The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Decks (June 12-18, 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! It's been a couple of weeks since we've had a Fish Tank because of a combination of CommandFest Richmond, endless spoilers, and me getting sick, which means we've got some catching up to do! This week, we're jumping around from format to format and have some really sweet-looking lists! What spice 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, SirEklz is basically trying to play Death's Shadow but in Standard! Thanks to Shadow of Mortality and Scourge of the Skyclaves, we now have not just one but two creatures in Standard that reward us for losing life. But how can we get our life total low enough to support these cards without fetch lands or shock lands? Vecna, of course! The main idea is to use Eye of Vecna and Hand of Vecna to lower our life total, which not only allows us to turn Shadow of Mortality and Scourge of the Skyclaves into powerful, undercosted threats but also might also let us summon Vecna itself, with the help of The Book of Vile Darkness. Back everything up with the good black removal available in Standard, and we have the recipe for a powerful deck. The best part? The deck falls into our budget category—at least in paper, where it costs just $93 to put together. If you're looking for something spicy and different to try in Standard over the summer before Adventures in the Forgotten Realms rotates, Vecna Scourge looks like a fun and perhaps even semi-competitive option!

Explorer

In Explorer, Noah M.'s looking to combo off with Orvar, the All-Form! The main goal is to get Orvar, the All-Form and Dusk Mangler onto the battlefield alongside a Maestros Ascendancy. We can then use Feign Death to target Dusk Mangler, make a copy with Orvar, and then sacrifice the Dusk Mangler to Maestros Ascendancy, which lets us recast Feign Death on Dusk Mangler to make another copy and give us back the copy we sacrificed, thanks to Feign Death's ability. Altogether, this will hit our opponent for 16 (counting the original Dusk Mangler's trigger) and make our opponent sac four creatures and discard four cards while leaving us a board full of 5/4s! 

While the deck should be spectacular when everything comes together, the challenges will be getting Orvar, Dusk Mangler, and Maestros Ascendancy on the battlefield at the same time and keeping them there long enough to combo off. While we can cast them, in a perfect world, we'll mill them to Stitcher's Supplier, Snooping Newsie, and Undead Butler and reanimate them both at once with Thwart the Grave (potentially for just three or four mana) once we're ready to combo off. Consistency will probably be a bit of an issue for Expl-Orvar, but when everything comes together, it seems like it will be a hilarious way to win a game of Explorer!

Modern

First up in Modern, we have Eidolon Madness from kazenokoeki, a deck built around a mostly forgotten cycle of creatures from Dissension: Eidolons that return themselves from your graveyard to your hand whenever you cast a multicolor spell. The goal is to combine Aurora Eidolon, Enigma Eidolon, and Entropic Eidolon with Zombie Infestation (to discard the Eidolons to make 2/2 Zombies) and Desecrated Tomb (to make 1/1 flying Bats as they leave our graveyard and return to hand), generating a slow, grindy value engine in conjunction with Dihada's Ploy and Faithful Mending, as multicolor spells we can cast multiple times. Once everything is set up, the deck should be able to generate a lot of creatures each turn, mostly for free, although it does look like it will probably be a bit slow to get going and can be shut down by graveyard hate. That said, the amount of repeatable value the deck can generate is immense if you can dodge the hate and get a couple of turns to set up. Plus, it's super cheap to put together outside of the mana base. If you're willing to play budget lands (or already have the expensive lands), you should be able to throw the deck together for under $50. Is Eidolon Madness competitive? My guess is not super competitive, but it is unique, fun, and budget friendly, and it looks like it should be able to win some games in the right matchups.

Treasure Hunt has long been a favorite budget jank archetype in Modern. Zombie Infestation most often is used as a finisher, but n3onblue has a different plan: Mirrodin Besieged and artifact lands! The idea of the deck, like any Treasure Hunt meme build, is to play all lands except for Treasure Hunts and a finisher. We mulligan until we find a Treasure Hunt and chain together copies (drawing most of our deck along the way) until we hit the finisher and (hopefully) win the game. Mirrodin Besieged is an interesting finisher for a Treasure Hunt deck. The idea is that we can draw and discard 15 artifact lands and then win on our end step. The advantages of this plan, as compared to Zombie Infestation, are twofold. First, we don't need to have a Reliquary Tower on the battlefield because we want to discard artifact lands to hand size. Second, we win immediately on our end step if we can get 15 artifacts in the graveyard, so we don't need to give our opponent another turn. On the other hand, there's also a huge downside to this plan: we lose to graveyard hate, which most Modern decks will have in their sideboard for other matchups. And since we can only play lands, Treasure Hunt, and a Mirrodin Besieged, we can't really defend against graveyard hate in any way. I'm not sure whether this build of Treasure Hunt is better than Zombie Infestation builds, but considering how cheap the deck is to put together, it should be easy enough to give it a try if you're in the mood for some memeing in Modern!

Legacy

One thing we know about Legacy is that you're very likely to win the game if you can cheat an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn into play. Well, GranitraHero has a pretty unique plan for getting Emrakul onto the battlefield: Hunting Grounds. Hunting Grounds is a strange card. It does nothing at all until you get threshold (seven or more cards in your graveyard), but then it becomes incredibly powerful, letting you put a creature into play from your hand for free whenever your opponent plays a spell. The idea of Unfair Grounds is to fill the graveyard with cheap cantrips, fetch lands, and free counterspells while also digging for an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or Hullbreaker Horror. Once we get our graveyard full, we just wait for our opponent to cast a spell, and then we start slamming Emrakuls and Hullbreaker Horrors for free, trusting that they should close out the game in short order. One possible addition to the deck would be a backup way to get Emrakul, the Aeons Torn on the battlefield, like Show and Tell. Having a bit of redundancy is never a bad thing; plus, one of the downsides of Hunting Grounds is that it does depend on our graveyard, which means if our opponent plays a Rest in Peace or Leyline of the Void, we could end up stuck with a bunch of finishers in hand and no way to put them into play. Regardless, it's really cool to see a Hunting Grounds deck for Legacy!

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.