The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Decks (May 16-22, 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 jumping from format to format to check out a bunch of cool brews! What sweetness did you all send in? 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. 

Standard

We've talked a few times about the possibility of Velomachus Lorehold in Standard, but there's always one big problem: there just aren't a ton of good instants or sorceries to hit with the Elder Dragon's attack trigger. Well, Halfwing might have cracked the code in a really unintuitive way: playing Velomachus Lorehold in Elf tribal. While the idea sounds crazy, the deck actually looks strangely powerful. Elves offer plenty of ways to ramp into Velomachus Lorehold, and the tribe's ability to flood the board with creatures turns Lorehold Command (most likely to pump the team and Lightning Helix) and Return of the Wildspeaker (to give all of our small Elves +3+3, potentially allowing us to alpha strike the turn when Velomachus hits the battlefield) into great hits for Velomachus Lorehold's attack trigger. 

Speaking of cards we've desperately been trying to make work in Standard, Jennometry has a sweet Standard Death & Taxes deck that's all-in on making Divine Gambit good. While the main goal is to play small, taxing creatures that are strong against the top-tier decks in the meta (Drannith Magistrate stops Emergent Ultimatum, Reidane, God of the Worthy slows it down, and Elite Spellbinder gives white a pseudo-Thoughtseize on a body), many of our taxing creatures also help to support Divine Gambit. Containment Priest stops the opponent from putting creatures into play with Divine Gambit, while Elite Spellbinder helps to ensure that the coast is clear (while also taking the best permanent from our opponent's hand so they can't put it into play when we cast Divine Gambit). While the deck doesn't have a super-fast clock, it does seem super annoying to play against, and if Divine Gambit is ever going to work in Standard, it's probably in a deck that looks a lot like this!

Historic

Meanwhile, in Historic, we have some glorious (literally) jank from Talespinner Lore! I'll warn you right away that Glorious Reversal Storm isn't the kind of deck that is likely to rank you up consistently on the ladder, but that's not the point of the deck. The goal of Glorious Reversal Storm is to do something hilarious and spectacular when its plan comes together. The main goal is to get Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield alongside a way to not lose the game, like Platinum Angel or Gideon of the Trials. We then can cast Chance for Glory or Glorious End, maintain priority, and cast Narset's Reversal (which will copy itself thanks to Thousand-Year Storm). We can use the copy to target the original Narset's Reversal and return it to our hand. This will copy the Narset's Reversal again, which we can use to target the Glorious End or Chance for Glory. The end result is that we'll get another turn (either directly with Chance for Glory or indirectly by ending our opponent's turn on their upkeep with Glorious End) and end up with all of our combo pieces back in hand thanks to Narset's Reversal, so we can repeat the process again the next turn. Basically, when everything comes together, we can take infinite turns (in one of the most creative and janky ways possible) without using "real" extra-turn spells like Time Warp! From a more competitive perspective, it seems hard to make the deck work consistently, mostly because it's essentially a four-card combo, although it is helpful that we can use cards like Glorious End and Chance for Glory for value as long as we have a way to protect ourselves from losing the game. One possible addition to the deck would be Tale's End, which would give us another way to survive a Chance for Glory / Glorious End by countering the "lose the game" trigger, while also offering protection against the Thassa's Oracle kill, which is currently dominating the Historic format thanks to Tainted Pact. All in all, I wouldn't expect to win a ton with Glorious Reversal Storm, but the games you do win with the combo should be amazing!

Modern

Meanwhile, in Modern, we have a Life from the Loam deck driven by some new Strixhaven additions in Deadly Brew and Witherbloom Command. The primary goal is to overwhelm the opponent eventually with 2/2 Bear tokens from Ayula's Influence by repeatedly returning lands from our graveyard to our hand (so we can discard them to make Bears) with Life from the Loam. Witherbloom Command gives us a one-shot backup Life from the Loam, returning a land to our hand while also answering graveyard hate that shuts down our combo, while Deadly Brew gives us some removal that can also return an Ayula's Influence (or a land) to our hand. While the deck isn't fast, it does have a lot of inevitability if we can get the game to go long. The one card that confuses me in the deck is Nissa of Shadowed Boughs. While the planeswalker does work with our land plan, we don't really have great creatures to reanimate or put into play (our biggest creature is Street Wraith, which mostly is in our deck so we can cycle, draw a card, and dredge Life from the Loam an additional time). How the deck lines up with the Modern meta remains to be seen, but if you like grinding out value and Bears, Witherbloom Loam looks like a fun option for the format that should be good if the game goes long.

Legacy

Last week, we played a Modern deck on stream looking to combo Sedgemoor Witch and Smallpox, with the idea being that if we have a Sedgemoor Witch on the battlefield, we can cast Smallpox and sacrifice the Pest token that Sedgemoor Witch makes to break the symmetry of the sacrifice effect. Well, Lemonlemon has a similar plan but for Legacy! Apart from the Witch Pox trick, the deck also has Chain of Smog to go infinite with Sedgemoor Witch. While Chain of Smog with Sedgemoor Witch doesn't win the game immediately like it does with Professor Onyx or Witherbloom Apprentice, it does make infinite Pest tokens, which should win the game on the following turn. Otherwise, the deck has a ton of powerful discard to keep the opponent's hand clean and Cursed Scroll and Mishra's Factory as backup plans for closing out the game. The best part of the deck is that it's actually pretty cheap for a Legacy deck, at right about $1,000. While it might sound silly to consider a $1,000 deck budget, it is comparatively cheap when you consider that many of the top-tier decks in Legacy cost somewhere between $4,000 and $9,000. 

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for this week! Do you have some ideas on how to improve the decks we looked at today? Let us know in the comments! Have a deck for next week? You can leave it in the comments too! Thanks to everyone who submitted lists this week, and as always, you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.