The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Decks (August 7-13, 2022)
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 Pioneer and Modern decks! What sweet brews did you all send in? Let's find out. Oh yeah, if you want your deck considered for next week's edition of The Fish Tank, leave a link in the comments, or you can email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
Pioneer
Aid from the Cowl is an interesting card. As long as we can trigger revolt consistently, it can give us a permanent from the top of our deck each turn for free! Brennen is looking to embrace the enchantment's power with Bant Aid. The deck is overflowing with sneaky ways to trigger revolt—Gilded Goose makes a Food we can sacrifice, Tireless Tracker makes Clues, Renegade Map can snag us a land, and Fabled Passage and Evolving Wilds trigger revolt while fixing our mana—with the idea being that we can stick an Aid from the Cowl, use these cards to trigger revolt, and hopefully spin into something huge for free, like Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, Koma, Cosmos Serpent, Dream Trawler, or Sandwurm Convergence. Since the deck is almost all permanents (the only nonpermanents in the main deck are four wraths), even if we don't get lucky and hit something massive with Aid from the Cowl, we should almost always hit something. Worst case, we get a free land, which helps us ramp into casting our big finishers naturally! We played Unexpected Results in Pioneer a bit ago, and it was really fun when it worked. Seeing this Aid from the Cowl brew makes me wonder if it would be possible to mash the two decks together since they mostly care about the same thing (having big permanents to spin into from the top of the deck). Either way, if you're willing to embrace the variance, the deck looks super fun and like it can probably even win some games!
Next up in Pioneer, we have perhaps the weirdest and cheapest burn deck I've ever seen: Enchantment Burn from Something Snazzy. The idea is to use Tatsunari, Toad Rider to make Keimi so we drain our opponent for one whenever we cast an enchantment, and then back it up by enchantments that can burn the opponent, like Okiba Reckoner Raid, Kumano Faces Kakkazan, Omen of the Forge, Roiling Vortex, and Sanctum of Stone Fangs, to double up our damage. I'm not really sure how realistic the plan is. On paper, the deck looks pretty janky, although it is super unique and cheap. My guess is that it's perfect for more casual play but might not keep up with the top tiers of the Pioneer meta, although the deck is so strange that it might play stronger than it looks on paper.
Meanwhile, DiabolicMachine is looking to ramp into Cruel Reality in Pioneer in a mono-black Golos shell. The goal seems to be to play the control game early with a ton of discard, removal, and sweepers and then use some combination of Golos, Tireless Pilgrim, Cabal Stronghold, and Cascading Cataracts (so we can activate Golos in our mono-black deck) to get Cruel Reality on the battlefield. Once we get the Curse on the battlefield, we should quickly be able to eat away our opponent's creatures and eventually burn them out of the game once they no longer have creatures or planeswalkers to sacrifice. If just forcing the opponent to sacrifice isn't enough, we've also got a Tergrid, God of Fright to steal whatever our opponent sacs! In some ways, the deck reminds me of the Cabal Coffers builds in Modern, except our Pioneer Cabal Coffers is the massively powered-down Cabal Stronghold, but the play pattern looks similar, with the "mono-black control into big-ramp finishers" plan. One potentially interesting option would be to try to make Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx work in the deck, although this would probably take a pretty major rebuild since the current version of the deck doesn't have many permanents to power up Nykthos. It might be worthwhile because Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx is so good at making huge amounts of mana. Regardless, the idea is sweet and seems like it could even be pretty powerful.
Modern
First up in Modern, we've got a sweet Soul Sisters build from Pie4man that's free to play on Magic Online with card-rental programs! Like most Soul Sisters decks, the goal is to gain a bunch of life with Soul Warden and Soul's Attendant, with the help of Norin the Wary blinking itself every turn. Along with gaining us a bunch of life, this will also keeps us drawing through our deck with Welcoming Vampire and Rumor Gatherer, which will eventually find us our finishers: Impact Tremors to deal damage as creatures enter the battlefield, Genesis Chamber to make even more creatures, and Speaker of the Heavens to flood the board with 4/4 Angels. The deck looks solid in general, especially considering the tight budget, and there's also some room for less budget-friendly upgrades like Ranger-Captain of Eos or Serra Ascendant. If you are a fan of Soul Sisters but aren't looking to spend a bunch of money to start playing on Magic Online, this seems like a good starting point!
Finally, in Modern, we have a super-spicy Glimpse of Tomorrow deck from AffinityToSquirtle. We've seen (and played) Glimpse of Tomorrow decks in Modern in the past, and AffinityToSquirtle's plan is similar: flood the board with permanents, cascade into Glimpse of Tomorrow, and put a bunch of things into play. What makes the deck unique is its plan for winning the game: Devilish Valet! The deck is overloaded with creatures that make tokens, like Scute Swarm, Deep Forest Hermit, Chancellor of the Forge, Myr Battlesphere, and Hornet Queen, with the idea being that we'll hit a Devilish Valet and a bunch of token producers from Glimpse of Tomorrow, which should make Devilish Valet big enough to one-shot kill our opponent on the spot! Of course, there's a chance we'll whiff because Glimpse of Tomorrow is random, although if we do, we can always hit a Goblin Dark-Dwellers to recast Glimpse of Tomorrow from the graveyard and try again. If you're looking to go big with Devilish Valet in Modern, Glimpse of the Devil should be able to do some spectacular things...if you get a bit lucky with your Glimpse spins!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. Make sure to let me know in the comments if you have an idea for how to improve these decks, and leave a link there as well if you want your own deck considered for a future Fish Tank (or email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com). 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.
