The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Submitted Decks (December 19-25, 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've got sweet brews from Standard back to Modern! What craziness did you all send in? Let's find out! Oh yeah, if you want one of your decks considered for next week's Fish Tank, make sure to leave it in the comments, or email it to me at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com, and your deck could be featured next week! 

Standard

I've wanted to see succeed Elves succeed in Standard ever since the tribe got a bunch of support in Kaldheim nearly a year ago, but they haven't quite gotten there yet. Thankfully, Corey P. has a new way to power up Elves: Toxrill, the Corrosive. One thing that Elves are really good at is making extra mana, with cards like Jaspera Sentinel, Sculptor of Winter, Circle of Dreams Druid, and Canopy Tactician offering a ton of Elf-based ramp. This, in turn, allows us to play Toxrill super early in the game. Once Toxrill, the Corrosive hits the battlefield, it will start eating away our opponent's defenses with slime counters, which frees us up to win by beating down with our Elves!

Historic

When Alchemy came out, I mostly overlooked Geist of Regret. While the ability to tutor up instants and sorceries to the graveyard and then copy them seemed powerful, I wasn't sure exactly where the card fit. Well, biggestmtgnerd has a really sweet plan to take advantage of Geist of Regret: Quasiduplicate. The idea is that we can cast Geist of Regret, hopefully find a Quasiduplicate to put in our graveyard, and then cast Quasiduplicate to copy Geist twice. We now have three copies of Geist of Regret, so every instant or sorcery we cast from our graveyard will be copied three times! If we can cast another Quasiduplicate from our graveyard, we can make four more copies of Geist of Regret, giving us a total of seven. If that's not enough to allow us to win with flying Geist beats, cards like Silent Departure suddenly bounce our opponent's entire board, Beacon Bolt turns into a weird one-sided wrath, and Chemister's Insight should draw us most of our deck...including more copies of Quasiduplicate to make more Geist of Regret. While some of the specific choices in the deck look a bit weird (I could imagine trying to have Quasiduplicate be the only sorcery in our deck, for example, so that we know Geist of Regret will find it, rather than something like Pillar of Flame), the idea is really neat. The deck looks like it could do some really powerful things if we can keep Geist of Regret on the battlefield!

Pioneer

Blood tokens have done a bunch of interesting things in older formats, showing up in Burn brews, Affinity builds, and more. Well, in Pioneer, Ohako has a fun idea to take advantage of the cheap-to-make artifact tokens: turning them into 5/5s with Ensoul Artifact and Skilled Animator and using them to beat the opponent down!

Modern

First up in Modern, we have a new and improved take on Gideon Tribal from Renom Beoulve, Book of Exalted Gids. The main goal is to emblem Gideon of the Trials and keep a Gideon on the battlefield, which makes it so we can't lose the game, which in turn frees us up to start taking extra turns for just three mana with Alchemist's Gambit and Chance for Glory without the downside of dying at the end of our turn. Eventually, we can find Panoptic Mirror to imprint one of the extra-turn spells, which gives us infinite turns to find a way to win with our pile of Gideons. As a backup plan, we have The Book of Exalted Deeds to combo with Mutavault as another way to stay alive forever (or, at least, until our opponent finds a way to destroy a land). The deck looks pretty solid in general, although I wouldn't mind having an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn to work with Nahiri, the Harbinger's ultimate (and also hose Mill, which is a semi-real deck in Modern at the moment). Ultimating Nahiri to tutor our a Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer feels pretty bad, even though the stupid Monkey is pretty busted on Turn 1. 

Next up in Modern, we have a spicy untap-based combo deck from Dboe at LandSaysGo. The idea of Puresight Combo is to get a Paradise Mantle on a Puresight Merrow, which gives us a Puresight Merrow that can tap to make a mana thanks to Paradise Mantle and then untap itself for a mana with its activated ability, exiling the top card of our deck along the way. This combo lets us exile our entire deck and then hopefully win the game with the help of Thassa's Oracle. (We can also exile cards from the top of our deck during our opponent's end step, stop when we find a Thassa's Oracle, untap, draw it for our turn, and then get back to exiling to win with Oracle's ETB trigger.) The rest of the deck is designed to find our combo pieces and help us stay alive long enough to go infinite. While the combo looks pretty janky, it's only two cards, and we can potentially win the game on Turn 3 if we have a good draw, which is pretty fast, even for Modern. We might have some issues with removal-heavy decks; if our opponent can keep us from untapping with a Puresight Merrow, we don't really have much of a backup plan to win the game. Either way, the combo is really unique and pretty fast, which might make it at least somewhat competitive in Modern!

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.