks competitive enough to pick up some wins, and it should be absolutely hilarious and awesome when it goes off!
Lifegain has already been close to being good enough in Standard even with Throne of Eldraine in the format. Thanks to rotation and some sweet new additions from Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, it might finally be time for the archetype to compete in Standard. Hordrasea's build—Righteous Festival—looks to combine lifegain synergies with the Faceless Haven / The Book of Exalted Deeds combo and Storm the Festival, as an expensive but potentially powerful Collected Company. The idea is to use cards like Lunarch Veteran and Prosperous Innkeeper to gain life as we play creatures, which will allow us to scry through our deck with Trelasarra, Moon Dancer while also growing a massive threat. Eventually, we'll find Righteous Valkyrie to pump our team or The Book of Exalted Deeds to start making Angel tokens. It will be very interesting to see just how good The Book of Exalted Deeds combo ends up being in Innistrad Standard. While Field of Ruin gives decks an answer, we've seen decks all the way back to Pioneer using the combo, so it could still be pretty powerful, even with more hate in the format. If you like gaining life and locking opponents out of the game, Righteous Festival looks like a fun option for our new Standard format!
Historic
Meanwhile, in Historic, Lex S. is looking to combo off with the help of Vadrik, Astral Archmage. The goal is to play Vadrik, Astral Archmage and then use Sudden Breakthrough to grow it to three power, giving all of our instants and sorceries a three-mana discount. Once we get to this point, our most important card is Pirate's Pillage, which turns into a ritual. (We can cast it for one mana and get two mana back in the form of Treasure tokens, while also filtering through our deck.). Cards like Pirate's Prize, Geomancer's Gambit, Seize the Spoils, Introduction to Prophecy, and the backside of Wandering Archaic all turn into free card draw / filtering. Eventually, we'll draw through our entire deck, find our other copies of Sudden Breakthrough to further grow Vadrik, Astral Archmage's power, and then use our leftover Treasure mana to win the game, by chaining together copies of Magma Opus, casting a huge Torment of Hailfire, or tutoring Mizzix's Mastery from our sideboard with Wish to recast our graveyard and then using our flashed back Wish to grab Mind's Desire to play the rest of our deck! Basically, if we can play and pump a Vadrik, Astral Archmage with one mana available, the end result should be that we can play our entire deck and win the game, which is absurd! The only downside is that the deck is leaning really, really heavily on Vadrik. We have Incubation // Incongruity to help find it, which is nice, but if we don't find it (or if our opponent can kill it at instant speed), everything will fall apart, and we'll be left spinning our wheels. Regardless, the combo turns should be some of the most spectacular available in the Historic format!
Pioneer
One thing we've learned over the past couple of years is that if you can resolve Deathbellow War Cry in the right deck, you should win the game with Minotaur value. Suddenly dropping Rageblood Shaman, Neheb, Dreadhorde Champion, Neheb, the Eternal, and Moraug, Fury of Akoum onto the battlefield out of nowhere typically gets the job done. The only problem is that Deathbellow War Cry costs a massive eight mana, so getting to cast it definitely isn't fast or easy. NajeelaSwordFTW has a sweet new Pioneer plan for making the sorcery work: Vadrik, Astral Archmage. Without help, Vadrik, Astral Archmage basically is a bad Goblin Electromancer, although since it gives a cost reduction to instants and sorceries based on its power, it interacts really well with pump spells like Infuriate, Titan's Strength, and Invigorated Rampage. If we can play Vadrik, Astral Archmage and follow it up with something like Titan's Strength, we can get the cost of Deathbellow War Cry down to just four mana. With Invigorated Rampage, Deathbellow War Cry costs just three mana, which means we theoretically can play Vadrix on Turn 3, play a pump spell on Turn 4, and immediately cast Deathbellow War Cry for the win!
The downside of the deck is that it doesn't look all that consistent. Our only reasonable way to ramp into Deathbellow War Cry is Vadrik plus a pump spell, which, combined with being a three-piece combo, means that we'll have some games where we just don't find all of our combo pieces, even with the help of cards like Consider and Solve the Equation. One way to improve consistency could be Irencrag Feat, as a backup way of casting Deathbellow War Cry in games where we can't find Vadrik, Astral Archmage. Another interesting idea is to move the deck from Pioneer to Historic. (I believe that outside of a few lands, all of the cards in the deck are Historic legal.) This would allow us to play Sethron, Hurloon General, which is one of the most powerful Deathbellow War Cry targets. Either way, the idea is really sweet, and it's super cool to see the explosive things that Vadrik, Astral Archmage can do early in 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.
