Coming out of the World Championships this year, I was hungry for more Magic. That’s nothing new; I almost always feel that way following any big tournament. While you can playtest a format to death before an event, there’s nothing like actual competition to teach you how things really work out—the trial by fire, if you will. I learn so much over the course of a major tournament that I’m always eager to get back to work, trying to figure out new ways to take advantage of that information.
That’s what I find so compelling about Magic; it’s a never-ending puzzle. Even if you solve it for a single event, the next day everyone else has all of the technology you just unleashed upon the world, and if you want that edge again, you have to go back to the drawing board. Standard at Worlds ended up looking almost exactly as we anticipated but certainly wouldn’t look that way by the time the Invitational came around. So back to the drawing board I went, fully intending to break open the new format.
I started in a strange place: Phyrexian Obliterator. It may seem strange, but my thought was that R/G Wolf Run and Mono Red would be the two most popular decks coming out of Worlds. My theory was that an aggro-control style Obliterator deck would have the tools to combat both of them, with Obliterator serving as a powerful tool to help put pressure on against Wolf Run and dominate the board against red.
Turns out I wasn’t just wrong. I was incredibly, horribly, impressively wrong. I brewed up probably a half dozen different Obliterator decks, and all of them were just downright terrible. I picked up all the cards I needed on Magic Online to play them in two-man queues, and I lost to everything. I’m not even kidding. In the several dozen matches I played with various incarnations of Phyrexian Obliterator decks, I’m pretty sure I won something like two or three times and lost not only to Illusions, W/U Humans, Solar Flare, and the like, but to the very Mono Red and Wolf Run decks that I had been playing Obliterators to beat in the first place!
There were several fundamental problems with my Obliterator decks. The first and most glaring is that Phyrexian Obliterator just isn’t very good! In my testing, it was a passable threat against Wolf Run but was downright terrible against Humans, Illusions, and yes, even Mono Red. In previous formats, a creature like Obliterator might have given Mono Red a great deal of trouble by effectively serving as a Moat, but Mono Red decks in the current format can largely get around individual large blockers on the ground. The power cards in Mono Red are no longer Goblin Guide and Plated Geopede but rather Shrine of Burning Rage, Stormblood Berserker, and Chandra’s Phoenix, all of which can ignore a single Obliterator trying to stop them. Even many of the support creatures for Mono Red don’t have to attack to keep applying pressure; Goblin Fireslinger and Grim Lavamancer can keep burning away against an army of Obliterators. If anything, I found myself dying to my own Obliterators against Mono Red more than anything else, since they’re certainly a tempting target for Traitorous Blood. Hardly the cornerstone card of my deck I was hoping for them to be!
Even if Obliterator were awesome, its mana cost requires incredible sacrifices to support it. One of my Obliterator lists had a total of two Mountains for lands that couldn’t produce black mana, and drawing one of those in my opening hand would often completely undermine my ability to actually curve out because I couldn’t play my Obliterator. As exciting as Prey Upon/Obliterator might be in theory, in practice it’s pretty much impossible to effectively play Obliterator in anything but a mono-black, B/u, B/r, or B/r/u deck, since you need every black producing dual land you can get your hands on. BBBB is such an incredibly demanding mana cost that you can’t afford to play any kind of utility lands, either, which is a major cost given how powerful cards like Inkmoth Nexus, Ghost Quarter, and the like can be.
Last, but certainly not least, is the infect problem. Obliterator suffers from the existence of the infect mechanic. Remember how black and green decks in Scars Limited could end up being incredibly awkward because the creatures were split between infect and non-infect? It turns out that’s also the case with black in Standard (and with green, for that matter). If you’re building a black creature deck with Obliterator, you don’t have very many options because a significant portion of the legal card pool is dedicated to supporting a theme that doesn’t synergize with what you’re trying to do. In particular, your deck misses out on the powerful rare creature slots devoted to Phyrexian Crusader, Phyrexian Vatmother, and Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon. While any white creature deck can use Mirran Crusader effectively, its counterpart isn’t so easy to find a home for. It’s no coincidence that the successful aggressive creature strategies we’re seeing nowadays—when Scars block makes up the majority of the available card pool—are red, white, and blue. Black and green simply have a much smaller pool of creatures to draw from.
I bring this up in part because the implications of that smaller pool are how I made the leap from my failed Obliterator decks to Infect. I had been trying Phyrexian Crusader as a sideboard card against both red and white creature decks, and it had been extremely effective. Granted, it suffered from some of the same problems as Obliterator against Mono Red in that it didn’t stop their big three threats, but it came down faster and dodged all of the white removal that could so punish Obliterator. The problem was that it didn’t really gel with my deck’s overall game plan. I was typically trying to win with damage, which significantly reduced the value of my Crusaders. But since the Crusaders were actually proving to be better than my Obliterators, I decided the solution was to just go the other direction entirely. It was time to scrap the Obliterator plan and get back on the Infect wagon.
Creatures (7)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (25)
Spells (26)
Once I decided to shift over to an Infect strategy, I had a lot of previous work off of which to build. A lot of people asked me for a long time if I was ever going to revisit my old U/B Infect deck, and my answer was typically that I felt like it was largely invalidated by the existence of Dismember. But Dismember is a card that has been steadily dropping out of favor in recent months. In the Caw-Blade/Splinter Twin era, it was rare to find a deck that didn’t play at least three and often the full four Dismembers between deck and sideboard. Nowadays, however, aggressive decks make up a much higher percentage of the metagame, and the four life cost on Dismember can really hurt. On top of that, the rise of Illusions has made Gut Shot the go-to Phyrexian mana removal spell of choice, particularly in conjunction with Snapcaster Mage, who makes every last mana count that much more.
With Dismember declining in popularity and Gut Shot’s stock at an all-time high, I really liked the idea of playing a deck that focused on the resilient infect creatures and eschewed the fragile fliers that have been the focus of most mono-black infect builds recently. Plague Stinger and Whispering Specter were great back when control decks relied on Doom Blade as their primary removal and Wolf Run decks tended to be of the mono-green variety, but they’re much less impressive in a world of Gut Shots. Similarly, Lashwrithe is powerful in a field that isn’t well set up to deal with it but becomes much less impressive when the equipped creature can die to a zero-mana spell in response or get bounced by Vapor Snag after investing so many resources into it.
Slowly but surely I found myself largely rebuilding my old U/B list. The part of that deck that I liked the most was always Contagion Clasp. The proliferate mechanic is really what sets infect apart from normal damage, in my mind. The ability to get in a small amount of poison counters early in the game and win slowly with incremental proliferate effects makes games play out much differently than with typical win conditions. More importantly, the ability to simultaneously use proliferate to kill your opponent and fuel other counter-based cards lets an Infect deck gain value on multiple axes at once. While I no longer had little Jace to fuel with my Clasps, I was certain I could find more ways to use them.
Tumble Magnet was an obvious choice that was also imported from my old build. While we no longer live in the world of equipment everywhere that was the original motivation behind the inclusion of Magnet, good old Tumbly still has a place in Standard. Magnet is especially powerful against Illusions, where it can just be three terrors on a stick but also serves as a fine answer to Mirran Crusader, which can otherwise be quite problematic. The one place where Magnet is much worse than it used to be is against opposing control decks. Whereas Magnet/Clasp was very effective at locking down Celestial Colonnades and Titans indefinitely in the old world, it’s not nearly so good at holding off the advantages gained by Consecrated Sphinx and not nearly as difficult for control decks to remove now that Oblivion Ring is an option. I started with four Magnets but slowly cut them down when they were just proving to be too weak against both control and hexproof creatures, until I settled at a mere two.
The new big winner from its tag-team with Contagion Clasp is Liliana. I haven’t been a huge fan of Liliana in most decks where I’ve seen her played, in large part because I feel like those decks don’t have good ways to take advantage of all of her abilities and are often playing her simply as an edict with a small chance of upside. In this deck, though, her synergy with proliferate effects makes her extremely powerful against opposing aggressive and control decks alike, and the ability to protect her with both removal and powerful permanents like Phyrexian Crusader and Tumble Magnet make her that much more difficult for opponents to just attack and kill her. Against creature decks, you can often protect her for a single turn to proliferate once and get a second Edict out of her, while against control you can threaten her ultimate extremely quickly thanks to Contagion Clasp and Tezzeret’s Gambit.
My earliest builds of this deck had both Think Twice and Forbidden Alchemy in an attempt to synergize with Liliana, but I found that they were both relatively unimpressive. Forbidden Alchemy was the first to go, since I was already using my mana productively in the late game with Contagion Clasp, and I didn’t want to just play three mana for an Impulse. Alchemy really isn’t that exciting when you don’t have a lot of other flashback cards in your deck or other ways to use your graveyard as a resource like Snapcaster Mage. Think Twice survived longer but was eventually supplanted entirely by Tezzeret’s Gambit, which provided more bulk cards for less mana overall and offered more synergy with the additional proliferate effect.
Being able to avoid the life loss on Gambit is one reason to play blue, but the main driver is Mana Leak. Mana Leak is a weird card to be splashing for, though, in that it’s really not that good against a huge percentage of the field, but it’s very important against Wolf Run and opposing control decks. It’s pretty awkward to be caught sitting with a bunch of countermagic in your hand when your opponent has a Delver and a pair of Phantasmal Bears, but it’s similarly awkward to not have a Mana Leak when your opponent plays a Titan. I actually sideboard Mana Leak out against pretty much all of the creature decks in the format, but so far it seems like it’s a necessary evil to compete with a lot of what’s going on in the format.
The last blue card in the maindeck is Viral Drake. This is the card that has turned the most heads when I’ve played it and has become something of the deck’s mascot. Truth be told, I arrived at Viral Drake pretty much entirely by accident when I searched on Magic Online for infect creatures in blue and black. I found that I had a single Viral Drake on my account and tossed it in the deck just to try it out. After a few games, I realized it was actually pretty impressive. The 1/4 flying body was big enough to get in the way of a lot of creatures, like Delver and Chandra’s Phoenix, and the proliferate effect was huge in any game that stalled out. Perhaps most importantly, it provides an excellent stopgap measure against Moorland Haunt, which could otherwise make it difficult to keep up in any game that came down to an attrition fight. It does have the drawback of actually turning on a lot of opposing removal that might otherwise be largely dead against your creatures, like Doom Blade and Oblivion Ring/Fiend Hunter, but it performed well enough overall that I felt comfortable playing a single copy. I had a second copy in the sideboard for a while but eventually decided I had to make room for something else.
That something else was a third copy of Phyrexian Vatmother. I’d originally intended the Vatmothers in the sideboard to be used against Mono Red and Wolf Run but eventually realized that I needed more threats against control decks as well. The plan against control is generally to board out most of the removal and board into discard and countermagic, and I found that I wasn’t able to play aggro-control with the threat density I had in my maindeck. Vatmothers helped to supplement that and actually give me the ability to kill my opponents when I stripped their hand to nothing with Distress (Which is awesome, by the way, and really ought to see more play than it does. Despise, on the other hand, I’m much less excited about.).
The sideboard card that overperformed the most, however, was Curse of Death’s Hold. This card is for real, and I would not be surprised to see it as a major feature of most control decks moving forward. In the Invitational, my one Curse singlehandedly won me two games—one against Tempered Steel in which it held off a Hero of Bladehold and a pair of Shrine of Loyal Legions and another against Wolf Run in which it nullified a flipped Garruk, two Inkmoth Nexus, and killed my opponent’s Birds so I could edict his Thrun with Liliana. It nullifies Moorland Haunt unless the opponent has an Honor of the Pure and in multiples can completely lock out most Illusions decks. I’d almost certainly play at least two Curses in my sideboard in future versions, and I’ve already started work on decks in which Curse plays a much more central role.
The biggest strikes against this deck are its weaknesses to hexproof and pro-black creatures, most notably Geist of Saint Traft and Mirran Crusader. The popularity of Geist in particular in Illusions makes that matchup dramatically more difficult than it was without it. I had Phyrexian Metamorph in the maindeck for a while, but he was too often a weak or dead card, and I ended up cutting it, but if Geist becomes standard in Illusions (as it’s looking like it might), it should probably make its way back into the deck.
It’s also possible that a better configuration for the deck would be to jam more removal in the main and shift all of the countermagic to the sideboard. I find that I generally feel favored in most matchups after sideboarding but don’t feel like a big favorite in game one virtually anywhere.
I’m also tinkering with a version that removes the blue entirely in favor of red. The big attraction of red is Slagstorm/Whipflare, neither of which kill any of your creatures and help deal with pesky Geists and Mirran Crusaders, but Volt Charge is pretty exciting too, since it’s a proliferate effect that can have an immediate impact on the board. I’m not sure what the control/Wolf Run matchups look like without countermagic, but so far I’m liking how the deck plays out against opposing creature decks. We shall see…
Just because there’s no more tournaments left this year doesn’t mean my brain is going to let me stop brewing. There’s always new puzzles left to solve…
Until next time,
bmk