The Fish Tank: Kaldheim Edition (January 24-30, 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 is Kaldheim week! Even though we don't have the full set yet, people are hard at work brewing around the new cards, and we have some really sweet submissions! What cool Kaldheim brews did you all submit this week? Let's find out! But first, 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 it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.

Standard

Some of my favorite decks in all of Magic are ones built around janky payoffs (this is basically the entire idea of Against the Odds). Well, SirEklz has a sweet Standard deck built around Reckless Crew! The idea is to flood the board with cheap equipment, possibly play a Crashing Drawbridge for haste and then Reckless Crew to make a bunch of (hopefully hasty) Dwarves, and stick all of our random equipment onto them. If there's a downside to the deck, it's that if we don't find Reckless Crew, we're mostly stuck playing a bunch of random equipment for no good reason, so consistency might be a bit of an issue. However, in a lot of ways, Reckless Zirdurrus reminds me of some of the Puresteel Paladin combo decks that used to be popular in Modern: extremely powerful but also a bit of a glass cannon. Oh yeah, the list shows two companions, but keep in mind that you can only reveal one each game. Lurrus of the Dream-Den is probably the better option against removal-heavy decks. In removal-light matchups, Zirda, the Dawnwaker's ability to let us equip naturally on the cheap wins out. 

The Omenkeel (probably better known as the backside of Cosima, God of the Voyage) is one of the most powerful Vehicles that has been printed since the heyday of Vehicles back in Kaladesh, offering good stats and a weird land-based card-draw ability. The idea of Bant Omenkeel Landfall from Halfwing is to use The Omenkeel's ability to steal lands from our opponent's deck to trigger landfall a bunch of times, thanks to extra land-drop cards like Azusa, Lost but Seeking and Dryad of the Ilysian Grove. This, combined with a ton of Zendikar Rising's MDFC lands, allows us to use our lands as spells, greatly increasing the concentration of action in our deck. The other interesting aspect of the deck is the finisher: Alrund's Epiphany. While the new extra-turn spell can't go infinite like Nexus of Fate can, even getting an extra turn or two offers a lot of land-drops and landfall triggers, which should be enough to close out the game!

If you've been playing Magic for a long, long time, you might remember that back after Coldsnap was released, there was a Mono-White Snow Control deck called Quinn the Eskimo or The Mighty Quinn. Well, thanks to Kaldheim, Quinn is back thanks to LunchFisk (with a potential alternate name of Snow White). The main goal is to blow up opponents' stuff with sweepers like Shatter the Sky and Doomskar and then eventually win the game with Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, Emeria's Call, or Starnheim Unleashed. Perhaps the most interesting card in the deck is Cosmos Elixir, which I wrote off as too expensive for Standard, but thanks to lifegain from Forsaken Monument and The Birth of Meletis (and a ton of sweepers to keep our life total high), it doesn't seem all that hard to get into a position where it is drawing us an extra card each turn, which should make sure that we keep hitting our sweepers and eventually out finishers! If you like control but don't like counterspells, Quinn the Eskimo Returns seems like a sweet (and maybe even good?) option for Kaldheim Standard!

Historic

Orvar, the All-Form is one of the most unique cards from Kaldheim, and as Bennymon1 realized, there's already a perfect shell for it in the Historic format: Feather! Feather, the Redeemed already wants you to play a deck full of cheap spells that can target your own creatures, and Orvar, the All-Form essentially is the same thing. By putting them both together, the end result is a deck that can annoy opponents endlessly by using Feather to repeatedly protect creatures with Fight as One or Gods Willing, remove creatures with Reckless Rage, and draw cards with Defiant Strike while also building a massive board of Dreadhorde Arcanists, Sprite Dragons, or Tenth District Legionnaires thanks to Orvar, the All-Form's ability to make token copies of our things as we target them with instants or sorceries. Traditionally, one of the problems with Feather decks is they tend to be a bit threat-light, which often leaves them in a position where, if their first couple of creatures are answered, they will have a hand full of cheap spells with nothing to target. Orvar, the All-Form mostly solves this problem since with just one non-legendary creature on the battlefield, every cheap spell produces a creature! If you like comboing off and spellslinger-style decks, Jeskai Orvar Feather looks like a solid and super-fun option once Kaldheim is released.

Modern

Oftentimes, powerful and cheap but difficult-to-use cards are thought of as memes in Modern. But after the success of Colossus Hammer, Magik0722 is looking to bring another colossal card to the format: Colossal Plow! Colossal Vehicles is basically an all-in aggro vehicle strategy. The goal is to stick Consulate Dreadnought on Turn 1 and then use either Giant Ox or Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger to start smashing the opponent for seven on Turn 2. If we don't have Consulate Dreadnought, we can settle for hitting for six on Turn 3 with Colossal Plow while also making mana (mostly helpful to play cards we tutor from our sideboard with Karn, the Great Creator) and gaining some life. While I think that Colossal Vehicles is probably a bit less competitive than Hammer Time, in part because our combo pieces are more expensive and in part because it generally takes three attacks to win with either Consulate Dreadnought or Colossal Plow (while a creature with Colossus Hammer usually wins in one or two), the deck still looks like it can be super fast and scary when it gets the right draw and dodges removal like Fatal Push! 

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for this week! If you have any ideas about 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.