The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy User Decks (November 21-27, 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've got several Historic decks—people seem excited to brew with new Kaladesh Remastered cards. But don't worry, we've got some Pioneer and Modern too! 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
Aetherflux Reservoir might not be one of the most competitive rares from Kaladesh Remastered, but it's certainly one of the most fun. It's the closest thing we have to an actual Storm card in the format (if you actually dig deep into the math, you need to cast the same number of spells to kill with Aetherflux Reservoir as you do with Tendrils of Agony, assuming both players are at 20 life). While playing Aetherflux Reservoir and casting some spells is sweet, bobano has an even sweeter plan: getting Bolas's Citadel on the battlefield alongside Aetherflux Reservoir. Toss in a bunch of cheap mana rocks and ways to change the top card of our deck by shuffling our library or scrying, like Mazemind Tome, Traveler's Amulet, and Wishclaw Talisman, and the combo of Bolas's Citadel and Aetherflux Reservoir potentially can let us play through our entire deck in one turn, with Bolas's Citadel providing us the cards and Aetherflux Reservoir offering the life we need to keep playing spells from the top of our deck. Eventually, as we cast more and more spells, we'll be gaining more life than we are spending to cast them, which allows us to eventually work our way to up more than 50 life and then kill our opponent with Aetherflux Reservoir itself! My only concern with the deck is that thanks to Kaladesh Remastered's artifact theme, a lot of Historic decks are packing hate for artifact at the moment, which might mean the meta will be pretty hostile to our plan of keeping two expensive artifacts on the battlefield for a turn or two. But if we can dodge the hate and stick both Aetherflux Reservoir and Bolas's Citadel, the results should be absolutely spectacular!
When it comes to energy-based decks, there are two big ones (energy midrange like Sultai Energy or Temur Energy and Aetherworks Marvel combo energy) and one strong budget option in Electrostatic Pummeler aggro-combo energy. But there's actually a fourth energy archetype that it seems like everyone but Achunkofmetal forgot about: Dynavolt Tower Energy Control! Similar to Aetherworks Marvel, Dynavolt Tower is both an energy producer (giving us two energy whenever we cast an instant or sorcery) and an energy payoff (allowing us to spend five energy to Lightning Bolt something), except it's a lot slower and grindier than its more combo-y energy friend. Izzet Dynavolt is basically a control deck with tons of removal and counters, all of which will come with a kicker of two energy once we have a Dynavolt Tower on the battlefield. The idea is that we control the board in the early game, stick a copy or two of our namesake artifact, and eventually use Dynavolt Tower to burn our opponent out of the game. While the plan looks powerful and the deck looks solid, I am a bit skeptical of the one copy of Relic Robber. While Dynavolt Tower is a good way to get rid of blockers, the aggressive, hasty three-drop does look out of place in the otherwise controlling shell. Also, be warned: Izzet Dynavolt is not a fast deck. If you decide to give it a try, expect to grind out a lot of long, slow, close games. So while it may very well be strong enough to allow you to rank up on Magic Arena, expect to do so slowly. Either way, if you're a fan of control but want to play with some new Kaladesh Remastered cards, this seems like a really fun way to go about it!
While Izzet Dynavolt is looking to burn the opponent out of the game extremely slowly, our last Historic deck this week is looking to burn the opponent out of the game quickly: Izzet Pingers! The deck, which costs just nine rares and has no mythics, is built around a trinity of two-drops: Electrostatic Field, Firebrand Archer, and Thermo-Alchemist, all of which deal a damage to our opponent when we cast an instant or sorcery spell. The red of the deck—as you might have guessed—is cheap, mostly cantripping instants and sorceries like Crash Through, Opt, Frantic Inventory, and Light Up the Stage, along with some cheap burn in Shock, Lightning Strike, and Skewer the Critics. The idea is that we can stack up a few of our pingers and potentially burn our opponent out of the game on turn four or five by chaining together cheap spells which will deal a ton of damage with our two-drops. While the deck looks super fun as is, a couple of possibilities could make it even better (although less budget friendly). One possibility would be making the deck mono-red, which would allow us to play cards like Runaway Steam-Kin to produce extra mana to make our combo turns even more explosive. Another is adding something like Arclight Phoenix to the mix for a resilient source of damage, which might require switching around our cantrips slightly (cards like Cathartic Reunion and Thrill of Possibility would go up in value since they would allow us to discard Arclight Phoenix). Is either of these plans better than the current one? I'm not sure, but part of what makes me excited for Izzet Pinger is that the deck is super cheap and has a bunch of potential upgrade paths that shouldn't cost that many extra wildcards!
Pioneer
Kaladesh Remastered has rekindled people's interest in the greatest artifact of all time—Panharmonicon—and not just in Historic, as darkartisan offers a really sweet take on Panharmonicon for Pioneer in Panharmonicon Fires. While we have a lot of obvious Panharmonicon cards in the deck—Elvish Visionary for card draw, Charming Prince for lifegain and blink value, and Agent of Treachery for a finisher—the most unique aspect of the deck is the synergy between Panharmonicon and Flameshadow Conjuring. With both on the battlefield, we can cast a creature with an enters-the-battlefield trigger, double that trigger with Panharmonicon, pay one mana to copy the creature with Flameshadow Conjuring to get a token copy, and get the enters-the-battlefield trigger two more times! This allows us to do some absurd things with Terror of the Peaks. Let's say we have a Terror of the Peaks on the battlefield and cast something like Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath. The end result will be that we get four Terror of the Peaks triggers (two from the initial Uro and two more from the Flameshadow Conjuring copy), each worth six damage, for a total of 24 damage straight to our opponent's face, which should be enough to win the game on the spot. And that doesn't even include all of the cards we'll draw and life we'll gain from Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath's enters-the-battlefield trigger! My only concern for the deck is the mana (although this is mostly fixed if we have Fires of Invention). It might be worth finding room for Fabled Passage, both to fix our colors in games when we don't have Fires of Invention and to help double-trigger Omnath, Locus of Creation. Either way, the deck looks surprisingly solid and like it should be able to do some incredibly fun, explosive things with both Panharmonicon and Flameshadow Conjuring.
Modern
Finally, we have some budget-friendly Modern action with Orzhov Vampire Value from ETphonehome. Unlike most Modern Vampires decks, which are built around lords, Vampire Value is an interesting aristocrat-ish take on the archetype. The main payoffs for the deck are Cordial Vampire and Indulgent Aristocrat, both of which are solid, individually adding +1/+1 counters to our entire Vampire team, but even better together when we can sacrifice a Vampire like Carrier Thrall or Martyr of Dusk to Indulgent Aristocrat to put a +1/+1 counter on our Vampires while also triggering Cordial Vampire to put another +1/+1 counter on our team, quickly growing our small Vampires into massive game-ending threats. Since we want to be sacrificing things anyway, we also have access to Smallpox, which can be a huge blowout against some decks by getting rid of a land along with a creature. Meanwhile, Lurrus of the Dream-Den eventually allows us to start recasting the Vampires we sacrifice from our graveyard for even more sacrificial value. While the deck looks solid (and doubly so for a Modern budget deck), I do wonder if having some targeted removal would be helpful. Either Fatal Push (for which we can easily trigger revolt thanks to our sacrifice plan) or Path to Exile would do. Another interesting possibility would be working Return to the Ranks or Rally the Ancestors into the mix, although these cards would probably be better if we also had Blood Artist or Cruel Celebrant (or both) as additional payoffs for sacrificing our creatures. Either way, Orzhov Vampire Value looks really fun, and you can't beat the price, especially in a format where competitive decks often cost several hundred (or even a thousand) dollars!
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.
