A week is a long time during Magic spoiler season. Just last week, I talked about some potential decks for M12 Standard, and over the last few days
even more new cards have been revealed that have put my brain in brewing mode. Last time, I touched mostly on existing decks, but this week I’m
breaking out my Pandaran suit and going full-blown brewmaster.
Just like last week, when Grim Lavamancer caught my eye, recently reprints have gotten me the most excited. One of them comes from a period when I
wasn’t even playing Magic, but harkens back to a card that fascinated me early in my Magic playing days, even if it did require doing a bit more
math than my friends in middle school would have liked.
I am talking, of course, about Smallpox, and its ancestor Pox before it. Pox was always a card that I found incredibly interesting when I was first
playing and building decks for tournaments, way back in the stone age—or Ice Age, as the case may be. The challenge of piecing together the
appropriate combination of cards to best take advantage of Pox’s symmetrical devastation was a puzzle I found fascinating. While I never played
it in a tournament, I loved Andrew Wolf’s Pox deck that was packed with cheap cantrip artifacts to reduce his hand size to thus diminish the
discard effect of his Poxes on himself, as well as reanimation spells like Dance of the Dead to enlist his opponent’s discarded fatties to kill
them.
While Pox is a card that WotC would almost certainly never reprint (it violates a fundamental directive of good game design—don’t force
your players to do excessive math!), it is a card that they have paid homage to more than once. The first reimagining of Pox came in the form of Death
Cloud, a card with which I was similarly fascinated when it hit the tournament scene. While Death Cloud and Pox aren’t obviously related, they
have similarly symmetrical effects that reward players for determining how to best exploit them. I tried building many a Death Cloud deck back in those
days, and despite never quite finding a build that got the job done, I had a soft spot in my heart for the card. Such a soft spot, in fact, that I
chose to play a Life from the Loam/Death Cloud deck at PT LA in 2009, my very first tournament back after a several year hiatus. I managed to limp into
Day Two, where I didn’t win a single match, but still, my love for Death Cloud remains unblemished.
Smallpox was released during that hiatus, so I haven’t really had much of a chance to play with it, but regardless it’s a card I’m
excited to see return. Modern Magic has in large part moved away from such symmetrical effects—a great deal more cards are printed as “all
upside” versions these days—and it’s great to see that they aren’t gone. The puzzle-solving challenge of breaking symmetrical
effects was always one of my greatest joys early on in my Magic career.
So how do we best use a card like Smallpox? Well, unlike either of its predecessors, Pox or Death Cloud, Smallpox is a fixed effect. Smallpox will
always cause both players to discard one card, sacrifice one creature and one land, and lose one life. That means there’s no particular incentive
to play cantrip artifacts like Spellbombs to “store” cards or anything like that. There is, however, an incentive to play cards that want
to make their way to the graveyard.
There was a brief time when I was excited about the potential for Smallpox in Extended last year, back when Dark Depths was everywhere. The idea of
playing a Flagstones of Trokair followed up by a Fetid Heath and then playing Smallpox, discarding Bloodghast, and returning it to play with the
trigger from the Plains you fetched up was just awesome and matched up really well against opposing Marit Lage tokens. Unfortunately, it matched up
remarkably poorly against the Thopter Foundry part of the deck, and ultimately the deck never got off the ground (although a similar deck made Top 8 of
GP Houston in the hands of one Pete Picard). We don’t have Flagstones, and we don’t have filter lands, but we do have Bloodghast.
But Bloodghast isn’t the only creature in town that is happy to make his way to the graveyard! Vengevine is an even more threatening fellow to
send to the discard pile, if last year’s Dredgevine decks taught us anything. But playing Vengevine puts us into a weird spot as a Smallpox deck
because one of the parts of the Smallpox effect is that it forces each player to sacrifice a creature, and Vengevine wants us to play a lot of
creatures.
Not a problem—let’s just look for creatures that we don’t mind sacrificing!
The most obvious candidate is Viridian Emissary. Emissary is a weird card because it’s not quite aggressive enough for most beatdown decks and
not quite reliable enough mana acceleration for control decks. Our deck looks like it’s shaping up to be something in between and is certainly
happy to have the death trigger of the Emissary available to mitigate our Smallpox losses. We can also use the body early on—both Bloodghast and
Vengevine provide the ability to grind down our opponent’s life totals in the long game, so getting in a few hits with an Emissary early on can
be a big deal. In a world where Dismembers are likely to be everywhere, every point of damage can matter, so it’s important that our deck be set
up to pressure the opponent’s life total.
Next up is Sylvan Ranger. The Ranger isn’t a big body, but he’s another creature that replaces himself and provides us with fuel for the
Smallpox. Again, it’s important to remember that Smallpox is a fixed effect, and having a single small creature in play we can sacrifice can let
us keep our Vengevines and the like around and attacking. Ranger is especially good for Vengevine recursion with Smallpox since it helps us keep up
with our land drops despite sacrificing them, as well as providing a body to get the chain going.
Another reprint that got me thinking about the potential of a deck like this is Zombie Infestation. Infestation was a cornerstone card in a number of
decks back during its first time around, including Upheaval decks. More notably for our purposes, it was used in a number of Reanimator style decks as
a discard outlet that could double as a secondary path to victory. While we won’t be discarding Verdant Forces and Visaras to subsequently
Exhume, Infestation does seem like a potentially powerful way to get Vengevines and Bloodghasts into our graveyard while giving us a bit of extra value
at the same time.
Fauna Shaman is another pretty obvious inclusion for that reason—we all know how powerful an unanswered Fauna Shaman can be in a Vengevine deck.
That gives us access to lots of potentially powerful bullet creatures, though I think we generally want to keep our curve low as a concession to
Smallpox.
Planeswalkers weren’t around during Pox’s time, but they did share a stage with Death Cloud, and boy were they good in combination. One of
my (many) losses on Day 2 of GP LA came in the Death Cloud mirror when my opponent had Garruk Wildspeaker to help him play an even bigger Death Cloud
and left him with an endless stream of 3/3s thereafter. While Garruk doesn’t have quite that kind of synergy with this deck, he’s still a
major potential threat, and the fact that Smallpox costs two mana means that you can play him, untap, and then Smallpox away your opponent’s
attacker who might be threatening to kill him—while discarding a Bloodghast, of course. Seems worth giving him a shot!
Another cute Smallpox trick is with Beast Within. Against decks with little to no creatures, you can use Beast Within on a land or planeswalker and
then Smallpox it away—it’s like a Vindicate with no drawback! Maybe it’s cuter than it is good, but I thought I’d mention it in
the hopes of getting the juices flowing.
Anyway, here’s my first go at a Smallpox list:
Creatures (26)
- 1 Solemn Simulacrum
- 2 Phyrexian Rager
- 1 Acidic Slime
- 4 Bloodghast
- 4 Vengevine
- 4 Fauna Shaman
- 4 Sylvan Ranger
- 4 Viridian Emissary
- 1 Hex Parasite
- 1 Vengeful Pharaoh
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (24)
- 10 Forest
- 10 Swamp
- 4 Verdant Catacombs
Spells (8)
I’d list a sideboard, but even the maindeck is so experimental that it seems kind of silly. Potential sideboard cards that excite me are Perilous
Myr, Obstinate Baloth, Mind Rot, Grim Discovery, and your typical selection of removal and discard spells.
There are probably a lot of things that are wrong about this deck—the mana, for starters. Sylvan Ranger and Viridian Emissary can help the mana
situation, but you’re still relying on just four Verdant Catacombs as fixing that doesn’t require colored mana. It’s possible that
much of what the deck is trying to do is just too slow and clunky to compete with streamlined decks like Valakut and Splinter Twin, but I have a
feeling this deck would match up really well against anyone trying to play U/B Control. I’d say Valakut seems like it would be a good matchup,
too, since Smallpox as a card is really powerful against them, especially if you can hit an Overgrown Battlement or Lotus Cobra with it, but Obstinate
Baloth out of the sideboard really puts a damper on how good any kind of discard can be against Valakut these days.
Who knows if this deck is any good, or even if this strategy can possibly be any good in the current Standard format? What I do know is that I loved
building decks like this years ago, and I just couldn’t help myself. While I’m sure this deck isn’t quite ready to take down SCG
Open: Cincinnati just yet, maybe it has the kernel of a deck that could be. Now if only M12 would hurry up and get on Magic Online so I can find
out…
Until next time,
bmk