The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy User Decks (December 6-12, 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
We've reached the point in Standard's life where we're only a month away from spoilers for Kaldheim, which means a lot of the most obvious cards and synergies in the format have already been explored. But allycatw91 has a unique build-around: Harmonious Archon! While the deck shares some similarities with a more traditional Orzhov Doom Foretold deck, its main goal is to stay alive through the early game with the help of removal and Doom Foretold and eventually stick a Harmonious Archon to turn everything into 3/3s, which powers up our Omen of the Sun and Bastion of Remembrance tokens as well as the tokens that Harmonious Archon makes itself. Then, we can use Charming Prince and Flicker of Fate to blink our token producers to make even more 3/3s and hopefully overwhelm our opponent. If you're looking for something different to try in Standard while we wait for the release of Kaldheim, going to town with Harmonious Archon and tokens looks like a really fun option!
Historic
Enigmatic Incarnation is a really powerful card, although it's not always all that easy to embrace its power since it requires a specific mixture of creatures and enchantments to work. Well, Valerio D.P. has a really interesting plan: overload on Leylines and powerful five-drops to Enigmatic Incarnation into after sacrificing a Leyline. The main goal is hopefully to have one or two of our 12 Leylines in our opening hand, use Gilded Goose and Paradise Druid to ramp into Enigmatic Incarnation, and start sacrificing our Leylines to tutor up five-mana creatures. Behind on board? We can get something like Massacre Girl or Cataclysmic Gearhulk as wraths. Need some life? Baneslayer Angel, Thragtusk, or Elder Gargaroth can help. Need to close out the game quickly? How about The Scarab God or Tendershoot Dryad? Apart from having a lot of powerful one-ofs to tutor up, the other thing I really like about the deck is that both Leyline of Sanctity and Leyline of the Void are very strong in Historic at the moment, with Leyline of the Void shutting down the sacrifice deck and Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath, while Leyline of Sanctity protects against Thoughtseize and keeps us from getting burnt to death by Mayhem Devil or Bonecrusher Giant. My main concern is that while the good games should be really good, the bad games will probably be equally bad, mostly because our curve is so heavy on four- and five-mana plays. If we don't have a mana dork or can't find Enigmatic Incarnation, we could easily end up in a position where we're so overloaded with five-drops that we can't cast fast enough to impact the game. Regardless, the deck looks super fun to play and like it should be pretty powerful in games where we can stick an Enigmatic Incarnation!
As you probably know by now, I love Panharmonicon. And while we played a few different versions in Historic since it returned in Kaladesh Remastered, Darren has a sweet, new Panharmonicon build: Gyruda-monicon! The idea is that we can play a Panharmonicon and then follow it up with our companion Gyruda, Doom of Depths to double-reanimate something with an even converted mana cost. If we happen to hit a Spark Double, we get two more Gyruda, Doom of Depths triggers to do it again. Along the way, we'll also be able to reanimate things like Fblthp, the Lost and Dusk Legion Zealot to draw cards, Ravenous Chupacabra and Hostage Taker for removal, and Gonti, Lord of Luxury to steal cards from our opponent's deck. While the deck seems like it should be able to do some absurd things once Panharmonicon hits the battlefield, the curve is a bit worrying. We don't really have ramp since we're a Dimir deck, which leaves us overloaded with four-drops, potentially leading to some really clunky, slow draws. Can we live long enough to stick Panharmonicon and play Gyruda, Doom of Depths? That's the big question. If we do, we should be able to easily win the game, but we'll probably also have some games where we get run over by aggro as we draw a handful of four-drops.
Modern
There's not much that I like better than blowing up opponents' lands, and Aleddin has a really unique take on the land-destruction archetype for Modern: Golgari Land Destruction! Typically, Modern land-destruction decks are red-based since red has most of the cheap land-destruction spells, like Stone Rain, Pillage, Molten Rain, and Boom // Bust. What does going into green offer? By far the spiciest card in the deck is Spreading Algae, in conjunction with Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth to turn all lands into Swamps. While Spreading Algae doesn't immediately blow up the land it enchants, it does when the land becomes tapped, which means our opponent either chooses not to ever use the enchanted land (making Spreading Algae essentially a one-mana land-destruction spell) or gets one use out of it and sacrifices the land, which then gives us back Spreading Algae so we can repeat the process. Backing up Spreading Algae are Smallpox, Rain of Tears, and Beast Within, all of which can destroy lands, along with Crucible of Worlds to keep replaying Field of Ruin or Ghost Quarter from our graveyard. As far as actually winning the game, we're mostly beating down with creaturelands or Genju of the Fens, or just hoping that our opponent scoops in frustration once we get them to no lands.
Some tribal decks have proven to be quite good in Modern—Humans, Merfolk, Elves—but Rafaelhva has a very different, much jankier plan: Dwarves! The core of the deck is the full seven copies of Seven Dwarves, which can turn into big threats if we get enough copies on the battlefield at the same time. Thanks to Depala, Pilot Exemplar, Metallic Mimic, and Adaptive Automaton, there are actually a bunch of Dwarf lords (or pseudo-lords) legal in the format to further buff our Seven Dwarves. On paper, the Dwarf tribe doesn't look quite fast or powerful enough for Standard, but we have a secret weapon: Blood Moon! As we've learned on many Against the Odds episodes, Blood Moon is a great way to make janky, potentially underpowered decks at least somewhat competitive because it does such a good job of slowing down the game, hopefully buying us enough time to pick up the Dwarf win. Of course, Dwarf Tribal is more of an Against the Odds deck than a truly competitive option, but even with this in mind, I do have one piece of feedback based on having built and played about a million Blood Moon decks: add more fetch lands! Even with five basic Plains in the deck, there's a decent chance our Blood Moon will lock us out of casting Depala, Pilot Exemplar, Lightning Helix, and nearly all of our sideboard cards. Adding Prismatic Vista or random white-X fetch lands like Flooded Strand will help to solve this problem by making sure that we can fetch out a basic Plains on Turn 1 or 2 before we Blood Moon. Can Moon Dwarves win a MagicFest or 5-0 a league? Probably not. But if you want to take the Seven Dwarves challenge in Modern, this seems like a really solid, fun way to go about it!
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.
