The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy User-Submitted Decks (Sept. 29 to Oct. 5, 2019)

Welcome back to The Fish Tank, the series where we take 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 a solid mix of decks ranging from Standard to Legacy and even Oathbreaker! If you missed last week's edition of The Fish Tank, you can find it here. Oh yeah, and 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

Improbable Reanimator is a pretty cunning mashup of two archetypes: the "when you draw your second card" theme of Throne of Eldraine and reanimator from past Standard sets. Oddly, the two themes work really well together. Apart from being a payoff for drawing two cards, Improbable Alliance is a good way of generating chump blockers to stay alive while we set up our reanimator kill, while cards like Thrill of Possibility, Tomebound Lich, and The Royal Scions—along with filling our graveyard with things like Drakuseth, Maw of Flames and Agent of Treachery—give us easy ways to draw two (or more) cards in a turn to trigger Improbable Alliance. While the deck looks a bit rough around the edges, it also looks oddly powerful. If you're looking for something different for Throne of Eldraine, with a bit of tuning and brewing, Improbable Reanimator seems like it could be at least somewhat competitive!

Apart from the annoyance that was Nexus of Fate, Standard doesn't usually have too many combo decks, but that may be changing, thanks to some janky combo pieces and the printing of Faeburrow Elder. The main idea of the combo is simple: get a Faeburrow Elder (or adapted Incubation Druid) that taps for at least four mana with the help of three colors of permanents and Leyline of Abundance (or Biomancer's Familiar) and then stick a Gauntlets of Light on the Faeburrow Elder. If we can get these pieces assembled, we will have infinite mana since we can tap Faeburrow Elder for four mana and then use Gauntlets of Light to untap it for just three mana, leaving one mana left over each time we go through the loop. As far as winning the game, we just activate Leyline of Abundance a bunch of times to make our creatures massive, or if we happen to have Gadwick, the Wizened or Hydroid Krasis, we can draw our deck for fun, tutor Jace, Wielder of Mysteries from our sideboard with Fae of Wishes, and win by milling ourselves!

Modern

Thankfully, no Neoforms or Griselbrands are involved in Mono-Red Neobrand. Instead, the name refers to the fact that the deck is hoping to win (or essentially win) the game on Turn 1 with a flurry of rituals into Irencrag Feat and then a huge threat. While Karn Liberated and Drakuseth, Maw of Flames are fine, the most interesting finisher is Rally the Horde, which can make somewhere between 10 and 40 1/1 tokens, enough to kill the opponent in just a turn or two. Sadly, the Rally the Horde plan does come with some risk: with only nine lands in the deck, it seems possible to get unlucky and exile our own deck. (Although maybe this is even a better and more hilarious story to tell—I'm not sure I've ever seen somebody accidentally mill themselves out on Turn 1!)

Finally, we have a wheel deck for Modern that isn't looking to jank people out with Narset, Parter of Veils! Hot Wheel looks super fun to play if you draw a Smothering Tithe or Waste Not. The idea of the deck is pretty simple: stick a couple of enchantments that care about the opponent drawing or discarding cards and then cast a bunch of the 16 wheels (Collective Defiance, Reforge the Soul, Time Reversal, and Echo of Eons) while using the Treasure tokens from Smothering Tithe to keep fueling the fun. Apart from winning with Waste Not value, the other goal of the deck is to make Molten Psyche the last wheel cast since it deals damage to the opponent equal to the number of cards they've drawn during the turn, which means with just a few other wheels beforehand, it should be 20 or more damage and win the game on the spot. The big challenge with decks like Hot Wheel is how they function if they don't draw their key pieces. While having both Waste Not and Smothering Tithe helps, without at least one (and hopefully more) of these enchantments on the battlefield, the deck will be in danger of spinning its wheels rather than cruising to a victory.

Legacy

I tend to take notice whenever I see a Commander card show up as the foundation of a Legacy deck, not because those decks are necessarily broken (or even all that strong) but because they are usually unique. In this case, we have a Sudden Substitution combo deck. The goal is to cast a pact (Pact of Negation, Intervention Pact, Slaughter Pact, Summoner's Pact, or Intervention Pact), preferably one that requires the payment of a color of mana our opponent doesn't have access to, and then use Sudden Substitution to give our opponent the pact in exchange for one of their creatures, causing them to lose on their upkeep when they can't pay for the pact. Since some Legacy decks play few (or even no) creatures, cards like Forbidden Orchard, Akroan Horse, and Hunted Troll allow us to give our opponent a creature, which is necessary for the Sudden Substitution combo to work. The plan is certainly janky, to the point where we have Sundial of the Infinite to save us from our own pacts if needed. But if you pull if off once, I'm sure everyone at the tournament will take notice.

Oathbreaker

One of the things that make multiplayer formats like Commander and Oathbreaker unique is politics. In a two-player game, you pretty much always want to do whatever is worst for your opponent, but in a multiplayer game, there are times when it is better to work together against a common threat. Ethno's Oko / Split Decision Oathbreaker deck takes this concept to the extreme, with a ton of cards that can be used to help (and perhaps even befriend) others at the table. If you're looking for something different to play in Oathbreaker and don't mind a bit of chaos with your politics, the deck looks like a lot of fun. Will it win? Who knows, but it does seem guaranteed to lead to an interesting game of Oathbreaker.

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. If you have some thoughts, ideas, opinions, or suggestions on the lists, let's talk about it in the comments! Oh yeah, and if you'd like your own deck considered for a future edition of The Fish Tank (or the Fishbowl Thursday Instant Deck Tech), leave a link in the comments, or you can email me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.