The Fish Tank: Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Edition (September 19-24, 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, in both Standard and Modern! What craziness can we pull off in our new formats? Let's find out! Oh yeah, we'll probably do another Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Fish Tank next week. 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 did a YouTube short earlier this week discussing the possibilities of going infinite with Teferi, Who Slows the Sunset in Standard. Now, thanks to Stone Rain Productions, we have our first list built around the combo. If you're not familiar with the plan, the idea is to use Lithoform Engine to copy Teferi, Who Slows the Sunset's +1 ability with a mana dork on the battlefield. This allows us to untap a mana dork, a land, and Lithoform Engine, allowing us to copy the Teferi trigger again. If the mana dork is Tangled Florahedron, we can gain infinite life with Teferi's +1. If it's Accomplished Alchemist, we gain infinite life and make infinite mana, which we can then use to burn the opponent out of the game with Light Up the Night! While the combo is super sweet, it is worth mentioning that it requires three different pieces (and for infinite mana, three different pieces that cost four mana). It seems likely that the plan is more of a sweet Against the Odds deck than a top-tier Standard strategy. Either way, it seems like it will be spectacular when it goes off!
Slogurk, the Overslime is one of my favorite cards from Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, and AngelicCookiese has a fun plan to take advantage of the new legend in a Sultai graveyard aggro shell. We can self-mill with cards like Deathbonnet Sprout, Ludevic, Necrogenius, and Old Stickfingers to grow Slogurk, the Overslime and then have cards like Ebondeath, Dracolich and Skyclave Shade leave the graveyard to grow Willow Geist, which is one of my sleepers from the set. A one-drop that can get really big really quick in the right deck has got to be good somewhere, right? While I'm not sold on Otherworldly Gaze being good anywhere, it does synergize with the deck's plan, so maybe it's better than I think in this deck specifically.
Finally, for Standard, we have a deck that I mostly want to show off because it looks like a solid upgrade plan for a Budget Magic deck we played a while ago: UW Magecraft! The idea is to stick Clever Lumimancer and Leonin Lightscribe and start slinging cheap spells like Consider, Faithful Mending, and friends until we build up a big storm count and make our team massive with a bunch of copies of Show of Confidence. In general, I'm skeptical that Delver of Secrets is going to be good enough for Standard, but it actually looks pretty solid in this deck (although having 20 spells means we'll only have about a 1/3 chance of flipping it on any given turn). If you're looking to upgrade the old UW Magecraft Budget Magic deck, this seems like a good starting point that is still fairly budget-friendly!
Modern
Rite of Harmony is an interesting card. On one hand, Glimpse of Nature is so good it's banned in Modern, and Rite of Harmony costs just one more mana (and color), and you get flashback as a bonus. On the other, outside of a brief window when it worked with Brain in a Jar, Beck // Call has never really found its footing in Modern, and it looks a lot like Rite of Harmony. All this is to say, I'm not sure how good Rite of Harmony will be in Modern. The good news is that LVL99Totodile has a sweet plan for using it, by comboing it with Ayula's Influence. The idea is that we can get Ayula's Influence down so that we can discard a land to make a 2/2 Bear and play Rite of Harmony. If we have enough mana, we can even flash it back. We can then discard a land to make a Bear and draw a card or two, which will hopefully find us another land to discard to make another Bear. Eventually, we'll find Dakmor Salvage, which lets us go infinite—we can discard it to make a Bear and, rather than drawing a card, dredge it back to our hand so we can do it again. While the combo is limited by the number of cards in our deck, it should make enough Bears that we can one-shot our opponent! Even better, since Rite of Harmony is an instant, we can do all of this on our opponent's end step, dodging sorcery-speed removal and sweepers! Earlier, I mentioned how much I love Slogurk, the Overslime—the Bears of Harmony shell could be an interesting way to take advantage of it in Modern—but even without Slogurk, the plan is really sweet!
We've played Dagger Burn–style decks built around giving opponents tokens a few times in the past. And while Hunted Vampires from Shushei K. doesn't have a literal Dowsing Dagger (sorry, Richard!), the idea of Hunted Vampires is similar. We can use cards like Slaughter Specialist and Hunted Phantasm to give the opponent tokens; drain our opponent with Trespasser's Curse as they come into play; and then kill all of the tokens with Illness in the Ranks, Virulent Plague, and Plague Engineer to grow our team with Cordial Vampire, drain our opponent with Blood Artist, and make Slaughter Specialist huge! While the plan is risky (if we don't find a way to kill the tokens, cards like Hunted Phantasm tend to get stuck in our hand since giving our opponent five 1/1s for free is a good way to die), it's also hilariously fun. The Vampire sub-theme is also really interesting. Getting Cordial Vampire as an additional payoff is pretty huge and gives the archetype a way to win with big creatures, rather than being solely reliant on the drain plan. If you're a fan of Dagger Burn, Hunted Vampires seems like a really fun option to try. While I expect it's probably a meme deck like Dagger Burn is, it does look solid enough to pick up a decent number of wins, and there's nothing quite like winning by giving your opponent free tokens!
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.
