The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Decks (September 5-11, 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 from format to format, with decks from Historic all the way to Commander! What sweetness did you all send in this week? Let's take a look! But first, to have your own deck considered for next week's edition, make sure to leave a link in the comments, or email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com. 

Historic

Bolas's Citadel is one of the sweetest cards that Wizards has designed in recent years. It's extremely powerful, but you need to be willing to build around the six-mana artifact a bit to fully harness its power, which Bladejackal's Trash for Treasures Storm deck certainly does. The idea is to get Bolas's Citadel on the battlefield as quickly as possible with the help of some Treasure synergies. We can either use cards like Unexpected Windfall and Seize the Spoils to ramp into Bolas's Citadel or, if we have Trash for Treasure in hand, use them to discard Bolas's Citadel and make a Treasure token, which we can sacrifice to Trash for Treasure to reanimate Bolas's Citadel for just three mana! Once we get Bolas's Citadel on the battlefield, oddly, our most important card is Dragon's Rage Channeler. While we don't really have any interest in trying to beat down with the one-drop, the ability to surveil whenever we cast a non-creature spell should allow us to go infinite-ish with Bolas's Citadel, by surveilling useless lands out of the way until we hit cards like Weather the Storm to gain a bunch of life and eventually Tendrils of Agony to win the game! Unlike some other Bolas's Citadel decks like Jund Sacrifice, there isn't really a backup plan in the deck—we're all-in on storming off with Bolas's Citadel—but the reward should be some of the most spectacular combo turns possible in the Historic format!

I know, I know, Emergent Ultimatum and Mizzix's Mastery aren't the most liked cards in the Historic format, but WCF mo's Ronza Red deck is sweet enough that it's worth showing off anyway. While it is true that the most common way for the deck to actually win the game will be resolving Emergent Ultimatum to get a planeswalker, Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider, or Planewide Celebration, how the deck gets to the point of resolving Emergent Ultimatum is pretty spicy: land destruction! The main goal of Ronza Red is to blow up as many of the opponent's lands as possible, with Stone Rain, Rubble Reading, and Primal Command covering the early game and Star of Extinction coming down later to blow up a land and sweep the board. Eventually, we'll get to the point where we can overload Mizzix's Mastery to flashback all of our land-destruction spells, which should take care of most (or even all) of the opponent's lands, creatures, and planeswalkers (thanks to Star of Extinction), giving us a flawless victory! If you don't mind occasionally janking opponents out with the one-card combo that is Emergent Ultimatum, the deck looks hilarious and fun. And according to WCF mo, it has been good enough to get them all the way to Mythic on Magic Arena!

Pioneer

In Pioneer this week, we have an ultra-budget mono-red ramp deck from rmuz24: Sundering Maw of Flames! The deck has one goal: get to seven mana as quickly as possible with the help of cards like Irencrag Feat, Skirk Prospector (with a bunch of random Goblins to sacrifice), and Runaway Steam-Kin. Once we get to seven mana, we have two options: we can cast Drakuseth, Maw of Flames, hopefully give it haste with Goblin Motivator, and attack for a ton of damage while also sweeping away some of the opponent's board with Drakuseth damage, or we can cast Sundering Stroke to deal seven damage to three different things, with the idea being that we can deal seven to our opponent and seven to one of our Boros Reckoners to deal 14 to our opponent's face. And if we happen to have two Boros Reckoners on the battlefield, we can deal a lethal 21 damage to win the game on the spot! I'm not sure how the deck will hold up to the top tier of the Pioneer meta, but it does seem solid for a deck that costs just $40 to put together!

Modern

One of the most interesting aspects of the spell / land MDFCs from Zendikar Rising has been the proliferation of no-land decks in formats like Modern, ranging from Belcher to Oops All Spells. Well, Drake96 has a really unique and spicy take on the no-land archetype built around Rally the Horde. Since we don't have any real lands in our deck, if we can resolve a Rally the Horde, the end result will be that we exile our entire deck and get a 1/1 token for each card we exile. Of course, this normally would end with us losing the game to milling out, but thanks to Mass Hysteria and Fervor, we have a bunch of ways to give our creatures haste. If we can get one of these down before we cast Rally the Horde, we should be able to attack for lethal immediately and win the game on the spot! While I'm not sure the plan is the most competitive way to build a no-land deck in Modern, it's certainly one of the spiciest and most fun!

Commander

We don't cover Commander nearly as much as we should on The Fish Tank, but The-Budget_Guy has a really sweet and cheap build of one of the most exciting new commanders from Innistrad: Midnight Hunt. I wanted to show it off since it seems like a good starting point for people looking to build around Tovolar, Dire Overlord. As we've seen with Toski, Bearer of Secrets, commanders that allow you to draw a card whenever you deal combat damage are extremely powerful. Tovolar, Dire Overlord does the same thing as Toski, Bearer of Secrets, as long as we're willing to overload our deck with Werewolves, which we'll want to anyway since Tovolar, Dire Overlord also gives us an easy way to transform Werewolves to their more powerful backsides. One of my favorite parts of The_Budget_Guys build is that it's only $88, which makes it either a good budget option or a good starting point to upgrade from, depending on your goal. 

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.