The Fish Tank: Sweet and Spicy Viewer Submitted Decks (November 29-December 4, 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 for Standard, Historic, and 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
In Standard, Corey P.'s looking to go off with the combo of Maskwood Nexus and The World Tree. If we can get Maskwood Nexus on the battlefield and then activate The World Tree, we can dump all of the creatures in our deck onto the battlefield, which means we're getting a devastating board of Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider, Cultivator Colossus, Hullbreaker Horror, Koma, Cosmos Serpent, and Toxrill, the Corrosive. The rest of the deck is mostly ramp and removal, with Cartographer's Survey being the biggest new addition from Innistrad: Crimson Vow since it's a ramp spell that can find non-basic lands, like The World Tree, which should help improve the consistency of the deck, as compared to past versions of the combo. The biggest challenge is that we need to get to 11 mana to activate The World Tree, which isn't easy, especially against aggro, but the payoff is huge if we can pull it off!
Historic
One easy way to get your deck featured on The Fish Tank is for it to be built around Panharmonicon, like Joe-B.'s Dollimonicon deck, which looks to combine the reanimating power of Dollhouse of Horrors with the trigger doubling of Panharmonicon! The idea is that we can play a bunch of value-generating creatures in the early game, like Fblthp, the Lost and Charming Prince, and removal like Deputy of Detention and Skyclave Apparition; blink them for more value with Soulherder or Ephemerate; and then, once our creatures die, use Dollhouse of Horrors to get them back to reuse their triggers again. Things get even crazier if we also have Panharmonicon, with all of our creatures double triggering! A couple of suggestions for the deck. First, unless wildcards are an issue, Thragtusk is a pretty strict upgrade over Arborback Stomper in the five-mana lifegain-creature slot. Second, it could be worth playing something that actively fills our graveyard (like Champion of Wits) to make sure that we have some good reanimation fodder for Dollhouse of Horrors. Drawing a Dollhouse and not having anything in the graveyard to reanimate is the worst feeling. Either way, the list looks super fun and offers tons of customization options as you can play pretty much any creature with an enters-the-battlefield trigger and have it be good in the deck!
Modern
I was pretty hyped about Thrasta, Tempest's Roar when Modern Horizons 2 came out, but so far, it hasn't made much of an impact on Modern. BennyMarty is looking to change that with Gruul Prowess. Thanks to free spells like Mutagenic Growth, Manamorphose, and Lava Dart, it's possible to get Thrasta, Tempest's Roar on the battlefield as early as Turn 2, giving us a massive hasty threat that can close out the game in just three attacks all by itself (or two, with the help of Assault Strobe!). Most commonly, Modern prowess-style decks are Izzet, but going into green offers some interesting options, mostly pump spells like Scale Up and Become Immense, which can close out the game super quickly, with the help of either Thrasta, Tempest's Roar or prowess one-drops Monastery Swiftspear and Soul-Scar Mage. If you like being aggressive and slinging spells but are tired of playing Izzet, Gruul Prowess seems like a really fun and potentially competitive option for Modern!
I'm a sucker for decks that look to damage their own creatures for value. The play pattern is just so strange and different that it's oddly intoxicating. Staxi_Boi has one such deck in Damage Control. The main goal is to deal damage to Boros Reckoner (to throw damage at our opponent or their stuff) or Stormwild Capridor, to grow the three-drop into a massive threat. We have Marauding Raptor to damage our creatures when they come into play; Pyroclasm and Whipflare to sweep away those annoying Monkeys (while all of our creatures survive) and also power up our threats; and Fury, which we counterintuitively want to use to target our own creatures! While the deck looks strange at a glance, if you dig deeper, it seems surprisingly synergistic. I could see adding something like Showdown of the Skalds for card advantage, and while I have no idea how it matches up against control or combo, it should be solid against creature decks.
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.