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Browse > Home / Strategy / Articles / The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Decks (May 8-14, 2022)

The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Decks (May 8-14, 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've got spice from Standard all the way back to Legacy! What wild 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

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While we most often focus on the wackiest, spiciest brews possible on The Fish Tank, there is another category of deck that I like to show off: budget brews! Take, for example, RookerKdag's No-Rare UW Delver deck for Standard. There isn't a crazy combo or anything like that, but it looks like a really solid (and, according to RookerKdag, fairly competitive, even against tier decks) Standard deck that has zero rares or mythics, making it as cheap as a deck can possibly be on Magic Arena. The deck reminds me a lot of the old Heroic decks we had in Standard a few years ago, with Illuminator Virtuoso and Stormchaser Drake giving us pseudo-Heroic creatures that get a bonus when we target them with spells. The goal is to stick a threat or two; protect them with counters, Sejiri Shelter, and Slip Out the Back; and grow them into massive Voltron-style threats to close out the game. This looks like a great option if you're looking for a way to rank up on Arena without any higher-rarity wildcards!

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While budget decks are great, we also have some wacky Standard brews, like Towan Talks's Bant Triskaidekaphile Halo Fountain! We played Halo Fountain a couple of weeks ago for Against the Odds, and while it took some work, we eventually managed to make 15 creatures and use Halo Fountain to win the game. Towan Talk's deck has a very different plan for Halo Fountain. The goal is to turn the artifact into a creature with the help of Halo Fountain or Tezzeret, Betrayer of Flesh. If we can add in a creature that taps for at least two white mana (like a flipped Weaver of Blossoms), we can go infinite and draw our entire deck by using Halo Fountain to tap and untap itself. I wasn't 100% sure the interaction worked, but I tested it against Sparky on Magic Arena to make sure, and it did. Here's the idea. Turn Halo Fountain into a creature and flip Weaver of Blossoms. We can tap Weaver of Blossoms to make two white mana and then tap Halo Fountain to untap Halo Fountain and Weaver of Blossoms while also drawing a card. We can do this as many times as we want, which will hopefully let us fill our hand and then win on our upkeep with Triskaidekaphile! While the combo has a lot of pieces and needs to dodge creature removal, which probably means it's more of a sweet Against the Odds brew than a competitive option, the idea is intriguing and might have implications in older formats. For example, we can win on the spot with the same setup if we replace Weaver of Blossoms with a creature that can make more than two white mana, like Incubation Druid. Incubation Druid will make us infinite mana, and once we have a bunch of white mana floating, we can tap and untap Halo Fountain with its one-mana token-making ability to make fifteen 1/1 Citizens and then win with Halo Fountain's last ability. While this is still probably an Against the Odds deck, it's a really sweet way to win the game! If you have some other ideas on how we can take advantage of Halo Fountain's ability to tap and untap itself once it is in creature form, make sure to let me know in the comments. Maybe we can come up with a sweet brew for the stream or YouTube!

Pioneer

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In Pioneer, we have a really interesting Grixis Sai Whir deck from drice2020. The decklist looks a lot like an artifact deck you'd see in Modern, with a ton of cheap artifacts and Whir of Invention to hold everything together, but being in Pioneer makes the list super unique. The main goal is to assemble the infinite combo of Saheeli Rai and Luxior, Giada's Gift. If we can get Luxior, Giada's Gift on Saheeli Rai, we can use Saheeli's –2 to copy itself. We'll legend rule away the real Saheeli Rai and keep the artifact token copy. At this point, we can keep using the artifact Saheeli Rai to copy itself, which will give us infinite "permanent enters the battlefield" triggers and allow us to mill our opponent out of the game with Altar of the Brood. If that doesn't work, we can also just flood the board with Thopter tokens with the help of Sai, Master Thopterist or go on the cheap artifact–beatdown plan by turning them into creatures with Tezzeret, Betrayer of Flesh. The deck looks really sweet and like it could be pretty good, although it might be even better in Modern because of Urza's Saga, which seems absurd in the deck as another way to find Luxior, Giada's Gift and Altar of the Brood or to make some massive Construct tokens. 

Modern

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Meanwhile, in Modern, we have a crazy looking deck from MARCO94-2ND.ACC: Leyline Madness. I'm honestly not even sure what to say about the deck because it has so many things happening. The deck has four different leylines—Leyline of Anticipation, Leyline of Abundance, Leyline of Lifeforce, and Leyline of Sanctity—which help us ramp with Sanctum Weaver. It can go infinite with Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and Zealous Conscripts. It can win by using Stoneforge Mystic or Anchor to Reality to cheat a Kaldra Compleat into play early in the game. It can Emergent Ultimatum into things like Omniscience or Iona, Shield of Emeria. It can make a bunch of mana with Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, Sylvan Caryatid, and Sanctum Weaver and win with a huge Banefire, all while also having a Yorion, Sky Nomad value plan with things like Ice-Fang Coatl and Seasoned Pyromancer. There's so much going on in the deck that I honestly don't know what to say about it, other than that it looks like a blast to play since there are so many different lines, win-cons, combos, and possibilities. While consistency might be a bit of an issue (I imagine there are some games where you draw one piece of a bunch of different combos but never draw the entire combo), the deck should be able to do some absurd things when everything comes together!

Legacy

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We don't get to talk about Legacy all that often on The Fish Tank because Legacy decks are so expensive, but Carter S. has a super sweet brew built around a new Streets of New Capenna card: Shadow of Mortality. You might be thinking it's a Death's Shadow deck, which would make sense since Death's Shadow has been a legitimate Legacy deck for a while now, but Carter's plan is way spicier. The goal is to get a Shadow of Mortality on the battlefield and then sacrifice it to Burnt Offering, which adds black or red mana to our mana pool equal to the sacrificed creature's mana value. This means sacrificing a Shadow of Mortality will give us 15 mana, enough that we can hard-cast Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or, if that's too boring, kill our opponent with a huge Torment of Hailfire. The idea is really sweet, and there are some interesting possibilities for improvement. For example, we could add Death's Shadow to the deck and have a creature-beatdown backup plan for games where we don't draw Burnt Offering, or we could add in more copies of Show and Tell and maybe a Griselbrand or two and maximize the "cheat a big thing into play" plan. Either way, it's super cool to see a Burnt Offering deck considering that, in the right deck, it can be the most powerful ritual in all of Magic!

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. If you have some idea for how to improve these decks, make sure to let us know in the comments, and if you want your own deck considered for a future Fish Tank, leave a link there as well (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.



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