The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy User Decks (December 20-26, 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.
Standard
While certainly not one of the most hyped MDFCs from Zendikar Rising, Kazuul's Fury is one of the most fun, mostly because it allows decks to play a Fling without taking up a non-land slot. Grand R. has an interesting plan for taking advantage of Kazuul's Fury (along with some literal Flings) in Standard: Scourge of the Skyclaves! The idea is to use some aggressive creatures like Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger and Robber of the Rich to get in some early damage while also using Shatterskull Smashing, Agadeem's Awakening, and Feed the Swarm to lower our own life total to grow Scourge of the Skyclaves. While we can never get the two-drop to 20 power, it can get easily get to 10 or more power, which, combined with our early damage, hopefully will be enough that we can play Scourge of the Skyclaves and immediately Fling (or Kazuul's Fury) it at our opponent's face for lethal! From a competitive perspective, one of the upsides of Scourge Fling is that it looks like a relatively solid Rakdos Aggro deck, so even if we don't manage to pull off the Fling kill, the deck should be at least functional (and maybe even good) when played "fairly." If you're looking for something different to try in Standard while we wait for Kaldheim to unleash some sweet new cards on the format, Scourge Fling seems like a fun option!
Historic
What's better than winning a game of Magic? Winning a game of Magic by drawing lots and lots of cards! Konfuz3 has a sweet Historic brew that's looking to do just that. The idea is to stick a Song of Creation and—with a combination of free spells like Ornithopter, Stonecoil Serpent, Ugin's Conjurant, and Mox Amber and cards that give us extra land drops like Enter the Unknown, Explore, Growth Spiral, and Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath—hopefully draw through our entire deck in one massive combo turn to win with Thassa's Oracle. It's fine if we fizzle and end up having to discard our hand to Song of Creation—we can always escape an Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath from our graveyard the following turn and start the process over again, this time with even more mana to reduce the odds of fizzling. The main issue with Song of Creation combo is what happens if we can't find or resolve Song of Creation. The answer seems to be not all that much, although I guess we can win by ramping a bunch and trying to beat down with a big Stonecoil Serpent, Ugin's Conjurant, or Uro, although we do have quite a few cards that aren't all that powerful until we have Song of Creation. It's also worth mentioning that with only 19 lands in the deck, our Explores and Growth Spirals will likely be pretty inconsistent as ramp until we have Song of Creation (at which point we should always have an extra land to play, based on our brute-force mass card-draw overcoming our low land count). Is Song of Creation combo actually competitive in Historic? I have no idea, but it does seem like the games where Song of Creation hits the battlefield should be spectacular!
Pioneer
Are you tired of losing to Uro and Omnath in Pioneer? So was Nate W., which is what lead to their White Sideboarders deck for Pioneer. The idea is to overload on cards that are most often seen as sideboard options but hate on Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath and the other dominant ramp / card-draw strategies of the format. Apostle of Purifying Light exiles Uro from the graveyard while also being great if you run into Mono-Black Aggro. Drannith Magistrate keeps opponents from escaping Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath into play. Spirit of the Labyrinth shuts down the card draw of Uro, Omnath, and everything else (while not hurting us since we don't draw extra cards). Just how good the deck is overall remains to be seen, but if you're tired of losing to Uro specifically, this list should (hopefully) get the job done. The best part? It's only $17 on Magic Online, so if you want to test it out, it should be pretty easy to put together, either by buying the cards directly or with the help of a loan program!
Modern
Underworld Breach is undoubtedly a powerful card, but what's the best (or at least, most hilarious) way to win with the enchantment in Modern? As AnAloofHonebee shows off in their Breach Combo list, it just might be Pact of the Titan. Here's the plan: use cheap, cantripping artifacts like Mishra's Bauble, Chromatic Sphere, and Chromatic Star to cycle through our deck until we find Altar of Dementia and our namesake Underworld Breach while also stocking our graveyard with cards to exile to escape (Grinding Station helps here as well, speeding up the milling process by sacrificing random artifacts). Once we get Altar of Dementia and Underworld Breach on the battlefield, all we need is a Pact of the Titan, either in our hand or graveyard, to win the game. We can cast Pact of the Titan to make a 4/4 and sacrifice it to Altar of Dementia to mill four cards, which gives us more than enough cards in our graveyard to cast Pact of the Titan again. Eventually, the end result of this process will be that we mill our entire deck and make a big board full of Pact of the Titan tokens. Finally, with the last three cards in our graveyard, we escape Burst of Speed to give all of our 4/4 Giants haste and win the game with a big attack! While the combo itself looks powerful and like it can win pretty quickly with the right draw, the drawback is that it does depend on your graveyard. While we do have Fragmentize in our sideboard to answer the Tormod's Crypts, Rest in Peaces, and Leyline of the Voids of the multiverse so we don't literally scoop to graveyard hate (at least, after sideboarding), we'd still rather avoid playing against it, if possible. That said, if we can dodge the graveyard hate of the Modern format, the deck looks hilarious and like it might win some matches too!
This week for Against the Odds, we played a Hive Mind deck, but there's more than one way to build around the enchantment. Talespinner Lore has a hilarious plan to take advantage of Hive Mind's ability to force the opponent to copy our spells: Enduring Ideal! The goal is to ramp into Hive Mind with the help of enchantments like Utopia Sprawl and Overgrowth and then resolve the epic Enduring Ideal. Our opponent will get a copy of Enduring Ideal, which will keep them from casting spells for the rest of the game. While we also won't be able to cast spells, our deck is built to be able to win the game by tutoring out enchantments each turn (we can get Overwhelming Splendor to turn all of our opponent's creatures into 1/1s, Ethereal Absolution to kill all our opponent's stuff, and then eventually win the game by making a board full of flying tokens with Ethereal Absolution itself) while our opponent's deck most likely won't be able to do anything with the Enduring Ideal they get to cast each turn! Thanks to the combo of Arbor Elf, Utopia Sprawl, and Overgrowth, we potentially can cast Hive Mind as early as Turn 3 and Enduring Ideal on Turn 4; plus, we get a bunch of card draw thanks to Setessan Champion and Satyr Enchanter to help find our combo pieces. While my guess is that Epical Enforcement is more of an Against the Odds deck than a top-tier option, locking the opponent out of the game is super fun, and even just pulling off the combo a couple of times will make it more than worth the effort!
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.
