This week, I thought I’d talk a bit about the all-new Caw-Blade versions I’ve been working on. There’s U/W/g Caw Blade and U/G/B Caw Blade and mono-red
Caw-Blade and Grand Architect Caw-Blade and Caw-Valakut!
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Okay, maybe not. As much as I might love Squadron Hawks, even I’ve gotten a little sick of seeing every article on every site about every format
talking about various Sword of Feast and Famine decks. It’s understandable, really, since Sword decks are dominating both Standard and Extended right
now, but it really does make for a whole lot of the same. But don’t worry — I’ve got your back.
And now for something completely different…
I’m sorry, dear readers, but I lied to you last week. Not intentionally, I assure you. You see, when I wrote my article last week, I fully expected to
play Caw-Blade at the TopDeck Open 2k tournament over the weekend. But I’d been toying around with an infect deck online that I’d brewed up a few days
before, and a funny thing happened. I kept winning.
When Evan asked as part of his PT Paris Magic Show “What would it
take to make Infect Constructed viable?” a lot of players answered that the deck would need a quality one-drop or something similar. My answer was that
I felt as though infect needed one of two things — either good, value utility creatures, like Gatekeeper of Malakir and Skinrender, or better
proliferate effects. I definitely felt that way at the time and in a sense still do. But it’s possible that the answer is simply that infect needs for
the available utility creatures and proliferate effects to become better positioned in the current environment. Like Phyrexian Crusader and Contagion
Clasp.
Phyrexian Crusader was the card that really got me thinking that it might be possible to build a competitive Infect deck. Protection from red and white
are both incredibly powerful abilities right now, with Boros, Mono Red, and Caw-Blade all making up important parts of the metagame. Even Valakut
relies on red removal to stop early beatdown, and Vampires has to Gatekeeper him away, or he stops their entire team. Especially with so many people
playing Doom Blade over Go for the Throat against Precursor Golems, there’s very little in the format that efficiently removes a Phyrexian Crusader.
Immune to all the format’s removal and beats everything in a fight thanks to first strike and infect? He’s basically begging for a deck to put him in,
especially if you think you might run into Paul Rietzl.
The problem with playing Phyrexian Crusader is that you’re not only playing infect, but you’re playing heavy black, which is a scary thing to do in a
world dominated by Sword of Feast and Famine. But I had a solution at the ready, since I’d been toying around with the idea in Caw-Blade for a while
now: Tumble Magnet.
Magnet is a great card for a lot of decks in Standard these days, since locking down an equipped creature after your opponent has spent so much mana
suiting it up can give you a sizable tempo advantage, not to mention the work it can put in protecting your planeswalkers from manlands or
Koth-animated Mountains when you tap out. But it’s especially potent in Infect, since it serves double duty of keeping your opponent’s Sworded
creatures at bay and forcing your creatures through. Much like in Limited, infect in Standard puts your opponent into a position where he needs to
chump block to stay alive fairly quickly, and Magnet can push you past two blockers, which is more than you can say for a typical removal spell. In
fact, my earliest list had maindeck Doom Blades and less than the full complement of Magnets, but I quickly dumped the spot removal to the sideboard in
favor of a full set of Magnets in the maindeck. They really are awesome, especially in a world of Squadron Hawks that make one-for-one removal look
pretty embarrassing.
Also included in my initial list and subsequently bumped up in number were Contagion Clasps. Clasp is a funny card, because by itself, it’s basically
just a two-cost removal spell for a one-toughness creature, but in combination with Tumble Magnet or poison, it becomes extremely powerful. I actually
had Go for the Throat early on but was more and more impressed by Clasp and Magnet that I cut all the actual removal from the deck entirely. In one of
my games online, I was playing against a Mono-Black Control deck, and I attacked him on turn 2 with an Inkmoth Nexus. I didn’t hit him with a single
creature for the rest of the game and killed him with Contagion Clasps, which were also keeping my three Tumble Magnets fully charged to tap down his
Grave Titan and friends. As the song goes — the first cut is the deepest…
The deck went through a lot of iterations in my early testing online. Initially, I had four copies of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, but they were really
unimpressive in the deck. I had Tumble Magnets to protect them, but my deck didn’t really leverage the extra cards very well, and I already had
Phyrexian Vatmother as a four-drop. I went from four copies to two to zero. I assure you, playing a blue deck in Standard without Jace felt strange to
me, too, but he just wasn’t carrying his weight.
The card I brought in to replace him was Tezzeret. My earliest versions of the deck hadn’t been terribly artifact heavy, so Tezzeret hadn’t been a
serious consideration, but as I went up on Magnets and Contagion Clasps, he got more and more attractive. I’d been sideboarding Necropedes against
aggressive decks, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that I wanted them maindeck, since I needed more creatures, and Necropede was the best guy
around. That made Tezzeret pretty appealing, since being able to hit your opponent with a 5/5 infect creature as early as turn 4 can end the game quite
quickly.
When people see that I have Tezzeret, a lot of them ask me why I don’t play cards like Ichorclaw Myr. The answer is that this isn’t a Tezzeret deck —
it’s an Infect deck that happens to have Tezzeret. I think this is an example of how a lot of players think too linearly about deckbuilding. While
building around particular cards can create powerful synergies, it’s entirely possible to go overboard and give up too much for your theme. Synergy is
clearly important, but playing suboptimal cards to achieve that synergy can end up costing you dearly when you only draw one-half of your “combo.”
I fell into that trap somewhat myself and ended up with Plague Myr in my deck. To be fair, I actually had Plague Myr before I had Tezzeret, with the
reasoning that it was an infect creature that could help accelerate out my Vatmothers. In the games when I had it and a Vatmother, it was good, but
generally speaking, it was just too low impact a card. I played two copies in my deck last weekend and have since cut them entirely.
I’ve said enough about the story behind the deck, so I figure I should finally get to it. Here’s the list I played at the TopDeck Open last weekend:
Creatures (14)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (26)
Spells (18)
Sideboard
The Plague Myrs, as mentioned, underperformed, but I was really happy with most of the rest of the deck. The tournament was seven rounds of Swiss, and
I beat U/B Control, Grixis Tezzeret, Elves, and two Mono Red decks before drawing twice into the Top 8, where I beat a Boros deck before splitting the
prizes in the Top 4.
The deck has incredible matchups against creature decks, especially Mono Red and Boros, because Phyrexian Crusader is just unstoppable. Necropede
provides a speed bump that takes a creature with him when he dies, and Contagion Clasp either kills something or shrinks a Goblin Guide to a reasonable
size. Tumble Magnets keep any equipped creatures in check, along with things like Mirran Crusader or Hero of Oxid Ridge, or even Koth-animated
Mountains.
Here’s the bad news: the Caw-Blade matchup isn’t great. At least, not in the deck’s current form. I actually didn’t play against a single Caw-Blade
deck on Magic Online in the week leading up to the tournament and didn’t play it in the event itself but got some games in with Matt Sperling between
rounds, and things pretty much went how I expected. Your Inquisitions and Tumble Magnets are excellent for keeping the “Blade” part of the deck at bay,
but you’re really weak to Jace and Gideon. Your creatures don’t hit planeswalkers very hard, and you’re not fast enough to win before they can take
control of the game. You do have Creeping Tar Pit and Tezzeret to keep Jace in check somewhat, but that’s often not enough.
I’m still working on figuring out what the best solutions are to these problems. My first instinct was Duress and Spell Pierce, which is why those are
in the sideboard, but I’m still looking for something better. I’ve considered Into the Roil, since it’s a card that can devastate an opponent who’s
relying on Gideon to protect him for the turn, and often a single attack with something like a Vatmother is enough to end the game. I’m also trying out
Skithiryx, which is a great way to deal with an opposing Jace that your opponent often won’t suspect and can punish someone who gets greedy and attacks
with Gideon, thinking the coast is clear.
As you can see, this deck is still very much a work in progress, but so far, it has shown a lot of promise. I’m trying different cards every day, but
I’m pretty happy with the core of the deck, which I see as the Necropedes, Crusaders, Vatmothers, Clasps, Inquisitions, Magnets, and Preordains.
I’ve had some people comment that it seems strange that I’m playing Preordain, especially as one of my only blue cards, but I think this is the perfect
kind of deck for Preordain. You have a number of cards that are dramatically more powerful than the rest of your deck in certain matchups, like
Phyrexian Crusader, and you want to be able to dig for them. Additionally, you have a number of cards that work particularly well in combination but
might otherwise be redundant, like Clasp and Magnet, and you want to be able to assemble your combos but not necessarily draw extra copies. Preordain
is one of the cards I’m happiest to see in my opening hand and one of the cards I’m happiest to draw at almost any point in the game. The deck has a
lot of low mana-cost cards, so you can very easily have extra mana left over to use Preordain, and the impact of the draw smoothing is huge.
The two Deprives also get some strange looks, but the deck can easily afford the mana cost in the midgame, which is the only time you’d really want to
cast Deprive anyway, and it’s a great way to protect yourself from things like a Primeval Titan or a Gideon. I’ve been questioned why Deprive and not
Mana Leak, and the reason is that you’d rather have a hard counter than one that’s easier to cast. Being able to stop a Lightning Bolt on an Inkmoth
Nexus is something that Mana Leak will almost never do and is something that I’ve won many games doing with Deprive. You’re not a control deck. You’re
not looking to use counters to protect you in the early turns. You want a card that will stop your opponent from playing some game-breaking card that
will win the game or stop you from winning, and that’s a job for Deprive.
The funniest looking card in the list, though, is certainly Contagion Engine. Contagion Engine was actually something I thought of at about 1 am the
night before the tournament. I’d recently cut all copies of Black Sun’s Zenith from my sideboard, since I realized that most of the decks I’d bring it
in against were ones that were incredibly weak to Phyrexian Crusader, and I really didn’t want to kill my own trump creatures against them. I had been
doing very well just bringing in spot removal but could easily envision a situation where I wanted some kind of board sweeper when the game stalled out
and my opponent played out a bunch of Squadron Hawks or something. Contagion Engine seemed perfect. It was a sweeper that went on to kill my opponent.
I only played it once, but it was in the quarterfinals against a board of six creatures, and over the next two turns, I activated it twice, and my
opponent died. I’d play it again in a heartbeat.
I’d play the deck again, too. I’ll definitely be at the SCG Open in Los Angeles in a few weeks, and I’d say chances are I’ll be infecting my opponents
there too. If you want to play the deck yourself, I suggest you do a good amount of playtesting, because there are a lot of subtle interactions that
can come up. I’ll run down some of them:
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Phyrexian Crusader has first strike and infect, which means it can tangle with a 3/3 and live but will die to a 4/3 like Vengevine — unless
you have Contagion Clasp. With Contagion Clasp, you can assign your first strike damage and then proliferate to kill the Vengevine before it gets a
chance to damage your Crusader.
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Be careful about your Tumble Magnet counters. You can’t proliferate onto an empty Magnet, so be sure to plan out your uses to ensure that
you’ll have time to proliferate so you can keep your Magnet going.
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Generally speaking, you’d rather keep mana open and proliferate with a Clasp than attack with an Inkmoth Nexus, so you don’t expose it to
removal.
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Contagion Clasp lets you race while blocking. Often, it’s correct to get in one hit with a Phyrexian Crusader or Necropede and soak up some
damage on the swing back if you have a Clasp that can slowly win you the game while you play defense.
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Contagion Clasp is not a “may” effect! If you animate an Inkmoth Nexus and attack and then play a Clasp on an otherwise empty board,
you’re going to be one sad panda. If you’re playing against a creatureless or creature-light deck, you’ll often want to play Contagion Clasp on an
empty board to avoid shrinking your own guys.
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Don’t always just use Clasp to kill a one-toughness creature. Often it’s correct to Clasp a larger creature and proliferate it down,
especially if you have Necropede or other ways to spread counters on the rest of their team.
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Remember that you can win with damage too! I’ve won a number of games by attacking with Tumble Magnets and Contagion Clasps animated by
Tezzeret, and while I haven’t won with just Creeping Tar Pits, I’ve forced my opponents to kill them with Tectonic Edge to protect my Inkmoth Nexuses.
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Speaking of Tezzeret and Nexus, remember that an animated Nexus pumped by Tezzeret remains a 5/5 creature after the turn ends but does not have infect or flying! If you animate it again, it will become a 1/1 flier with infect, and you’ll have to pump it again with Tezzeret.
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Corrupted Conscience is really sweet when you cast it on a Titan. Inferno Titan is especially nice, but any will do.
I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this deck in the coming weeks. Make no mistake — this deck is real. I hope SCGLive has their poison status icons
ready for LA!
Until next time,
-bmk
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