The Fish Tank: Modern Horizons 2 Edition (May 30-June 5, 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, we are focusing on sweet new Modern decks brought to us by Modern Horizons 2! What sweet Modern lists did you all send in 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. 

Modern

Living End has been a part of Modern more or less since the start of the Modern format, although just how good it is varies greatly based on the meta. Well, thanks to Modern Horizons 2, the deck might be on the rise for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, Shardless Agent gives the deck its best three-mana cascade spell, which allows us to cut the inconsistent Demonic Dread (because you need a creature on the battlefield). While getting a better cascade spell is a big deal, perhaps even more important are two of the new free evoke Elementals in Grief and Subtlety. Grief specifically seems insane in the deck since we can use it to clear a counterspell or wrath from our opponent's hand for free before we cascade into Living End and, since Grief ends up in the graveyard if we evoke it, immediately get it back into play along with everything else in our graveyard. Of course, Living End still struggles against graveyard hate, and Modern Horizons 2 doesn't seem to solve this problem. Even so, the deck looks way, way better today than it did just a couple of weeks ago.

One of the purposes of sets like Modern Horizons is to power up archetypes in Modern that are under-performing. For Modern Horizons 2, perhaps the biggest winner is Enchantress, which gets some really powerful new cards, some Legacy Enchantress-level reprints, and a new combo finish. JCGarm's Combo Enchantress deck is mostly focused on the combo plan. The main goal is to stick a Freed from the Real on a Sanctum Weaver to make infinite mana, which allows us to win the game with Against the Odds favorite Helix Pinnacle! The deck also gets Sterling Grove as a way to tutor up combo pieces and also protect the combo from the battlefield, Enchantress's Presence as a hard-to-kill card-draw engine, and Solitary Confinement as a last line of defense when everything goes wrong. While the deck looks really sweet, I'm not sure about Setessan Champion over Eidolon of Blossoms. While Eidolon of Blossoms does cost an extra mana, being an enchantment (and thereby protected by Sterling Grove) seems like a big deal. Is winning with Helix Pinnacle the most competitive way to build Modern Horizons 2 Enchantress? Maybe not, but it's certainly the spiciest and most fun, and the deck does look like it should be able to do some spectacular things!

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While Enchantress might be the biggest Modern Horizons 2 winner, close behind is Domain. Halfwing has a deck looking to use some new Modern Horizons 2 cards to be aggressive, before finishing the game with Tribal Flames to the face! Thanks to fetch lands and shock lands (along with eight Hierarchs), the deck should be able to play a 4/4 flier (Scion of Draco) or a 5/5 ground creature (Territorial Kavu) on Turn 2 with some consistency. Backed up by exalted from Ignoble Hierarch and Noble Hierarch, these creatures (plus everyone's favorite Monkey Pirate Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer) should be able to force through some early damage, which then allows us to close out the game with Lightning Bolt and Tribal Flames, with Snapcaster Mage to flash our big burn spells back from the graveyard! 

What's better than making your opponent discard some cards with various Rats? Locking your opponent out of the game with Rats! LVL99Totodile's Orzhov Ratlock deck is built around one of the most talked-about new combos from Modern Horizons 2: Grief and Ephemerate, which triple-Thoughtseizes the opponent over the first two turns of the game and helps us quickly empty our opponent's hand. Once we get our opponent out of cards, the combination of Eldrazi Displacer and something like Burglar Rat, Chittering Rats, or Grief essentially can lock our opponent out of drawing cards for the rest of the game since we can keep blinking one of our discard creatures on our opponent's draw step to make them discard whatever they drew for the turn. If we are locking our opponent with Burglar Rat or Grief, an instant potentially can break our opponent out of the lock, which makes Chittering Rats our best lock piece. Since Chittering Rats makes our opponent put a card back on the top of their library rather than discard it, this means our opponent will be stuck drawing the same card for the rest of the game while we slowly beat them down with Grief and various Rats!

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.