The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Decks (January 30-February 5, 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 have a touch of Standard, a resurgent interest in Pioneer, and, of course, some Modern spice! What 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.

Standard

First up in Standard, we've got a wild Boros control deck from The_Anti_Body. The main synergy is to use Roiling Vortex to power up Tibalt's Trickery. If we use Trickery to counter something with Roiling Vortex on the battlefield, our opponent either takes five damage from Vortex (for casting a spell without paying any mana for it) or chooses not to cast the spell, which turns Tibalt's Trickery into a red Counterspell. Backing up this synergy are a bunch of additional burn spells, like Sacred Fire, Igneous Inspiration, and Spikefield Hazard; Valakut Exploration, which offers damage or extra cards, depending on what we need; and a bunch of sweepers, including Burn Down the House, Doomskar, and Vanquish the Horde, with the goal being to keep the opponent's board in check until we can eventually burn them out of the game or win with Cat tokens from Felidar Retreat. The end result is basically a Burn control deck, which seems really solid against creature decks like Mono-White or Mono-Green, although I'm not sure how it will stand up to more traditional blue-based control. Either way, the deck is super unique and looks like a blast to mess around with in Standard as we wait for Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty to be released next week!

Pioneer

I've started getting a surprising number of Pioneer submissions in just the past couple of weeks. It seems like maybe the format is making a comeback. This week, we've got two sweet Pioneer brews to look at, starting with Pie4man's PioneerForm. The idea of the deck is to sacrifice a Tasigur, the Golden Fang to Neoform (hopefully early in the game, thanks to cards like Fabled Passage and cheap spells like Opt and Consider to fill the graveyard and reduce Tasigur's cost), in order to tutor up something like Koma, Cosmos Serpent, Hullbreaker Horror, or Nezahal, Primal Tide to close out the game. The deck seems like it should be super explosive when the plan comes together, especially considering that we back it up with cheap disruption like Thoughtseize, Fatal Push, and Abrupt Decay. My only real worry is that there's only one Tasigur, the Golden Fang, and our deck will be pretty clunky if we can't find a copy since all of our other creatures are seven drops and our Neoforms will be dead draws. Thankfully, we have a bunch of cheap cantrips to dig for our combo pieces, which should help, but I almost wonder if it would be worth adding Hooting Mandrills to the deck (we've already got the green mana) for a bit more redundancy. Either way, the plan is sweet, and this seems like a solid option for Pioneer if you like cheating big things into play.

Next up, we have a really innovative Pioneer combo deck from Corrosive_Cat: The Recycling Plant! The deck looks a bit like Mono-Green Stompy, but it has a spicy infinite combo built in! The main idea is to use The Great Henge (which can come down as early as Turn 3 with our best draws) to reduce the cost on Metalwork Colossus, making it free to cast with the help of an additional non-creature artifact. The next step is sticking Ulvenwald Mysteries, which makes a Clue token whenever a non-token creature dies. We then can start looping two copies of Metalwork Colossus. We can cast one, draw a card from The Great Henge, and sacrifice it and a Clue to a Metalwork Colossus in the graveyard to return the graveyard copy to our hand, which we then cast to draw a card with The Great Henge, and then repeat the process, saccing a Clue and Metalwork Colossus to return the first Colossus from our graveyard to our hand. This will draw us through our deck and eventually find us Altar of the Brood to win us the game by milling our opponent's entire deck! Of course, we can also just win by beating our opponent down, which is what makes the deck scary: we look like Mono-Green Stompy until we suddenly combo off! If you've been looking for a spicy new combo to brew around in Pioneer, The Recycling Plant seems like a really fun place to start!

Modern

First up in Modern this week, we have a new twist on one of my favorite archetypes—Carth and Friends—but this time with Mirror Box! Mirror Box is oddly perfect for a Carth deck, allowing us to have multiple copies of Carth the Lion (which does crazy things in a deck full of planeswalkers) and also multiple copies of the same planeswalkers on the battlefield! It also allows us to play Mox Amber for ramp. I do wonder how good it will be since our cheapest legend is Wrenn and Six, which is only a two-of; after that, our legends cost between three and five mana, which means Mox Amber probably won't add extra mana until Turn 3 at the earliest (although it is sweet that we can keep multiples on the battlefield thanks to Mirror Box). While I'm not sure that Mirror Box will make Carth & Friends more competitive, it certainly makes it more fun. Imagine having a planeswalker leave the battlefield with two or three copies of Carth the Lion on the battlefield to refill our hand with planeswalkers while also being able to ultimate pretty much any of the planeswalkers in our deck immediately! What could be more fun than that?

Apparently, it's planeswalker week in Modern because our second deck is Genesis Wave Superfriends from Marvelman123! The idea is to make a bunch of mana quickly with Arbor Elf, Utopia Sprawl, and Birds of Paradise to cast a massive Genesis Wave, putting Doubling Seasons, Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider, and a bunch of planeswalkers into play (all of which we should be able to ultimate immediately thanks to Doubling Season and Vorinclex doubling up their loyalty counters). This should lead to us winning the game on the spot as we ultimate a board full of planeswalkers! My only real concern is whether we have enough ramp. For Genesis Wave to really be good in our deck, we need to cast it for eight or nine mana. Are Arbor Elf, Utopia Sprawl, and Birds of Paradise enough to get the job done? I'm not sure, although worst case, we can always just hard-cast our Doubling Seasons and planeswalkers fairly—well, not exactly fairly, but more fairly than ultimating a bunch of planeswalkers in the same turn with Genesis Wave!

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. If you'd like your deck considered for the next Fish Tank, leave me a link in the comments, or you can email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, or you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.