Slime, Knuckles, and Haktos: Honorable Mentions #5

Hello and welcome back to Fun & Jank! It’s been a while since our last Honorable Mentions, and I’ve cooked up a few brews that didn’t quite make it to full episode status. These are the kinds of decks that had cool ideas or a unique twist on existing archetypes, but in their current form just weren’t polished or powerful enough to really go anywhere.

As you know, I’m a fan of talking about jank whether it works or not. You have to take the good with the bad, because you’re going to learn from your failures just as much as your successes.

Today we’ve got three examples: a slime-fueled combo with an Eldrazi payoff, a Knuckleblade tribal deck making use of some wild Alchemy toys, and a hatebears shell with a focus on creatures with protection.

Let’s dive in!

Deck #1: Shelldock Slimes

This deck is simple and stupid. Most of the time, you’ll want to actually take the draw while playing this. The plan is to discard Slime Against Humanity to hand-size and then fire off Surgical Extraction to rip (almost) all of them from your deck, leaving 0 (or more) copies behind. That shrinks your library to under 20 cards, setting up Shelldock Isle to cheat in something big.

From there, you’ve got a few possible hits that you can hide away with Shelldock Isle.

• 1.) Emrakul, the Aeons Torn – The best thing to hit. Isle actually casts the card you exiled so you get to take an extra turn and swing with Annihilator 6.
• 2.) Devourer of Destiny – Second best option. We get to remove something and get a 6/6 for just one mana.
• 3.) Slime Against Humanity – Now normally you want to remove all of these with Surgical. However, you can technically leave a few in the deck as a back up if you happen to not have a Shelldock Isle to play. With most of tthe copies out of the deck, this will create a ~35/35 slime a majority of the time.

Devourer of Destiny also does double duty here. Filtering/digging early for your combo pieces while also shrinking your deck size.

You can find a video of the combo being executed in an earlier version playing Shelldock Apostle below!

Turn 2 Emrakul in Historic🍝👽

1.) Discard Apostle to handsize
2.) Surgical Extraction your own Apostle
3.) Play Shelldock Isle, hide away Emrakul
4.) Cast Emrakul turn 2@fireshoes
Magic as Richard Garfield Intended pic.twitter.com/V8iuOZkzmz

— MTGJankTank (@MTGJankTank) September 23, 2025

Why it Janked:

1.) Casting Emrakul on turn three for a single blue mana is the kind of nonsense these articles are made for.

2.) The backup plan of making a 40/40 Slime is hilarious.

3.) It’s not often you come across a deck that actually wants to go second

Why It Tanked:

1.) The setup is slow and fragile, with way too many moving pieces.

2.) As a combo deck, mulligans feel necessary, but every mull means it takes longer to discard a Slime to hand size.

3.) Even in Historic Bo1 with the hand smoother, there were plenty of games where you just stared at Slimes while aggro ran you over.

4.) It’s a pure glass cannon — when it doesn’t pop, it does nothing.

Deck #2: Knuckleblade Zoo

Back in Khans of Tarkir Standard, Savage Knuckleblade was a fan favorite He’s a beefy, flexible threat that could smash in, bounce out, or pump itself up. I adored this card and have been secretly looking for a home for it since it was added to Arena.

Lucky for me, Alchemy gave us a gift: Audacious Knuckleblade, which meant for the first time ever we could live the dream and play eight Knuckleblades. That alone was enough to spark some nostalgia, but it also tied perfectly into one of my favorite underappreciated cards: Trackhand Trainer.

Trainer conjures Training Grounds, and suddenly those expensive Knuckleblade activations become dirt cheap. Audacious Knucklebladecould even chain copies of itself onto the field for just a single green mana. How neat is that?

Why it Janked:

1.) Double Knuckleblade nostalgia — eight copies to finally live the dream.

2.) Trackhand Trainer does double duty: cheapening activations and refilling your hand.

3.) Audacious Knuckleblade can chain itself into play and filter draws for cheap.

Why it Tanked:

1.) Even with Training Grounds, Knuckleblades are still mana-hungry and fragile compared to most Historic threats.

2.) Zoo shells rely on speed, and spending turns setting up engines makes this version slower than classic aggro.

I tried multiple variations of this including a Delver build, but this is the one that performed the best. Overall, the deck was just not as efficient and powerful as the other creature decks in the format. Obviously it was sweet when it worked, but we often got out-gunned and out-sped by other lists.

Deck #3: Haktos Taxes

This deck set out to be a disruptive tax shell with a midrange punch. The plan was to slow opponents down with effects like Guardian of Thraben”], Chalice of the Void, and Esika’s Chariot, then close the game with threats that are awkward to remove: Haktos the Unscarred and Lavabrink Venturer.

Both creatures are evasive in their own way — Haktos randomly blanks entire swaths of removal and blockers depending on his number, while Lavabrink can lock down whatever mana value spells the opponent relies on most. Together, they give the deck a pair of finishers that force the opponent to have exactly the right answer (and even then, sometimes it just doesn’t matter).

Why it Janked:

1.) Tax effects stall the opponent, buying time for your harder-to-kill closers.

2.) Haktos and Lavabrink can singlehandedly dominate matchups when they line up right. I mean I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone else play either of these in Historic lol.

3.) The shell gave you some free wins off Chalice or Thalia, while still having a plan to end the game.

Why it Tanked:

1.) The curve felt awkward: sometimes you had hate pieces but no pressure, other times threats without enough disruption to protect them.

2.) Haktos is still inconsistent — when the number doesn’t cooperate, he’s fragile for four mana.

3.) Against fast decks, you sometimes just durdled with clunky four-drops while they ran you over.

I will say that it was very satisfying watching my opponents reading Haktos multiple times in a game. Nothing like totally blanking every piece of interaction a midrange player has with just a single creature.

Closing Thoughts

These three brews might not have been ready for prime time, but that’s never really the point. Honorable Mentions is about celebrating the strange corners of deckbuilding and inspiring creativity in brewing.

I brew hundreds of decks, and honestly, maybe 10% of them ever make it to the point where I share them on social media or Discord. For every Fun & Jank feature that looks clean and semi-functional, there are dozens of piles of cardboard that never see the light of day. And that’s okay — because the process itself is the fun part.

Brewing is trial and error. It’s testing something that looks terrible on paper just to see if maybe, just maybe, it’s secretly broken. It’s building around a pet card you’ve loved for years, even if the meta doesn’t care. It’s sleeving up a pile of garbage only to stumble onto one spark of synergy that might carry into the next list.

So even if these lists tanked, they still did their job: they taught me something, they entertained me, and they reminded me why I love doing this in the first place.

Thanks for reading.

As always feel free to comment and leave any questions you have below! Make sure to come back next week for even more Fun & Jank!

If you want to see these decks in action, come hang out with me on stream (also streaming on youtube now!) where we test, refine, and have a ton of fun together!

Happy Brewing!