Infectious Fun

Love it or hate it, Poison has been with Magic since Legends. Infect is a deck to be reckoned with!

It's a well known story that Mark Rosewater was trying to get the Poison mechanic into a Standard expansion for years, to no avail. When the Scars of Mirrodin block rolled around, he finally found his opportunity. And so the beloved and despised Infect mechanic was born.

I was thinking for a while about what deck I wanted to cover first for this series, and I'm as surprised as anyone that I settled on Infect. It's really not one of my favorite decks or archetypes, but I think it's a great entry point into Legacy from both a gameplay and cost/availability perspective. Let's talk about why.

Infect's game plan is straightforward and easy to grasp. You attack with your evasive Infect creatures, and pump the crap out of them until your opponent is nothing but a disease-ridden corpse. So understanding how the deck works is simple. Superficially, it looks like an aggro/stompy deck, but it very much has combo aspects in the way it operates.

It's a deck that rewards good situational awareness, understanding what the other decks in the format do, and reading whether your opponent might be holding a piece of disruption or removal. Finding just the right time to go for the win is a key element to success. It's the classic "a minute to learn, and a lifetime to master" scenario. It also rewards being able to calculate the math of the cards you have in your hand, and finding lines like Crop Rotating away a land, to load up your Graveyard, to Delve out Become Immense. So player skill is an integral part of winning, and new-to-the-format players will gain a sense of accomplishment as they progress and gain experience.

Infect is one of the decks which isn't going to be particularly hurt by substituting shock lands in place of OG dual lands. You're looking to win with a single attack, by turn 3-4 so the loss of life, where you have to take it, is unlikely to be relevant in most situations. Fetch lands are more relevant than Duals, since you're looking to Delve, and to shuffle unwanted cards away after Brainstorm. While there's some Bant versions, you can build a well-tuned version in GU. So there's some cost savings available in the mana base.

The core of the deck is these two creatures...

... this land...

... and a pile of pump spells. 

Once you get the Glistener Elf, Blighted Agent, and Inkmoth Nexus (around $130 for all of these at the time of writing), you have the functional core of the deck. There are optimal selections of pump spells to use, and an optimal mana base but the deck will run with just about anything that makes your dudes bigger. So it's possible to assemble the core cards, and then still play and get experience with the deck while you work toward optimizing. This will allow you to spread the costs over time.

Most of the actual pump spells you're going to need are commons or uncommons, and fairly inexpensive. Become Immense, Invigorate, and Vines of Vastwood are all under or around $1. Berserk (of which you need only 2 copies) is around $20. You could easily substitute a pair of Rancor to get started. It's not optimal, but it'll get the job done.

Other cost savings can be found in some of the ancillary spells - most notably, Force of Will. While most of the lists I see run a set of four (which jumps the deck cost from the $200 range to well over $600), I honestly feel that Pact of Negation - at 1/10th the price - will serve equally well, since your primary use-case is to protect against disruption on the turn you're trying to win.

Infect is one of those decks like Burn and Merfolk that shares a huge number of cards across Modern and Legacy. So as you build, you'll be building for two formats at once. 

Well, thanks for taking the time to read all this! There's a ton more budget Legacy decks to talk about, so stay tuned.

Have fun, and be kind to one another. 

Typical Deck List

 

Budget Friendly Deck List