Good day everyone, I'm back from my hiatus. Kinda. I've been away from MTGO for at least one year, since the release of Zendikar; I was kinda burned out from the sheer power of the Alara cardpool: I thought nothing could compare to those multicolored two-drops that made my day so many times, so I purposedly skipped the whole ZEN block trying not to be too turned-down from the disappearance of that multicolor goodness.
However Scars of Mirrodin attracted my attention with a single keyword: Infect.
In a moment, I was hooked again.
What Infect really does is take Wither and Poison and melt them to maximize the effect on both creatures and players: to creatures it works like wither, dealing damage in the form of (really annoying) -1/-1 counters; to players it's even worse: it deals not regular damage, just poison damage. Fact is, you need just 10 poison counters to die. This means that your (in-game) life expectancy is effectively halved; moreover at pauper level (just commons, remember) there is no such thing as "poison healing", making this strategy quite the powerhouse.
Let's start from the basics: the colors in which Infectious creatures live are Black and Green, so we'll open the dances with two mono-colored decks. You can choose to go green...
...or, if it better fits your style, black:
Either way you end up with a consistent deck that, with some tweaks, could be quite enjoyable (not from your opponent's point of view, by the way).
As I said earlier, I skipped on the entire Zendikar block; however in the past few weeks I've learned to enjoy the benefits of the surprisingly powerful Landfall mechanic which I absolutely overlooked when I read the first ZEN spoilers. As you can see the Green deck benefits from the synergy between Adventuring Gear, Groundswell, the two fabulous pauper fetchlands ( the new Evolving Wilds and the old-but-still-good Terramorphic Expanse ) and Harrow, exploiting Landfall to pump an unblocked attacker as much as possible - maybe with an active Vines of Vastwood protecting it from removal.
The Black deck focuses more on removal with both the excellent Grasp of Darkness and the cheaper Disfigure while introducing a little of card advantage with Sign in Blood and its creature counterpart, the Moriok Replica.
However, combining the two colors makes for a less consistent mana base but lets you gain much more flexibility with both combat tricks and removal spells at your disposal:
And yet I'm not satisfied. I feel that Infect could be even more threatening with a splash of other colors; after all in the current standard cardpool there are many ways to inflict even 10 damage in 4 or less turns - just make that poison damage and it's game.
Let's try it with everybody's favourite insect:
With Plated Geopede and Assault Strobe it's far from impossible to deal 10 damage in the third turn: add Tainted Strike to the equation and if the opponent has no answer the game is sealed. All you need is these cards in your opening hand: Mountain, Swamp,Evolving Wilds/Terramorphic Expanse, Plated Geopede, Assault Strobe, Tainted Strike. Yes, it requires six different cards and the opponent must not meddle with your play...but my inner Timmy just giggles like a silly girl at the tought of pulling this off.
Anyway, Landfall is not the only mechanic that plays well with Infect: you can exploit a couple of Blue spells to make your poisonous creatures unblockable.
Three pictures are better than three thousand words:
+ 
+ 
This three cards together nets you 70% of the damage you need to win the game with a single attack and the Rebound effect of Distortion Strike makes another creature unblockable for free in your next turn. Just add some buff and it's GG. Filling up the other slots with card advantage and a little bounce effects should give you enough room to finish the game with stardard attacks. Or unblockable ones.
Then you could also choose to walk the "White Weenie" way and enable those little white ones to kill in a few attacks with both black spells and some equips:
And with this one we have a possible Infect deck with every color. How is this even possible? Because Scars of Mirrodin is mainly focused on two themes: Infect and Artifacts. Since the latter are color-independent it's really quite possible to build everything starting from just these two cards:
If you did look at my lists you can see these two cards in all of them. Why? Because they're just so good: The first one is kinda overlooked at first sight but enables the player to do a multi-layered bluff with each attack: do the opponent wants to block and most likely lose a creature? Or will he let it pass, taking one poison counter? And if he lets it pass, he still has to think about the possibility you have one or more buff-spells in hand...Not a pretty picture, is it?
The second one is key in card advantage: it recovers one of your critters enabling a possible infinite loop of Curs. A specialized, colorless (Grave Digger) that fits in all decks. Brilliant.
Additionally, the equips from both the Zendikar block and the Scars block are very strong and dedicated when it comes to buff a creature: Adventuring Gear gives +2/+2 landfall to any creature, Blade Pinions is a little high on cost but it enables both flying AND first-strike making an excellent blocker/attacker out of every Infect-capable creature.
Summing up, I think that Infect is one (if not The) of the most powerful abilities that have been printed on Magic Cards. In this article we explored part of its possibilities in the Standard battlefield, just think about what strategies it could enable in the Extended and the Classic cardpools. Maybe I'll talk about it in another article if you wish.
Meanwhile, have a good time with MTGO and all things magic-related!
- Dave
P.S. I'd like to note that this article was written without even glancing at the lists used in the last few Standard PDC tourneys so they are all untested, unrefined and fruits of my mind - both in goodness and badness. If even one of you readers felt inspired to give Infect a try after reading this article then my job is done. :)
Happy Infection to you all!
7 Comments
Good cover on the next pauper Infect craze. Just one thing: in the UGb Unblockable Infection list, the sum of the other spells is 22. Which one wasn't supposed to be there? 3x Harrow, maybe?
Yep, that's the one. :)
And I also noticed that the spell-land in the White/Black deck is wrong, I meant to insert Sejiri Steppe for the protection effect not Halimar Depths. And the total card count is wrong too.
Oh my, I definitely need a better proofreading routine. ^_^;
But uhm, by the way...Are you possibly the same kumagoro that used to write on IAF? ^_^
I feel excited about Infect as well, and it really makes me want to play it in every possible format... however, I haven't put together any decks/lists mostly because Infect seems like the flavour du jour and has created a backlash in the whining brigade. There's a lot of discussion/whining about the inability to remove poison counters. So, I was wondering, have you had a chance to play Infect decks in the cas/cas or TP rooms and have you experienced whining about your deck?
I actually played some games both as Infecter and Infected, but always in the cozy hall of my clan. I think there will always be some whining about strategies that involves some kind of "unfair" abilities; I still have to find a player who did not encounter a sudden-quitter while playing land destruction, counterspells or poison based deck. And sometimes that happens even with more straightfoward yet unexpected tactics (just remember the damage stack + (Momentary Blink) shenanigans of some time ago...). So, well, I would not be surprised if Infect becomes the new LD in the casual room. :)
That's a good come back to writing but maybe you could show us some matches (reports) on any of the lists next time. Let's see how you work on infect on wider card pools like Extended or Classic.
I agree that infect is such a strong ability thanks to combining an alternate win condition with some great removal on legs. I'm testing an Black-red list in classic right now and it's really fun to win on poison.
I'm one of the guys who's been chattering on the PDCMagic boards about infect. We came up with lists very similar to these and are still tweaking them.
I think what Scars of Mirrodin has given us is just right. The mechanic is just beautifully designed and creates a whole new playing environment. But right now, I don't think there are enough infect creatures to do the trick. Chances are the remaining two sets in the block will give us the tools we're missing. I feel that right now Infect is just as susceptible to tokens sweepers and removal heavy control decks, and these can tailor themselves to beat the very linear infect strategy quite easily.
I rather liked how this article simply threw around a plethora of deck ideas with this new mechanic without refinement or testing. That's how deckbuilding happens; testing results in deck tweaking. Any of the six lists you came up with a re good starting points and the description of the deckbuilding thought process was central here. Keep up the good work and happy poisoning :-)