I’ve been curious about Infect in Legacy since I discovered how good it can be in Pro Tour Philadelphia with Blazing Shoal, but I assumed Wasteland would be too much of a problem. Modern has shown that Blazing Shoal is completely unnecessary. There’s no reason to assemble a specific two-card combo of cards that are blanks by themselves when you can just cast two pump spells for almost the same effect, especially when Invigorate is in the format to let you do this for free.
In Legacy, I think the card selection, mana, and disruptive elements are good enough that I want to move toward a blue/green deck rather than just a green deck with Blighted Agent. My list is very much in the style of Modern Infect decks, but I have a few interesting twists. Here’s the deck I’ll be playing today:
Creatures (10)
Lands (20)
Spells (30)
- 4 Brainstorm
- 2 Force of Will
- 4 Daze
- 2 Berserk
- 4 Invigorate
- 2 Crop Rotation
- 4 Might of Old Krosa
- 4 Vines of Vastwood
- 3 Groundswell
- 1 Apostle's Blessing
Sideboard
I think Crop Rotation is better than the two-mana infect creatures. It finds Inkmoth Nexus and, most importantly, lets you present a threat at instant speed. So your opponent might think it’s safe to tap out because you have no creatures, and then you can Crop Rotation at the end of their turn, untap, and kill them. Also, it provides a reasonable counter to Wasteland, and it lets you sideboard Bojuka Bog to get several answers to graveyards in a single slot. I’m playing a Simic Growth Chamber so that my Crop Rotation can potentially function as a land, but it’s probably more cute than right since I have to have two lands to make that work: one to sacrifice and one to bounce.
Elvish Spirit Guide adds an explosive and tricky element to the deck, but it seems like the kind of effect that’s easy to overdo, so I’m just playing two. Berserk can be the biggest pump spell, getting you straight ten with another +4/+4. But nine is usually good enough, and Berserk is horrible by itself, so I didn’t want too many. It’s entirely possible that it’s not right to play it at all.
I think the rest is pretty self-explanatory. On to the games:
It’s hard for a deck like that to actually play enough spot removal in Legacy to interact properly with Infect since so many of the decks don’t have creatures or don’t rely on their creatures. Their best cards are discard, but if I can just get a threat down first, they might die. And Hymn to Tourach really isn’t the right discard spell for the job.
As I mentioned in the video, U/W Control is the hardest matchup (that I’m aware of) for Infect in Modern, and the upgrades to their deck in Legacy only make matters much worse. Cheaper countermagic, easy untargeted removal like Terminus, and the Counterbalance lock on top of Swords to Plowshares makes for a miserable matchup.
This felt harder than the Jund match. Lingering Souls is really annoying if I don’t have a Blighted Agent, and Stoneforge Mystic makes me really need all the pieces to kill my opponent because it threatens to lock me out quickly if it doesn’t all come together on my end. If it does, though, Stoneforge is far too slow.
I’m pretty sure he shouldn’t have bothered siding in Choke, but I don’t know how bad his worst card was.
In theory, this match should have been harder than the one before it since my opponent’s deck had both Stoneforge Mystic and discard. But my draws were better, and I think I was favored there and just got slightly unlucky.
Thanks for watching,
Sam
@samuelhblack on Twitter