The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Decks (August 21-27, 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 some spicy Modern lists, some Panharmonicon action in Historic, and even a fun casual Legacy list! What sweetness did you all send in this week? Let's take a look! But first, to have your own deck considered for next week's edition, make sure to leave a link in the comments, or email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com. 

Historic

There's nothing I like more in Magic than blowing up lands, except for Panharmonicon, which means Cannibal's Ponza-monicon deck is right up my alley. The main goal is to get a Panharmonicon on the battlefield, play an Earth-Cult Elemental, and make our opponent sac two permanents (or, if we get lucky with our dice-rolling, four permanents) with its enters-the-battlefield trigger. We then can use Ephemerate and Teleportation Circle to blink Earth-Cult Elemental and do it again, until we hopefully eat away all of our opponent's permanents and get a flawless victory! For the ultimate blowout, we can stick a Mirror March, play Earth-Cult Elemental, and—with lucky coin flips and dice rolls—potentially make our opponent sacrifice all of their permanents at once! The rest of the deck is more or less a Boros midrange deck with wraths, card filtering, and ramp. While the deck is a bit light on other enters-the-battlefield triggers for Panharmonicon, we do have a few, with Priest of Ancient Lore being the best of the bunch. One suggestion for the deck: Thrilling Discovery is probably just a better Thrill of Possibility since being an instant doesn't really seem like much of an upside in the deck, especially compared to some lifegain, which can help us stay alive while we are getting our expensive combo pieces on the battlefield. While I don't really have any idea how competitive the deck might be (my guess would be medium at best since neither land destruction nor Panharmonicon has proven to be especially competitive in Historic), when things go well, the deck should do some hilarious things! Oh yeah, and it's only 21 rares on Magic Arena, with 12 coming in the mana base, so it shouldn't take too many wildcards to put together if you want to give it a try!

Modern

One of my all-time favorite Modern decks was Troll Worship. The idea is to stick a Worship on a hexproof creature like Troll Ascetic and trust that the opponent simply won't be able to win through the lock. While the deck was insane back in 2015, it has gotten a lot worse since, mostly because Wizards keeps printing flexible answers like Assassin's Trophy and Prismatic Ending that can kill Worship and break the lock. Iam-invictus has a really sweet plan for fixing this issue: combining Troll Worship with Enchantress! The printing of Sterling Grove in Modern Horizons 2 is a huge, huge deal for the deck. If we don't have Worship, Sterling Grove can find it; if we do have Worship, Sterling Grove can protect it, solving one of the deck's biggest issues. While not quite as cheap as the original Budget Magic list, the mashup is still pretty inexpensive for a Modern deck, at just $180, which is a nice bonus. My only concern with the Enchantress / Troll Worship hybrid plan is Sythis, Harvest's Hand. One way that the Worship hard-lock can win is by milling the opponent out very slowly as they draw their entire deck. This plan might be off the table if we draw too many extra cards with Sythis, Harvest's Hand, although thanks to the addition of Spirit Mantle, this might not be a huge issue since Worship Enchantress should be able to win with damage before running out of cards. If you have the old Troll Worship deck and, like me, are disappointed with how often Worship dies these days, this build seems like a solid upgrade plan. And if you like janking opponents out of the game, it's cheap enough to put together as a backup deck and play for fun!

One thing we've learned since Modern Horizons 2 was released is that the evoke Elementals are incredibly powerful, doubly so if you build around them with cards like Ephemerate, Undying Evil, or Malakir Rebirth to both reuse their enters-the-battlefield abilities and also keep them around permanently after evoking them. We've seen a few ways to take advantage of this synergy, ranging from Stoneblade shells to Elemental Tribal to Reanimator. Staxi_Boi has a new and super-spicy plan for the evoke Elementals in Tragic Delver. The idea is to evoke Fury and Grief early in the game, potentially return them to play with Malakir Rebirth, and take advantage of the fact that the evoke sacrifices the creature after it enters the battlefield to play undercosted creatures like Grim Wanderer and Bone Picker (aka "Tragic Delver") that need a creature to die for them to hit the battlefield early in the game (or at all). The end result is a really unique take on Rakdos Aggro that should be fairly resilient to removal but also pretty fast with the right draws. Plus, you always have the potential of picking up free wins with the double-Grief Thoughtseize on Turn 1!

When Minion of the Mighty was first previewed, there was a bit of hype about trying to use it to kill opponents on Turn 2 in Standard by using multiple pump spells to get it to six power, attacking and putting Terror of Mount Velus into play tapped, and attacking for 22 total damage thanks to double-strike. Sadly, the combo turned out to be pretty clunky, mostly because you need two pump spells, Minion of the Mighty, and Terror of Mount Velus in your opening hand, which is asking for a lot. But maybe the problem with the combo is that we were trying it in the wrong format. As Sixshot's Minion of the Mighty deck shows off, the plan gets a lot easier in Modern. Scale Up can get Minion of the Mighty all the way up to six power by itself, reducing the number of cards we need to combo, while Vines of Vastwood and Snakeskin Veil protect Minion and also push it toward six power. We also get Dragonlord Atarka as a backup Dragon to put into play. While technically not a one-shot kill like Terror of Mount Velus, a Turn 2 8/8 trample that wipes away a creature or two should still be enough to close out the game in most situations. While consistency likely still will be an issue—there's only one Minion of the Mighty, and we're not going to do a lot if we don't draw it (or if it immediately dies)—the combo should be much more consistent in Modern than in Standard. It's also worth mentioning that Scale Up was just released on Magic Arena in Jumpstart: Historic Horizons, which means something very similar is now possible in Historic as well! 

Legacy

Finally, we have some casual Legacy action this week. While Griffin Canyon Combo doesn't seem like a deck that can 5-0 a league, it does seem hilarious and fun for the kitchen table! The idea is to get a creature that can untap a land—like Krosan Restorer, Voyaging Satyr, or Juniper Order Druid—on the battlefield alongside a card that can turn it into a Griffin, like Artificial Evolution, Unnatural Selection, Imagecrafter, or Arcane Adaptation. This allows us to go infinite with one of the weirdest old lands in Magic: Griffin Canyon, which can be tapped to pump a Griffin +1/+1 and untap it. We can tap Griffin Canyon to pump Voyaging Satyr (or whatever untapper we have) and then tap Voyaging Satyr to untap Griffin Canyon, with the end result being an infinitely large creature that we hopefully can use to win the game! The biggest drawback of the combo is that once we go infinite, the massive creature can still be chump blocked. Adding a Fling effect or a way to make a creature unblockable might be worth considering, to make sure that we don't go through all of the work of comboing off only to have our massive "Griffin" stonewalled by a 1/1 token. While there are certainly easier ways to go infinite in Legacy, there might not be a more hilarious combo deck in the format!

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for this week! Do you have some ideas on how to improve the decks we looked at today? Let us know in the comments! Have a deck for next week? You can leave it in the comments too! Thanks to everyone who submitted lists this week, and as always, you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.