The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy User Decks (December 13-19, 2020)
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 bounce around from Standard to Historic to Modern! What cool 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 them to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
Historic
Endlord99's Professor Google deck is a lot to take in thanks to being both a Yorion, Sky Nomad deck and overloaded with one-of tutor targets. The main goal is to find Wishclaw Talisman, use Animating Faerie to turn it into a creature, and use Wishclaw Talisman to tutor up Trostani Discordant, which allows us to keep regaining control of Wishclaw Talisman on our end step so our opponent never gets to use it. This allows us to keep tutoring things up each turn, finding whatever one-of we need for a given situation. The rest of the deck is hard to describe, with some really strange one-ofs for very specific situations or combos. My main concern for the deck is consistency. With so many one-ofs and 80 cards in the main deck, we're not very likely to find any specific card unless we manage to assemble the Wishclaw Talisman combo. That said, the deck looks like a blast to play, with so many fun, spicy options to dig for!
Paradox Engine seems to be a popular build-around in Historic at the moment, and Wood_Elemental has a really sweet plan for taking advantage of the combo-y artifact. The goal of Metalwork Expertise Combo is to play a bunch of mana rocks so that we can cast a Metalwork Colossus for free and then hopefully cast a Rishkar's Expertise on the same turn, which will draw us somewhere around 10 or 11 cards, depending on if we have a Forsaken Monument on the battlefield to go with Metalwork Colossus. In those 11 cards, we'll hopefully find a Paradox Engine that we can cast for free thanks to Rishkar's Expertise. Once we have the Paradox Engine, every spell we cast will untap all of our mana rocks. Our next step is to use a Karn, the Great Creator to grab Mystic Forge from the sideboard, which should let us play through our entire deck by casting spells from our library to untap our mana rocks (and also Mystic Forge itself in case we need to tap it to exile away uncastable lands or colored cards). Eventually, this will lead to all three Metalwork Colossuses on the battlefield along with a massive Stonecoil Serpent. We then use a second Karn, the Great Creator to grab Akroma's Memorial from the sideboard and smash our opponent with our hasty, trampling, flying, protected army! Is the Rishkar's Expertise plan the most competitive way to take advantage of Paradox Engine? I honestly have no idea, but it has to be one of the most fun!
Pioneer
Vadrok's Menagerie Mardu, brought to us by Mothin', might be the grindiest aggro deck I've ever seen. At first glance, the deck looks like a pretty straightforward aggro list with efficient threats like Knight of the Ebon Legion, Adanto Vanguard, and Rotting Regisaur, but a closer look reveals the deck's true plan: Grim Captain's Call! If we have the proper creature types in our graveyard, Grim Captain's Call can return up to four creatures from our graveyard to our hand for just three mana, which is an absurd deal. Fanatical Firebrand and Kitesail Freebooter offer Pirates; Knight of the Ebon Legion, Adanto Vanguard, and Olivia, Mobilized for War are Vampires; Rotting Regisaur gives us a Dinosaur; and Mire Triton happens to be a Merfolk, so in theory, we can get maximum value out of the sorcery. Plus, many of our cards fill our graveyard (Mire Triton self-mills, Rotting Regisaur forces us to discard, and Fanatical Firebrand sacrifices itself for damage), so by the time we're ready to refill our hand with Grim Captain's Call, we should have a stocked graveyard to help. If that's not enough value, we can mutate Vadrok, Apex of Thunder onto something to cast Grim Captain's Call (or one of our other instants / sorceries) from our graveyard for even more grindy card advantage! If you like the idea of being aggressive but still want to be able to play the long game against control decks, Vadrok's Menagerie Mardu seems like a really fun way to go about it!
Modern
When people bemoan the lack of an Armageddon in Modern, they often forget that we do sort of have an Armageddon in the format in Thoughts of Ruin. It just takes a lot of work to make the plan successful since it requires us to have a bunch of cards in hand to make it into a true "blow up all lands" spell for four mana. Well, Robin S. has a plan for punishing all of those annoying Primeval Titan and Tron decks with the Kamigawa sorcery. The idea is that rather than playing a bunch of real lands, we are instead using a massive 20 Borderposts to make our mana. Since we can cast our Borderposts by returning a land to our hand, they naturally keep our hand full of cards to power up Thoughts of Ruin while also making sure that we don't have many (or even any) actual lands on the battlefield, so once we resolve Thoughts of Ruin, we get to keep our mana, while our opponent should lose most of their mana. Because we're on the Borderpost plan, we have a couple of other payoffs that care about having a bunch of noncreature artifacts on the battlefield for closing out the game, in Metalwork Colossus (which should come down for free thanks to our Borderposts) and The Antiquities War, to turn all of our Borderposts into 5/5s to beat our opponent down for the win! Of course, embracing the Borderpost plan also means that we can get blown out by artifact-destruction spells (with something like Ancient Grudge turning into a double Stone Rain and Shatterstorm or Vandalblast doing an Armageddon impression of their own), so there is risk. But the deck is super spicy and seems like it should be miserable for opponents to play against!
On one hand, Flame of Blades' deck fits within a fairly well-known Modern archetype in Modern. On the other hand, it's a Merfolk deck with a really surprising and funny plan: Choke the opponent out of the game! No Modern player will expect a Merfolk deck to play Choke since the deck typically is overflowing with Islands, but QuickChoke Merfolk manages to have a functional mana base with only a single Island among the 22 lands in the deck. The idea is that we can use Sea's Claim, Aquitect's Will, and Quicksilver Fountain to turn our opponent's lands into Islands (while Quicksilver Fountain might raise some eyebrows, it's not that weird for a Merfolk deck to try to turn opponents' lands into Islands thanks to cards like Lord of Atlantis and Master of the Pearl Trident), so even at this point, they probably won't be expecting Choke. We then wait until our opponent taps down and surprise them with a Choke to keep their lands from untapping for the rest of the game, which should buy us enough time to win the game by beating down with our Merfolk. While the deck's plan is funny, and—especially considering there are a lot of Island-heavy decks in the meta at the moment thanks to Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath and Mystic Sanctuary—it does seem like it could actually be pretty good at the moment, I do wonder if Spreading Seas might just be a better version of Sea's Claim. (Is one extra mana worth drawing one extra card? Most likely.) Regardless, if you like the idea of being an aggressive tribal deck but still want to lock opponents out of the game, QuickChoke Merfolk seems like a really unique option.
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.
