The Fish Tank: Streets of New Capenna Edition (April 17-23, 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 is Streets of New Capenna week. All of the decks are built around spicy New Capenna cards for formats ranging from Standard back to Modern! 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 is a Riveteers...err...Jund deck from Halfwin. Of all the color combinations from Streets of New Capenna, Riveteers is the one I'm most excited to play with in Standard. Blitz is a really interesting mechanic, and the shard has some really cool cards. While it's certainly possible to make a normal Jund Midrange deck featuring the good Riveteers cards, Halfwin has a spicier plan: Riveteer Fight Rigging! The idea is to turn on Fight Rigging as quickly as possible. Shakedown Heavy, Daemogoth Woe-Eater, and Ziatora, the Incinerator are all big enough that we should be able to cast the free hideaway card the turn it comes into play. What are we hoping to play for free? [[Tibalt, Cosmic Impostor], of course. (Yes, it is legal to play the backside of MDFCs with hideaway cards.) The other interesting synergy of the deck involves Ob Nixilis, the Adversary. I figured that in Standard, people would mostly be using the new planeswalker with cheap sacrifice fodder like Eyetwitch and Shambling Ghast, but all of the high-power creatures we're using to turn on Fight Rigging also work well with Ob Nixilis, the Adversary. We can sacrifice a Shakedown Heavy and get enough loyalty to ultimate our casualty copy of Mob Nixilis right away to draw seven cards and refill our hand! While the deck could probably use a Thragtusk or two (Workshop Warchief), it looks really fun to play and like it should be able to do some really powerful things!

Pioneer

In Pioneer, we have Queza Lich Combo from Ali J. The idea is really simple: play Lich's Mastery, play Queza, Augur of Agonies, either gain a life or draw a card (which will happen on our draw step if we can't find a way to do it before), and win the game. Queza, Augur of Agonies will drain our opponent for one, gaining us a life and triggering Lich's Mastery to draw us a card, which will trigger Queza to trigger Lich's Mastery, and so on, until our opponent's life total hits zero! It's basically a two-card "win the game" combo. The rest of the deck is basically Esper Control with tons of removal and a bit of lifegain from cards like Absorb and Faithful Mending, in case we manage to stick Lich's Mastery before we find Queza, Augur of Agonies. Personally, I'm super hyped to try the combo in Pioneer. While Esper Control is an obvious shell for it, I'm also curious to find out of there's some sort of ramp or reanimation plan that can speed up the combo even more. The possibilities are endless! Regardless, Ali J's list is sweet and seems like it should be able to steal some wins in a really spicy way!

Modern

Meanwhile, in Modern, windelf396 is looking to combo off with Vivien on the Hunt. Here's the idea: use Planebound Accomplice to put Vivien on the Hunt into play, maybe as early as Turn 2 with the help of Arbor Elf and Utopia Sprawl. If we manage to do this, we win. We can use Vivien on the Hunt to sacrifice Planebound Accomplice to tutor up Felidar Guardian to blink Vivien so we can use the planeswalker again. Then, we can sacrifice Felidar Guardian to get Karmic Guide to reanimate Felidar Guardian and blink Vivien, and then sacrifice Felidar Guardian to get Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker to copy Karmic Guide, reanimate Felidar Guardian one more time, and then go infinite with Kiki-Jiki copying Felidar Guardian (which blinks Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker so we can do this an infinite number of times and win with Felidar Guardian beats). 

The rest of the deck is mostly dedicated to finding the combo (Imperial Recruiter, Oath of Nissa, and Call the Gatewatch), speeding up the combo (Utopia Sprawl and Arbor Elf), or giving us a backup plan (Saheeli Rai, which goes infinite with Felidar Guardian, and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, which can win by itself). While the combo itself is sweet, it will be interesting to see just how consistent it will be. Not only do we need to find both Planebound Accomplice and Vivien on the Hunt, but we also can't draw our one copy of Felidar Guardian, Karmic Guide, or Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker, or else we won't be able to copy. It might be worth playing an extra copy of our combo-chain creatures just in case. Either way, the combo is really sweet and can win on Turn 2 with its best draws, which is about as fast as any deck can win in Modern!

Speaking of Modern combos fueled by Streets of New Capenna, we've got another sweet one from Lucas Brenton: Sieve Stash Combo. The idea is to get Bootleggers' Stash on the battlefield alongside Time Sieve, which—assuming we have at least five lands, which we should—gives us infinite turns. We can tap our lands to make Treasures, thanks to Bootleggers' Stash, and then cash in five of those Treasures to take an extra turn with Time Sieve. Eventually, during our infinite turns, we'll draw into our one copy of Revel in Riches (along with a bunch of counterspells and discard to protect it) and use it to win the game on our upkeep with Treasures from Bootleggers' Stash. While the deck looks pretty solid in general (considering it's trying to win with a pretty janky combo), I do wonder if Birds of Paradise might be better as Search for Tomorrow or another land-based ramp spell, just because Bootleggers' Stash cares about how many lands we have on the battlefield, but this is a nitpick. So, how strong is the combo of Bootleggers' Stash and Time Sieve? We'll have to wait and see. My guess is it's a strong-ish Against the Odds deck—it living long enough to resolve Bootleggers' Stash might be tough in some matchups—but it is a really unique and hilarious way to win the game, and it might just work if backed by enough good removal and some tutors like Whir of Invention!

A long time ago for Against the Odds, we played a Rat Lock deck that looked to use blink spells with Chittering Rats to lock our opponent out of drawing cards ever again. Well, the deck is back thanks to Pie4man, and this time, it's free to play on Magic Online! The main goal is to get Chittering Rats on the battlefield with Eldrazi Displacer, which lets us blink Chittering Rats on our opponent's draw step each turn to make them put whatever card they draw back on the top of their library, essentially locking them out of the game. While we are looking to get the combo set up, we can use cards like Ephemerate and Touch the Spirit Realm to blink Spirited Companion and Wall of Omens for card draw, Shriekmaw for removal, and Burglar Rats for discard, giving us an endless train of sneaky value. While I have no idea how the deck lines up with the current meta—the last time we played it was in 2016—the updates look great, and there's no excuse not to give it a try, considering it's literally free with the free card-rental programs!

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. If you have some idea for how to improve these decks, make sure to let us know in the comments, and if you want your own deck considered for a future Fish Tank, leave a link there as well (or email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com). 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.