The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy User Decks (November 1-6, 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 have a bunch of Standard and Modern, with a bit of Historic slipping in as well! 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
While the big news this week was Commander Legends spoilers, something even more important happened in the Magic world: Wizards released the set list for Kaladesh Remastered, and it included Panharmonicon! This means that once the set is released in a few weeks, we're going to be playing a lot of Historic Panharmonicon decks. Mothin' gets the Panharmonicon party started early with Mono-Black Panharmonicon]], which walks the line between a mono-black devotion deck (with Gray Merchant of Asphodel having an insane enters-the-battlefield trigger to double up with Panharmonicon and Phyrexian Obliterator to up our devotion to black) and a Panharmonicon deck, with cards like Dusk Legion Zealot and Phyrexian Rager to dig through our deck and Yarok's Fenlurker for discard. While the deck looks like a blast, we do need to take a minute to talk about one card specifically and rant about Magic Arena...
What is a Soulhunter Rakshasa? Why are there two different versions of the same card with different abilities? For some reason, Wizards has put a handful of brand new cards on Magic Arena in various beginners' products—cards that literally don't exist in paper Magic or on Magic Online. Making matters even worse, they originally printed Soulhunter Rakshasa with an enters-the-battlefield trigger that dealt damage equal to the number of Swamps you control before later nerfing it to five damage. While the card does seem great with Panharmonicon, I'm pretty sure it is only legal in best-of-one Historic on Magic Arena, which further complicates matters. If you decide to play Mono-Black Panharmonicon in best-of-three, you'll likely have to replace the five-drop, with Ravenous Chupacabra or Gonti, Lord of Luxury being good options depending on whether you are more worried about aggro (Ravenous Chupacabra) or control (Gonti, Lord of Luxury). Arena rant aside, Mono-Black Panharmonicon looks like a blast, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if we were playing something similar for a video or stream in the not-super-distant future!
Phyrexian Obliterator is one of the most interesting cards added to Historic through the Historic Anthology series. As we just saw in Mono-Black Panharmonicon, it can be a good standalone threat, but if we're willing to go deep and build around it like Cooper G. did, it can be even better in conjunction with fight spells. The main goal of Fight Club is to get Phyrexian Obliterator on the battlefield and then use cards like Primal Might, Inscription of Abundance, and Khalni Ambush to make Obliterator fight the opponent's biggest creature, which will then make the opponent sacrifice permanents equal to the creature's power. In theory, with enough fight spells, we can use the combo to force our opponent to sacrifice everything and potentially pick up a flawless victory! We also get Jumpstart rare Neyith of the Dire Hunt to make our fighting even more effective by drawing us a card whenever we fight, which keeps us churning through our deck to find even more fight spells to make our opponent sacrifice even more permanents! The only drawback of Fight Club is that it does depend on the opponent having creatures, which means the matchup against creature-light control decks will probably be pretty tough since we'll have a bunch of dead fight cards. But against any creature-based deck, Fight Club looks both hilarious and powerful!
Modern
Ever wished you could steal all of your opponent's permanents in Modern? Well now, thanks to Anguepa's Wall Combo deck, you can! Here's the plan: get Axebane Guardian on the battlefield with a few other creatures with defender so it taps for several mana. Then, use the combination of High Alert (which we can find with Drift of Phantasms) and Zirda, the Dawnwaker (which we already have access to as our companion) to keep untapping Axebane Guardian to make infinite mana of any combination of colors. At this point, we have a few ways to win the game. If we happen to have Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, we can simply dump all of the non-Human creatures in our deck onto the battlefield until we eventually find our one Memnarch, which can use our infinite mana to turn all of our opponent's permanents into artifacts and then steal them. If we don't have Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, we can use Karn, the Great Creator to grab Staff of Domination from our sideboard, use Staff of Domination to draw through our entire deck until we find the Memnarch, and steal all of our opponent's stuff. As far as actually winning the game, the most fun way is to simply beat down our helpless, permanentless opponent with their own creatures, although we can take the more direct route of casting our one Walking Ballista for a million mana and pinging our opponent to death! The downside of Wall Combo is that we actually need Axebane Guardian to stick on the battlefield for our deck to really do anything cool; otherwise, we are mostly stuck playing a bunch of walls that don't do much of anything, so one well-timed removal spell can mostly ruin our deck. But when everything comes together, the results should be spectacular!
People love mill decks. People love storm decks. What happens when you mash both archetypes together into a single deck? That's what Gcvader is looking to find out with their Mill Storm deck! The main goal is to get a Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield. If we can untap with it, we can use cards like Growth Spiral and Farseek to ramp a bunch and Manamorphose, Opt, and Serum Visions to draw a ton of cards and then eventually win the game by targeting our opponent with a bunch of copies of Increasing Confusion! We also have a Laboratory Maniac, so if we can't target our opponent for some reason (like Leyline of Sanctity), we can always try to mill ourselves and then win by drawing a card with Laboratory Maniac on the battlefield. Worst case, we can take 10 or 20 turns in a row with Savor the Moment, which might not sound that exciting since we don't get to untap, but eventually, we should be able to rebuild by drawing lands and playing them untapped.
While the plan looks super unique and fun, I am a bit worried that 21 lands just isn't enough. In general, Storm decks play a fairly low number of lands thanks to various rituals, and while we do have Desperate Ritual and Pyretic Ritual in the deck to make extra mana, with just 21 lands, our Uro, Titan of Nature's Wraths and Growth Spirals will likely be very inconsistent as ramp. It might be that once we get Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield, we'll draw so many cards that it won't t matter, but it might be worth finding a way to get at least a few more lands in the deck to increase consistency.
Is Mill Storm a good deck in the sense that it will win a MagicFest or 5-0 a league on Magic Online? I'd guess not, but it does look super fun to play and, with a bit of tuning, like it could win some games (in spectacular fashion) in the right matchups!
Legacy
While 8 Rack is a semi-popular third-tier deck in Modern, it's not normally something you see in Legacy. But this might be changing thanks to Dravohx, who not only sent in a sweet The Rack build for Legacy but also said they have used it to win two local Legacy tournaments recently! Since we've played 8 Rack in Modern a few times in the past, you probably know the main plan: empty the opponent's hand with discard and then win the game with damage from The Rack and Shrieking Affliction. So rather than rehashing how 8 Rack works in general, let's talk a bit about what makes the Legacy version different. By far the biggest addition to the deck is Hymn to Tourach, which is quite possibly the best discard spell ever printed in the history of Magic, not only forcing the opponent to discard two cards for just two mana but also making those cards random, which means you occasionally get free wins by making your opponent discard their only lands. Otherwise, most of the upgrades to the deck come in the sideboard, including Chains of Mephistopheles, which can be a powerful way to fight against card-draw spells like Brainstorm but sadly adds a ton to the cost of the deck (thanks Reserved List). In fact, over $1,700 of the deck's $2,400 price tag comes from the two copies of Chains in the sideboard. Without them, Dravohx's 6 Rack would be about the same price as many Modern decks. The other upside of the deck is that if you have Modern 8 Rack, you should be able to also have the Legacy version without spending too much extra money, especially if you skip out on Chains of Mephistopheles. Regardless, if you like making opponents discard cards or are looking for a cheap-ish intro deck for Legacy that doesn't require spending thousands of dollars on dual lands, Dravohx's 6 Rack seems like a sweet 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.
