Why Infect?Typically, the decks I created prior to this one ended up falling under one of two types:
- A very low-curve Naya Stompy or WG Weenie deck that tried to stick a
Noble Hierach that would then try to spam efficient one-drops like
Savannah Lions and
Skymarcher Aspirant. One problem with this deck is that it often couldn't take full advantage of the
mana provided by
Simian Spirit Guide which is basically like saying we had to throw out 4 of our lands in a deck for
Wastes when mana is already tight. Another is that with the struggle to even get to 2 mana, we would have a hard time stacking cards like
Honor of the Pure or even casting things like
Lightning Bolt to keep our momentum going into the lategame. Overall, there were a lot of ways to make the deck consistent, but it didn't have much (if any) staying power.
- An affinity deck spamming every 0-mana artifact we could find from
Mox Amber to
Welding Jar to power out a lot of
Myr Enforcer and
Mycosynth Golem. The problem here is that while the threats are efficient and potentially even free, they're very slow to reach that state and things like
Mishra's Bauble for card draw or
Salvage Titan as an alternate plan of attack require us to
sacrifice artifacts meant we ended up with two different gameplans in our deck that didn't compliment each other. In other words, we had a lot of great threats, but our supporting gameplan to back it up either took too long or often risked messing itself up.
Infect eliminates both of these problems by guaranteeing that sticking a "small"
Glistener Elf or a
Ichorclaw Myr is part of our win condition. We are a "sink or swim" deck using
Blazing Shoal to attack for 10 infect and blow the opponent out on turn 2 or 3, so running into the long game where we don't have any mana isn't really a concern for us because if we got to turn 3 or 4, we're probably dead to begin with. The deck's goal is thus to get the ideal hand of
Glistener Elf +
Blazing Shoal + a 10 CMC red card as fast possible. If we're expecting a small creature to come down and try to chump us out, we hope for
Gut Shots to appear in our hand to clear the way.
Card 'Draw'Gitaxian Probe and
Street Wraith are pretty self-explanatory here - we virtually cut our deck down to 52 cards so we can ensure the pieces we want are more likely to appear in our hand. Of particular note however is
Sphinx of Foresight - while not a draw spell per se, we are looking to ensure even our turn 2 draw is as relevant as possible to the situation at hand. If that can help us clear away 3 or even 6 useless mana sources or redunant pieces to sculpt our winning hand, it can work just as good as if if not better than a proper draw spell. There is also a corner case where if we end up with a hand full of fast mana/rituals and
Manamorphose, we can use all of it to slam the Sphinx down on turn 1 and hope it is a sufficient clock to beat the opponent.
Rituals/Pseudo RitualsWe run
Wild Cantor for one very important reason here over
Noble Hiearch or
Birds of Paradise - specifically, that it can be played with
. Since our best shot revolves around sticking a
Glistener Elf, we want to minimize the cases in which we draw an Elf and a mana source that can't play it. Wild Cantor helps with this by giving a Simian Spirit Guide a chance to play the Elf where other mana dorks would have to wait a turn or not be compatible with Spirit Guide.
As mentioned above,
Manamorphose helps us fix our mana to hardcast our non-infect 'threats' providing utility for us in a pinch. It also works as a card draw spell, helping us dig just one card deeper for that perfect combo piece we might need. I've chosen to run
Rite of Flame in this build over
Dark Ritual despite the slightly increased risk for an important reason - it helps us hardcast our Blazing Shoal fodder cards if we whiff and can't find our combo hand.
Apex of Power was my card of choice because it effectively turns into a card that lets us 'draw' 7 and cast any of the desired cards from the pile with its mana refund. In other words, if this deck somehow manages to 'storm' into it via ritual critical mass, we may very well be able to brute force our way through the opponent by dropping creatures far above what they can play on turn 1 - creatures like
Chancellor of the Tangle and
Sphnix of Foresight that were pulling double-duty as our opening hand utility cards, no less. A single
Myojin of Infinite Rage is in here mainly to up the Shoal fodder count as a bit and doubt as an alternative payoff - while normally he would be ridiculously expensive by our standards, dropping a 7/4 indestructible creature on turn 1 or 2 is still a very credible threat.
Ultimately, this is a deck that includes a
lot of ways to try and win on turns 1-3. It just happens to rely on the same 'support package' of cards to power into all of them. If you haven't guessed already from this writeup, though, you're pretty much on "all or nothing" with this deck; you'll entire completely the smash the opponent out of nowhere or encounter another flop where you didn't play much of anything. May your all or nothing charges yield glory against your foes!