A six-card deck that wins a lot. And is under $800!
Goldfish hand:
T1 Reliquary Tower
T2 Swamp,
Zombie Infestation
(discard irrelevant lands to it immediately)
T3 Island, then Treasure Hunt, getting pretty much the rest of your deck to your hand. Since you have Reliquary Tower, you don't have to discard the lands if you don't want to. But you usually do, so discard them all to
Zombie Infestation
and get a bunch of 2/2 zombies. Alternatively to this, you can leave them all in your hand, and if the opponent swings for lethal, discard some and get a few chumpers, and discard the rest at the end of their turn so they untap and can swing big.
T4 Contested War Zone, pump and swing for a bunch of damage.
Game 2? Switch up the game plan.
Sideboard: Swap 13 Swamp and 2
Zombie Infestation
out, and put the whole board in.
Goldfish hand:
T1 Reliquary Tower
T2 Island, Treasure Hunt... etc.
T3 Mountain. This is where they expect the Swamp, and it throws them for a loop. Every anti-enchantment sideboard is useless! If you don't have a Treasure Hunt, pass the turn. If you do, play it. Get more lands. Also, play Conflagrate for X=0. Just get it in the graveyard to cast it for flashback on the next turn.
T4 Mountain, Conflagrate. Boom. Direct damage, and with four Treasure Hunts, you're most likely to cast two and then get the Conflagrate, so you should have enough lands to win.
Game 3, if it goes that far? Mix and Match. This is the lineup I'd use:
24x Island
12x Mountain
12x Swamp
1x Conflagrate
1x
Zombie Infestation
4x Treasure Hunt
2x Contested War Zone
4x Reliquary Tower
Goldfish hand?
T1 Reliquary Tower
T2 Treasure Hunt, then use what you get. Fake em' out, then go from there.
If you get a hand with either Conflagrate or
Zombie Infestation
together with Treasure Hunt, you're probably going to win.
Surprisingly, this deck routinely goes 3-2 or 4-1 at FNM. I use it every couple of weeks, and I've gone 5-0 with it three times. The modern format doesn't have many decks that can beat this consistently. UWx control usually does, Abzan or Jund midranges usually do (due to their high amount of countermagic and disruption, respectively), but most other decks can't handle an average of about 30 damage on turn 4.This is a deck that's kind of the monster under the bed, but even monsters have nightmares. So if you run into Pyroclasm,
Ratchet Bomb
, Engineered Explosives or Ensnaring Bridge, then i'm sorry. It works against mostly everything else.
Go buy this deck and have fun.
