before reading: Today's article is all about using the best of red to fuel an infect strategy in EDH. Pulling threats from the graveyard and dealing combat damage with sickly artifact creatures and maybe some infectious burn along the way.
Red is not my favorite color in Magic. Not by a long shot. When I think about the avenues available to red, my mind goes to artifact recursion, burn, and goblin swarm. I never got into graveyard shenanigans or bent heavily into artifacts. Artifacts always seemed like they were supposed to be slightly overcosted enablers to help decks fill in gaps here and there. Today, an entire strategy around recycling is very powerful and easy to facilitate. We have cards like Scrap Mastery, an artifact centered Living Death in red. Just hold off on playing something like Shatter before hand. You don't want to let your opponent recycle as hard as you. What can be said about burn? It's gotten way more viable in the last few years with all the permanents that increase damage output and a push in card design to include the word “each” rather than “target” opponent when it comes to damage. This spread-the-love mindset will make you a lot of enemies all at once rather than one at a time. When I say “goblin swarm” I don't necessarily mean goblins, but it's going to be goblins, come on, we haven't gotten a goblin commander to unseat Krenko in almost a decade. Just turn that critical mass of sacrificial tokens sideways like a red wave breaking over the table.
That's what I think about when I think about red. But we're here to get weird. So what don't we think about when we start building a red deck? A quick look over at the themes page at your favorite aggregator website, like edhrec, is in order. It's a great way to feel vindicated: burn, artifacts, go wide tokens. I certainly don't see anything along the lines of mill, lifegain, or group hug. That may be a bridge too far today. Then it hits me, infect. A quick search shows red only has 3 creatures with infect. That's slim pickings. Proliferate is even worse. Volt Charge. That's it. A Lightning Bolt that makes counters is a weird pairing to be sure. So how do we square this circle? We lean into what red does well: artifacts and burn. Our options for infect more than triple when we look at colorless options. Thank you Inkmoth Nexus for pushing us over, too bad you're cost prohibitive.
Things get even better with proliferate. Karn's Bastion makes the effect not only repeatable but hard to remove since land destruction is so frowned upon. Throne of Geth helps fill our graveyard with artifacts to be recurred in the future and spreads those counters around. I certainly haven't forgotten Core Prowler playing double duty. It's great when it hits, maybe better when it dies. All the more reason to recycle it and break it again for fun and profit. You can even play it politically with a little skill. Point it at the player who doesn't have any poison counters yet. Let him know that if he blocks he doesn't get any counters but he'll be giving them to the two other opponents at the table. “Take one for the team?” “Oh no?” Well maybe one of your mutual opponents would be more apt to waste a piece of targeted removal on whatever is blocking Core Prowler and kick that can down the road.
Regular damage and infect do not play well together. Doing 9 points of infect damage and 39 regular damage just means no one is dead. If you go down that road just make sure the damage is used in such a way to clear the path of potential blockers before you swing with your infectious mob. Making it weird means figuring out how to make burn and infect work together. Nothing out there does both for us. Right? Wrong. Warstrom Surge bridges that gap. Any time we have a creature with infect enter the battlefield the Surge will let that creature punch one of our opponents. That's great for getting around blockers or Ghostly Prison type effects. It also acts as a great payoff when we recur artifact creatures from the graveyard. Play something like Necropede and Warstorm Surge lets us divvy out a poison counter to an opponent. Sacrifice it to Throne of Geth to hand out a poison counter to your opponent and a -1/-1 onto a problematic creature. Pull it back to your hand when something like Myr Retriever dies or right back onto the battlefield with Scrap Mastery. Whatever you do, don't fall into the trap of thinking a Terror Of The Peaks will do the same thing. The dragon does the damage in this case, not your sickly artifact creature. But wait, don't give up that easily. If we suit up the dragon with a Grafted Exoskeleton we get to turn that burn into poison counters. Or we would if the dragon wasn't so expensive. We get the same effect with an adequately devoted to Purphoros.
We have a couple of other options for burning in the infection rather than burning it out. The classic Chanda's Ignition will push counters to all opponents and distribute -1/-1 all around the field to unsuspecting creatures, yours included. Gravitic Punch does something similar but only allows you to sucker punch one player. Soul's Fire works the same way. Fallen Ferromancer doles out the counters safely, albeit slowly, one tap at a time.
Who could we get to round out this list of cards we're getting together? With red and artifact creatures abundant in our graveyard we need something that will take advantage of both. Feldon of the Third Path is the natural fit. We don't need him to attack necessarily, but having him make a token of one of our infectious creatures to sneak in for poison counters is exactly what we want to do, early and often. I always said if I played Feldon I would include Sundial of the Infinite. End the turn, keep your token to threaten someone your next turn as well. This ability plays nicely with the cards we've already mentioned like War Storm Surge. Sundial of the Infinite also works well with Flameshadow Counjuring, allowing access to even more tokens in future turns.
This leaves plenty of space for players' favorite refuges, card draw, and ramp. We'll be playing great rummaging options like Thrill of Possibility to help stack our graveyard early so Feldon has a solid target to recur. Plague Myr is good early and fine later on since it's a mana dork with infect. Iron Myr taps for red and could suit up in the Grafted Exoskeleton if it’s lived beyond its usefulness, or if we just find ourselves desperate. Sisters of the Flame is a little more obscure and pricey but we're here to #MEDHWA, so why not. Foundry Inspector and Jhoira's Familiar provide mana reduction which is often a better form of ramp. You can always add a Meteor Golem in addition to Scour From Existence to deal with hard to remove permanent types. Plan to pay a premium for them. Unless you recur the golem on the cheap. With all the proliferate available, Mercadian Bazaar is a good fit. Two mana per tap is great, and if we can keep the counters flowing we'll never have to sac it. If you can get your hands on a Krark-Clan Ironworks, do it. A free sac outlet always has potential, and making mana at such a volume means we always have gas to play out our hand. I don't have one, so don't expect to see it in my final list, but you can easily find a card to cut to free up a slot.
Recursion is a great way to build redundancy. Cards like Goblin Engineer and Goblin Welder are staples for a reason. Trading trash for treasure means we always have triggers available and we'll see the cards we need with greater frequency. The Engineer even loads the yard for us. There's no reason not to make him a Feldon target when the opportunity presents itself. We can safe guard our strategy even further with cards like Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer. There's less reason to fear a Wear//Tear or By Force with him on the field. With Grafted Exoskeleton doing so much work across the board it's a key piece that's better left on the field if able. It even turns something like Reckless Fireweaver into a short clock in this deck
Here's what I settled on for my decklist using cards I had and stuff that's easy (cheap) to acquire.
Feldon of The Third Path
Sundial of The Infinite Volt Charge Scrap Mastery
Corpse Cur Contagion Clasp Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer
Fallen Ferromancer Contagion Engine Goblin Welder
Core Prowler Sword Of Truth and Justice Goblin Engineer
Grafted Exoskeleton Soul's Fire Myr Retriever
Ogre Menial Viashino Heretic Junk Diver
Phyrexian Digester Emberwilde Captain Workshop Assistant
Phyrexian Juggernaut Sorcerer's Wand Burnished Hart
Necropede Burning Anger Jeska's Will
Ironclaw Myr Chandra's Ignition Iron Myr
Razor Swine Purphoros, God of The Forge Sisters of The Flame
Plague Myr Gravatic Punch Jhoira's Familiar
Warstorm Surge Reckless Fireweaver Foundry Inspector
Decimator Web Simian Sling Scour From Existence
Cosmotronic Wave Tormentor's Helm Lux Cannon
Alchemist's Vial Cleansing Wildfire Chaos Warp
Haunted Cloak Solemn Simulacrum By Force
Mark for Death Circuit Mender Tormod's Crypt
Racecourse Fury Honor the God-Pharoh Flameshadow Conjuring
Jandor's Saddlebags Quicksmith Genius Fleetfeather Sandals
Mask of Avacyn Tormenting Voice Tibalt's Trickery
Vance's Blasting Cannons
Mountain x 25 Looming Spires Mercadian Bazaar
Karn's Bastion Zhalfirin Void Evolving Wilds
Ruins of Oran-Rief Rogue's Passage Kher Keep
Grasping Dunes Castle Embreth
When you sit down at a new table and someone asks what the deck is about you wouldn't be wrong to tell them the standard red stuff (artifacts or burn) to lull them into a false sense of ease. The confusion of being given poison counters left and right and trying to match that up with your stated strategy will open a nice window to victory over unsuspecting opponents. Sick!
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