The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Decks (June 26-July 2, 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, the focus is on Standard and Pioneer! 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.

Standard

A couple of weeks ago, we played a mill deck for Budget Magic built around the new fetch lands from Streets of New Capenna as well as Splendid Reclamation. OpppsAllJank has a similar but maybe even more explosive take on Splendid Reclamation in Standard in Reclaiming Valakut. While the deck can still mill people out with Ruin Crab, I wouldn't really consider it a mill deck since Crab is the only mill card in the deck. The real plan is to win with Valakut Exploration. We can fill our graveyard with lands thanks to Cathartic Pyre, Thirst for Discovery, and Big Score (along with a bunch of fetch lands that will naturally end up in the graveyard) and then reanimate them all with Splendid Reclamation, hopefully with a couple of Valakut Explorations on the battlefield to win the game with direct damage, which I guess makes Reclaiming Valakut the Standard version of a Modern Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle deck. While I really like the idea, I will say that playing 69 cards (while nice) likely isn't optimal. I think the extra cards are mostly an attempt to add more lands to the deck, which makes sense, considering how important lands are to our game plan. But playing more than 60 cards (without a very good reason, like Yorion, Sky Nomad) usually isn't advisable since the extra cards will make us less likely to draw important combo pieces like Splendid Reclamation and Valakut Exploration. I'd probably try to find a way to cut down to 60, probably by dropping Commune with Spirits and a few lands. Either way, the deck looks like it should be able to do some really fun, explosive things when the plan comes together!

Mono-Red has more or less been a lost archetype in our current three-color Standard, but Ethan W. has an interesting plan for bringing the archetype back to prominence: going as big as possible with the help of Treasure mana. Rather than being overloaded with the cheapest, most efficient threats in Standard, Treasure Red is built around Treasure tokens, both with Ognis, the Dragon's Lash and a bunch of hasty creatures and also cards like Magda, Brazen Outlaw, Atsushi, the Blazing Sky, and Fable of the Mirror-Breaker that can make Treasure on their own. Thanks to all of this extra mana, the deck can play some huge top-end threats like Inferno of the Star Mounts and Thundersteel Colossus, which can get in huge surprise attacks to close out the game. If you're a fan of mono-red but struggling with the aggro plan, it might be worth giving Treasure Red a chance. It looks fun and like it might even be fairly competitive!

Pioneer

First up in Pioneer, we've got a spicy Sultai list—Sultai 6—from Khansolo. The main idea is to overload with the cheapest six-power creatures available, to let us cast a free card (hopefully something like The Tarrasque or an Eldrazi) from under Fight Rigging as quickly as possible. The most interesting part of the deck is the six-power creatures, which not only include Standard Fight Rigging all-star Shakedown Heavy and former Mono-Black Devotion heavyweight Desecration Demon but also two massive threats with the downside of giving the opponent creatures in Reservoir Kraken and Clackbridge Troll. While these cards are both very undercosted, I am a little worried about the anti-synergies in the deck, like Clackbridge Troll and Reservoir Kraken giving the opponent creatures that can be used to tap down Clackbridge Troll, Reservoir Kraken, and Desecration Demon. That said, it's possible that we just play so many huge, cheap threats that we overwhelm our opponent's defenses, even though we are giving them a bunch of small creatures as sacrifice fodder. While we do have The Meathook Massacre to clean up all the tokens we give our opponent, I could see taking it a step further and playing cards like Massacre Wurm to punish our opponent for having a bunch of small creatures on the battlefield! How good is the deck? I really have no idea, but it does look hilarious and super fun to play!

Finally, we have a super unique combo deck this week from Trythe that I'm calling All-In Citadel. We've seen Bolas's Citadel in the past, most often played as a value card or pseudo-combo piece in sacrifice decks, but Trythe is all-in on going as infinite as possible with the artifact. The goal is to flood the board with cheap or free artifacts, which allows us to Whir of Invention for Bolas's Citadel even though we don't have any black mana in the deck. Actually, speaking of the deck's mana, we've only got a single "real" land in one basic Island, with the rest of our lands being MDFCs. Since MDFCs count as spells in our deck, we can cast them with Bolas's Citadel, which means once we get Bolas's Citadel on the battlefield, we should be able to cast literally our entire deck, assuming we have enough life to keep casting spells. While we do have some incidental life gain from things like Navigator's Compass and Mazemind Tome, the real plan is to get an Aetherflux Reservoir onto the battlefield, which will gain us an increasing amount of life as we cast our entire deck with the help of Bolas's Citadel and eventually turn into our win condition by allowing us to spend 50 life to dome our opponent for 50. While I'm not sure how consistent the deck will be in practice, the combo turns should be pretty absurd! As far as advice, I've got two pieces, one from myself and one from Trythe. First, unless budget is a concern, we probably should play the full four copies of Sea Gate Restoration in the deck so we have a few more untapped lands. In theory, All-In Citadel can combo by Turn 3, but the fact that so many MDFCs come into play tapped has the potential to slow us down by a turn, even if we have the nut draw. Second, Trythe mentioned that if you play the deck, be careful about how to let your spells resolve once you get Bolas's Citadel on the battlefield. We've got a full playset of Jwari Disruption in the deck, and as a counterspell, it needs a target for it to be cast from the top of the deck, or else it can fizzle our Bolas's Citadel. The trick is to cast a spell with Bolas's Citadel and check the top card of your library before it resolves because, if it happens to be Jwari Disruption, you can cast it with Bolas's Citadel to target the first spell while it's still on the stack!

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.