The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Veiwer Decks (February 7-13, 2021)

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 a bunch of Modern, along with a smattering of other formats. What sweet decks did you all send in 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 it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.

Standard

Niko Aris is still one of my favorite Kaldheim cards, and even though initial results have been less than encouraging, I'm still holding out hope that it will end up a solid card in Standard. JForc3 has an idea to make that happen: Niko Bant Enchantments. The idea is to take advantage of the fact that the Shard tokens Niko Aris makes are enchantments, which means they'll trigger constellation cards like Setessan Champion, Archon of Sun's Grace, Eutropia the Twice-Favored, and Nessian Wanderer. If we can stack up a few creatures with constellation and then use all of our mana to make a bunch of Shards with Niko Aris's enters-the-battlefield trigger, the value should (hopefully) win us the game by making a bunch of 2/2 Pegasus tokens, drawing us a bunch of cards and allowing us to get in a massive flying attack thanks to Eutropia. While not having any Throne of Eldraine cards is a bit worrying, the deck looks solid, synergistic, and super fun! Oh yeah, and if you already have popular lands like pathways and temples, it's also super cheap to put together, with under 10 rares / mythics (while also having the nice price of $69 in paper).

Pioneer

Last week on stream, we played a Modern deck built around comboing Master of Waves with Mystic Reflection to make an absurdly big board full of Elementals by targeting Master of Waves with Mystic Reflection while its token-making trigger is on the stack. One of the questions people asked was if the same deck could work in Pioneer. Well, now, thanks to Anonymous, we have the answer: yes! Mono-U Copycat Devotion is basically the Pioneer version of Master of Waves / Mystic Reflection combo. The plan is the same: stack up some blue pips on the battlefield, target Master of Waves with Mystic Reflection with its trigger on the stack, and win the game. However, we do get some interesting additions in Pioneer, like Naban, Dean of Iteration as a backup (but much less explosive) Mystic Reflection and Willbender, which is sneakily powerful with Harbinger of the Tides and Mystic Reflection, potentially allowing us to steal our opponent's creatures for just two mana! Can the deck compete in a world of Omnaths, Wilderness Reclamations, and the like? Who knows? Either way, the list looks solid, and it looks like the perfect starting point if you're looking for a way to port the Master Reflection combo to Pioneer!

Modern

While we've looked at Grinning Ignus combo decks in the past, as Rubic realized, the strategy became a lot more consistent with the release of Kaldheim, thanks to Birgi, God of Storytelling. Here's the idea: we find Grinning Ignus, which can bounce and replay itself for a single red mana. If we add in Birgi, God of Storytelling (or Runaway Steam-Kin, our backup, slightly worse Birgi), we can bounce and replay Grinning Ignus an infinite number of times. If we have Hazoret's Monument on the battlefield, we also generate infinite mana (since Grinning Ignus will cost one less) and also infinite looting, which will find us Bontu's Monument to finish the game by draining our opponent out as we keep casting Grinning Ignus! Basically, the deck is a weird budget-friendly storm deck without any actual storm cards! While adding Birgi to the deck should up the consistency by giving us eight copies of Runaway Steam-Kin to combo with, the pinch is still that there is only one Grinning Ignus, which is why we have Flamekin Harbinger to find our payoff consistently. Perhaps the biggest issue with the deck is that we do need three combo pieces to go off, but you can't beat the price, and the Infinite Ignus wins should be spectacular when everything comes together!

The combo of Viridian Longbow and deathtouch creatures can be quite powerful against creature decks, allowing us to repeatedly snipe down our opponent's best threats for just a single mana. Traditionally, the issue with decks like ThatWetStuff's The Arrow is that they have a hard time closing out the games because many of the deathtouch creatures are small. Well, thanks to Kaldheim, the strategy got a really interesting way to speed up its clock: Fynn, the Fangbearer! Thanks to Fynn's ability to give all of our deathtouch creatures poison 2, it at least doubles (and, in some cases, quadruples) the damage dealt by creatures like Foulmire Knight, Chevill, Bane of Monsters, Narnam Renegade, and Vraska, Swarm's Eminence tokens. Add in the ability to clear away blockers with a deathtoucher and Pathway Arrows or Viridian Longbow, and the deck should be able to infect the opponent out of the game fairly quickly. The biggest downside of the deck is that while it is really solid against creature-based strategies, our plan of pinging creatures to death with a single point of deathtouch damage becomes much less exciting if our opponent is playing a spell-based control or combo deck because our opponent likely won't have many creatures. Thankfully, we do have a bunch of discard, which is good against control and combo, but it's still worth keeping in mind that the deck likely will have some really good and really bad matchups. Either way, The Arrow is cheap and looks really fun!

Pyre of Heroes is one of the Kaldheim cards I'm highest about in formats like Modern, but so far, it hasn't really taken off in the format. Staxi_Boi is looking to change this with a unique plan: rather than trying to work all of the way up the curve with Pyre of Heroes, the main goal of Burning-Tree Pyre is to keep turning underpowered two-drops into powerful three-drops. The main synergy is that both Burning-Tree Emissary and Hidden Herbalists are Humans that make two mana (just enough to active Pyre of Heroes) when they enter the battlefield. This means that we can cast them and then immediately Pyre them into a three-drop like Magus of the Moon, Seasoned Pyromancer, Eternal Witness, or Combat Celebrant, depending on the situation. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that it's basically Pyre of Heroes aggro. Along with the Pyre value plan, we can also just dump a bunch of free copies of Burning-Tree Emissary / Hidden Herbalists, pump them with Atarka's Command, and win like a weird 8 Whack–style deck!

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.