The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Decks (March 14-20, 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're bouncing around with lists from Historic all the way back to Legacy! What cool ideas did you all send in this week? Let's find out! But first, to have your own deck considered for next week's edition (and for our Fishbowl Thursday Instant Deck Tech), make sure to leave a link in the comments, or email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
Historic
While Historic Anthology IV might not be the most powerful of the Historic Anthology series, it still released some really interesting cards into the format, with Collected Conjuring being one of the weirdest and harder to build around. At first glance, Collected Conjuring looks a lot like Collected Company—a card that falls between very good and busted, depending on the format. But as it turns out, building a deck with around 30 sorceries is a lot harder than building a deck with 30 creatures. To have enough sorceries in the deck to typically hit two with Collected Conjuring, there usually are only eight-ish utility slots for finishers. EnthrallingVictory has a sweet plan for taking advantage of the fact that a single Collected Conjuring can cast three sorceries in the same turn: Metallurgic Summonings and Shark Typhoon. If we can get either (or better, both) on the battlefield, Collected Conjuring will add a ton of power to the battlefield, as we'll theoretically get a 4/4 token from our namesake card and then two additional smaller tokens form the sorceries we hit with Collected Conjuring. The rest of the deck mostly is ramp (to get to Metallurgic Summonings and Shark Typhoon), card draw, and removal. While the deck looks like a blast, I did want to mention one thing: split cards are sort of a non-bo with Collected Conjuring because they count as their combined mana value (so Spring // Mind actually has a CMC of nine, while Discovery // Dispersal has a CMC of seven, making both too expensive to hit with Collected Conjuring). It might be worth replacing them with sorceries we can find with Collected Conjuring. Otherwise, if you want to sling some spells and make some Sharks or Constructs, Temur Conjuring Ramp looks like a ton of fun and like it might actually be able to win some games.
What's better than forcing your opponent to sacrifice most of their board by fighting something with Phyrexian Obliterator? Stealing all of the permanents they sacrifice with Tergrid, God of Fright! Blckpanther95's Tergrid Obliterator list is pretty spicy. It's a graveyard-based Golgari deck looking to use cards like Stitcher's Supplier and Glowspore Shaman to mill over Phyrexian Obliterator so we can Back for More it into play, while fighting our opponent's biggest creature in the process, to make our opponent sacrifice a ton of permanents. If we also have Tergrid on the battlefield, then rather than ending up in the graveyard, all of those permanents will come back into play under our control! The biggest drawback of the deck is that it's pretty graveyard dependent, which means cards like Grafdigger's Cage (which are pretty popular in Historic) shut down our reanimation plan and make it much harder to Obliterator our opponent. But we do have Assassin's Trophy and some solid sideboard cards to answer our opponent's answers. Personally, I'm not 100% sure that the self-mill plan is necessary. In theory, you could play the same combo in a mostly-black devotion deck, splashing for green fight spells, and mostly invalidate graveyard hate. But either way, the combo itself looks spectacular. Nothing is more fun than stealing your opponent's board!
Pioneer
Recently, Wizards has printed not one but two cards that can be considered one-card combos: The World Tree and Emergent Ultimatum. While both cards require specific support pieces in the deck to win the game, in theory, we only need to resolve / activate a single card to win. Kelvin-escesare has a Pioneer deck taking advantage of both. The plan is simple: ramp a lot and use sweepers like Languish, Extinction Event, and Shadows' Verdict to stay alive long enough to either cast a Emergent Ultimatum or activate The World Tree, either of which should be able to win us the game. If we are on the Emergent Ultimatum plan, we search for Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider, Valki, God of Lies, and Liliana, Dreadhorde General (or Alrund's Epiphany, depending on the situation), either giving us one game-ending planeswalker ultimate or two powerful planeswalkers for seven mana. Meanwhile, The World Tree win is even more interesting. The idea is to grab just three Gods: The Locust God, God-Eternal Bontu, and God-Eternal Rhonas. God-Eternal Bontu lets us sacrifice our board to draw a bunch of cards, triggering The Locust God to make a bunch of hasty, flying tokens, which God-Eternal Rhonas pumps, allowing us to close out the game immediately with one big attack. The plan is really sweet, and it seems super fun to play, although there is some risk that since we only have one copy of each of our tutor targets, we might occasionally draw one naturally and fizzle the combo. I'm not sure if playing more copies would actually improve the deck, but it is something to keep in mind. If we draw The Locust God or God-Eternal Bontu (for example), then The World Tree kill suddenly is mostly off the table. Still, with two different one-card game-ending combos, the deck looks really scary!
Modern
Giants haven't really found their footing in Standard yet, but maybe the problem is we're trying to play the tribe in the wrong format. What if, as JuniorThunder suggests, the true home for Giants is Modern? While Temur Giants has most of the best Giants in Standard, like Calamity Bearer, Tectonic Giant, Bonecrusher Giant, and Quakebringer, moving into Modern also adds some interesting new tribe members. Inferno Titan is a super-fast clock. And while Sunrise Sovereign might be expensive for a lord, giving trample along with +2/+2 to all of our other Giants helps to make up for the big mana investment. Plus, we get a bunch of cheap mana dorks in Birds of Paradise and Noble Hierarch to speed things up. While removal-heavy decks might be an issue, imagine a game where we curve Calamity Bearer into Quakebringer into Sunrise Sovereign. Having a bunch of massive trampling Giants dealing double damage seems like it should be able to close out the game in short order!
Legacy
We don't look at Legacy decks as often as we should. But this week, we have a sweet (and budget-friendly) Legacy combo deck from TeamSINSO: Treasonous Children! The main combo of the deck is Treasonous Ogre and Children of Korlis. We can play Treasonous Ogre, pay as much life as possible to make mana, and then use Children of Korlis to gain that life back and repeat the process. Then, thanks to Enduring Renewal or Sigil of the New Dawn, we can get back Children of Korlis and repeat this process over and over again, not only gaining infinite life but also making infinite mana. The problem is Treasonous Ogre only makes red mana, and Children of Korlis requires white mana, so we have False Dawn and Mycosynth Lattice as fixing. Eventually, we win the game with a massive Fall of the Titans for lethal! While the plan is really unique and the combo is sweet, I do have a couple of suggestions for improving the deck. One involves Mycosynth Lattice. I think that we either want to add Karn, the Great Creator into the deck, giving us a backup combo of locking our opponent out of the game with Mycosynth Lattice, or cut Mycosynth Lattice altogether for Chromatic Orrery, which offers the same fixing but without turning all of our things into artifacts and allowing cards like Force of Vigor, Ancient Grudge, and Nature's Claim to kill our combo pieces. The second suggestion is to switch Fall of the Titans to Banefire to get around counterspells. Doing a ton of work to combo off only to have Fall of the Titans countered by Force of Will seems brutal. Suggestions aside, I really like the deck. While it certainly seems more Against the Odds than truly competitive, it is a hilarious way to win a game of Legacy!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for this week! If you have any ideas about how to improve these decks, make sure to let us know in the comments, and if you have a deck you want to be considered for a future Fish Tank, leave that there as well! Thanks to everyone who sent in decks this week! 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.
