The Fish Tank: Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty Edition (February 13-19, 2022)
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, we're focused on Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty brews across formats! What spice did you all send in? Let's find out. Oh yeah, if you want your deck considered for next week's edition of The Fish Tank, leave a link in the comments, or you can email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
Standard
First up in Standard, we have a Bant Channel deck from Armorer that is sort of like a Standard-legal version of Living End. The idea is to discard artifact and enchantment creatures with channel, like Sunblade Samurai, Greater Tanuki, Colossal Skyturtle, and Mirrorshell Crab, all of which offer removal, ramp, or mana fixing. Once we have a full graveyard, we reanimate everything with Brilliant Restoration to build an overwhelming board out of the blue. One thing I really like about the deck is that it has a ton of removal, which should make it strong against creature decks. It is probably a bit soft to graveyard hate, although in theory, we can win by hard-casting our expensive channel creatures in a pinch. I'm not sure just how strong the deck is, although it's a really sweet idea, and it seems like it might even be pretty powerful if we can dodge counters and graveyard hate!
Dragonspark Reactor really intrigues me. In a world of Blood tokens, Treasure tokens, and cheap artifact creatures, it seems pretty easy to add counters to it quickly, possibly enough counters that it can more or less one-shot the opponent all by itself! That's the theory of Devin W.'s Blood Reactor deck: play cheap artifacts and things that make Blood tokens, deal some damage with Oni-Cult Anvil and our random creatures, and hopefully use Dragonspark Reactor to close out the game!
Pioneer
As you probably know, I love Hammer Time decks, but Pioneer is one format where I've never tried to build around Colossus Hammer. SirEklz has us covered with a really sweet-looking Boros Hammer build that takes advantage of some of the new Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty reconfigure creatures. The best draw of the deck involves playing Sigarda's Aid on Turn 1, which lets us flash equipment into play. This means we can flash in Lizard Blades (technically an equipment) on our opponent's end step after Turn 2 to dodge sorcery-speed removal, untap, and play Colossus Hammer on the Lizard Blades (with Sigarda's Aid equipping it for free) to smash our opponent for 22 damage thanks to double strike! The biggest challenge for the deck is consistency. While we have a bunch of copies of Colossus Hammer since Fighter Class can tutor it up, we've only got one way to equip for free in Sigarda's Aid, which probably means we should mulligan fairly aggressively for the enchantment. It seems possible to pick up some wins as a weird aggro deck backed by Shrapnel Blast for direct damage and Michiko's Reign of Truth for pumping and eventually creating a massive creature.
Modern
In Modern, Pie4man is updating a classic Hogaak-era Against the Odds deck for Modern: Ayula Bear Loam. The main goal is to combo Ayula, Queen Among Bears with Ayula's Influence, which will allow us to discard lands to make Bear tokens and then either grow those Bears or fight down our opponent's board with the help of Ayula, Queen Among Bears. Thanks to Life from the Loam and Wrenn and Six, we've got a bunch of ways to keep returning lands from our graveyard to our hand in order to give us a steady stream of Bears. So, what are the new additions to the deck? Mostly lands. Boseiju, Who Endures gives us some repeatable removal, Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance offers even more tokens (although sadly not Bears), and Urza's Saga is powerful enough to win the game all by itself thanks to the Constructs it can make, while also tutoring up things like Shadowspear and Soul-Guide Lantern. The deck was surprisingly strong when we played it years ago, and it looks even better now! If you like grindy graveyard value or are just a fan of Bears the deck looks like a really fun option for Modern that might be more competitive than you think.
Finally for Modern, we have a really fun-looking Enchantress build from Derek N., which I mostly wanted to show off because it features Weaver of Harmony. While Weaver of Harmony has combo potential, it might actually be good enough as a value card in Enchantress decks. First, it's an enchantment itself, so worst case, it's a two-mana way to trigger Sythis, Harvest's Hand and Enchantress's Presence, which isn't exciting but a solid enough floor. More importantly, Enchantress decks incidentally have a lot of abilities to copy. Doubling up the card draw from an enchantress effect is good, making an additional land into a massive trampler with Destiny Spinner for just one mana seems like a great way to close out the game quickly, and doubling up the removal of On Thin Ice or Colossal Skyturtle is a solid way to slow down the game while we get the almost unbeatable engine online that Enchantress decks offer. At first, I thought that Weaver of Harmony wouldn't be necessary in Modern Enchantress, but the more I think about how much value it can add for a fairly low cost, the more I like the idea of at least testing it out. It's super fun at worst, and at best, it could be a really strong new addition to the archetype!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. Thanks to everyone who sent in decks this week! If you have a deck you want to be considered for next week's Fish Tank, make sure to leave a link in the comments, or you can email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com. If you have some ideas on how to improve this week's decks, make sure to leave them in the comments too!
