The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Decks (May 9-15, 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

Mystic Reflection is one of my favorite cards in Standard, and Madgonzilla has a really innovative way of taking advantage of the instant. The plan is to play a five-power creature like Lovestruck Beast or Vantress Gargoyle, play a Thieves' Guild Enforcer, target it with Mystic Reflection, and then sacrifice our five-power creature to Tend the Pests, giving us five copies of Thieves' Guild Enforcer entering the battlefield all at once, which will mill our opponent for a massive 60 cards, enough that we'll win on our opponent's draw step. We also potentially can pull off the combo by targeting our Myriad Construct to sacrifice it and make four tokens, giving us a bit of redundancy. The drawback is that it does take three or four cards to combo off, although it is worth pointing out that most of them are pretty reasonable on their own as threats, so we should be able to function reasonably well in games where we don't find all of the pieces needed to mill our opponent's entire deck at once.

While mutate may not have developed into a top-tier mechanic, it has proven to be one of the best mechanics for supporting janky combos. Benjamin L. has a new way to go infinite with mutate: Double Major. The goal is pretty simple: mutate a Vadrok, Apex of Thunder and copy it with Double Major while it is on the stack. The Double Major copy will still mutate; when it does, we can recast the Double Major for free to copy the original Vadrok, Apex of Thunder that's still on the stack. After it resolves, we'll have two mutating Vadroks, which means we can use one to recast Double Major and copy the original Vadrok, Apex of Thunder again and the second to cast something else from our graveyard. If we have Thrill of Possibility, we can loot through our deck until we eventually find something like Igneous Inspiration or Prismari Command that can deal damage. Once we find a cheap burn spell, we'll have infinite damage: we'll keep copying Vadrok with Double Major, using the extra copy of Vadrok to recast the burn spell until our opponent dies! While I am a bit worried that we only have two other creatures to mutate onto and I have no idea how consistent the deck will be in practice, the combo is really sweet, and it should be spectacular when it goes off!

Historic

Finding good budget decks for Magic Arena is tough since the economy is so punishing, but ThiagoTK has a fun-looking Historic deck that will only set you back 16 rare wildcards (with 15 of them coming in the mana base, so if you already have shock lands, the deck should be almost free). The goal is to win quickly with Fynn, the Fangbearer poison counters backed by a ton of one-mana deathtouch creatures. While we've played something similar in Standard, Historic offers a couple of big upgrades. First, Neoform helps us to find Fynn, the Fangbearer, which is really important since our deck really needs a Fynn on the battlefield to win and there isn't really a backup Fynn in the format. Second, we have Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive, which makes every creature in our deck unblockable, making it the perfect way to poison our opponent out even through blockers. As a bonus, we can even find Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive with Neoform if we already have a Fynn, the Fangbearer on the battlefield. While I wouldn't expect the deck to be tier one—we'll have a hard time winning if our opponent can keep killing our Fynns—it does look like it should be able to steal a decent amount of fast wins, which, combined with its low cost, might make it a decent and spicy option for grinding out daily rewards on Magic Arena.

Pioneer

With paper Magic soon making a comeback, it might be time for Pioneer to rise from the ashes. SirEklz has a really unique Cat deck. While it mostly looks like Cat Tribal at first, the main goal is to sacrifice Cats to Pyre of Heroes to tutor up more Cats and then reanimate our sacrifice Cats with God-Pharaoh's Gift, which we can find with Gate to the Afterlife. While the idea of a Cat deck being competitive probably sounds weird, every time we play the Cat tribe, they end up over-performing—there are actually some really powerful midrangey Cats in Magic now. I haven't played much Pioneer recently, so I have no idea how well the deck will match up against the current meta. But if you're a Cat fan and tired of just attacking, Never Look a Gift Cat in the Pyre seems like a really fun option.

Modern

Last week, we dedicated the entire Fish Tank to Dragon's Approach builds for Standard, but what about Modern? Halint has a fun-looking Dragon's Approach build for the format. While the core of the deck is similar to Standard—25 copies of Dragon's Approach and Goblin Lore / Burning Inquiry to quickly get Dragon's Approach into the graveyard—Modern offers some really interesting upgrades. Locket of Yesterdays should make Dragon's Approach cost just a single mana, turning it into a Lava Spike with upside. More importantly, Knollspine Dragon is a great tutor target for Dragon's Approach. Since Dragon's Approach itself deals damage, if we can tutor our Knollspine Dragon, we should be able to discard a bunch more copies of Dragon's Approach, refill our hand, and immediately cast another Dragon's Approach to tutor up another Knollspine Dragon, which will repeat the process and draw even more cards since the latest Dragon's Approach will have dealt another three damage. Once our opponent gets low enough on life, we can tutor up Bogardan Hellkite for five direct damage to close out the game! While [[Dragon's Approach] is undoubtedly a meme deck and I wouldn't expect the Modern version to be super competitive, it does look fun and like it should be able to do some really funny things when everything comes together!

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.