The Fish Tank: The Brothers' War Edition (November 6-12, 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, in celebration of the release of Magic's newest set, we are focused on decks featuring new The Brothers' War cards! What spice 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

I'm pretty sure that Mishra, Claimed by Gix is the Brothers' War card that viewers love the most—I've been sent a ton of different Mishra builds. Eevee098's stood out, not because it's the best but because, along with melding Mishra, it's also built around attack-amonicon Isshin, Two Heavens as One! The plan is pretty simple: meld Mishra with Phyrexian Dragon Engine, which should hopefully win us the game. But, if that doesn't work out, we have a ton of the best attack triggers in Standard to double up with Isshin. Even without Phyrexian Dragon Engine, Mishra, Claimed by Gix can close out the game with its Hellrider-esque drain mode, especially with Isshin to double the triggers, while Squee, Dubious Monarch, Myrel, Shield of Argive, and Adeline, Resplendent Cathar make double the tokens, and Cityscape Leveler can blow up multiple permanents each turn! If you like attacking, Mishra + Isshin looks like a ton of fun and like it should be able to win a decent number of games, assuming we can dodge sweepers and get in some attacks!

Also in Standard, we have a budget-friendly (at least in paper Magic) sleeper archatype in Naya Auras from Halfwing. While much of the hype for The Brothers' War has been focused on meld cards and flash artifacts, the deck also has a couple of super-powerful auras in Audacity (the closest thing to a Rancor that we've had in Standard since, well, Rancor) and Draconic Destiny, which is sort of an expensive red version of Rancor! Combined with creatures that care about enchantments being cast, like Generous Visitor and Kami of Transience, this should allow us to build some massive, evasive threats early in the game, hopefully smashing our opponent to death before they get a chance to recover! 

Historic

One of the sneaky impacts of The Brothers War is that the old-border artifacts add a bunch of new cards to Magic Arena for the first time, opening up some new possibilities in Historic and Explorer. Rai_chain is looking to use not just one but two of these cards to pull off a classic jank kill: Door to Nothingness! The two key combo pieces of the deck are Ramos, Dragon Engine and Door to Nothingness, with the goal being to get these artifacts in the graveyard and then reanimate them with Invoke Justice or Refurbish, although we can just hard cast them as well. Then, we get five counters on Ramos, Dragon Engine (Invoke Justice's four counters help speed this process up) and use the double WUBRG it generates to make our opponent lose the game with Door to Nothingness! As far as Door to Nothingness wins go, the deck looks solid—Door isn't an easy alt-win con to achieve—although it is worth mentioning that artifact removal is a problem for the deck since Door to Nothingness enters the battlefield tapped, so we'll need to wait a turn to make our opponent lose the game even once we have everything assmebled. But if you're looking for a super-sweet new Against the Odds–style kill in Historic, this looks like a really fun one!

Pioneer

We played a Pioneer Waste Not deck a while ago, and while the deck was super sweet, it had one big problem: the games where we didn't draw our namesake Waste Not went really poorly, and there isn't really a second Waste Not–style card in Magic. Basically, the deck was powerful but lacking consistency. Well, Ohako seems to have found the perfect way to make Pioneer Waste Not more consistent: Diabolic Intent! Since we're already playing a bunch of cheap discard creatures like Burglar Rat, Elderfang Ritualist, and Acquisitions Expert, we should have a random 1/1 to sacrifice to Diabolic Intent to tutor up Waste Not, essentially doubling the number of Waste Nots in the deck! This should help sovles the deck's consistency issue, which is a huge deal. Waste Not with an active Waste Not is a really scary deck!

Modern

Titania, Voice of Gaea is one of the most exciting cards from The Brothers' War, but I've mostly been trying to figure out how to make it work in Standard. Totes McGoats, on the other hand, is jumping right into the deep end by trying to pull off the Titania meld in Modern! Build-a-Bear Workshop has two related plans. The first one is to get four lands in the graveyard (having a bunch of fetch lands and cycling lands helps here) and meld Titania, Voice of Gaea with Argoth, Sanctum of Nature to build a massive, hopefully game-ending monster. Plan B is to use Ayula's Influence to discard lands (which also helps fill the graveyard for Titania), hopefully with Ayula, Queen Among Bears on the battlefield to grow them into 4/4s or fight down our opponent's board! With the help of Life from the Loam, the combo can be adding 12 power to the board every turn, which should be able to overwhelm our opponent in short order!

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today! Thanks to everyone who sent in their sweet and spicy brews! If you want your own deck considered for the next edition of The Fish Tank, leave a link in the comments, or you can email me the deck at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.