Infectwire loses the wire

It's been almost a week since I last updated you on my Green/Blue Infect build. I've made several more changes, and the new version of the deck is playing very well online and in testing. I recently won a T2 tournament on Magic-League with it.

Alright, first lets start with the list:

Deck
Land - 24 4 Inkmoth Nexus 4 Misty Rainforest 2 Halimar Depths 5 Island  9 Forest Creatures - 10 4 Glistener Elf 4 Blighted Agent 2 Viral Drake Spells - 20 2 Tezzeret's Gambit 4 Mutagenic Growth 4 Groundswell 4 Vines of Vastwood 2 Distortion Strike 2 Dismember 2 Beast Within	Planeswalkers - 2 2 Garruk Wildspeaker Artifacts - 4 2 Contagion Clasp 2 Piston Sledge	Sideboard 2 Dismember 2 Beast Within 4 Nature's Claim 3 Twisted Image 4 Apostle's Blessing

The first thing you'll notice is that the deck no longer runs Livewire Lash. So, sadly, I've had to drop the Infectwire name.

The second thing you should notice is that I'm running Garruk Wildspeaker instead.

Garruk does 2 important things. First, he acts as a damage magnet. People are scared of him when you're running infect, and will direct damage at him that would otherwise come at you. Secondly, if you get off his ultimate, it's pretty much a guaranteed win.

The other change is that I am now running Piston Sledge instead of Livewire Lash. Essentially, Piston Sledge gets onto a creature on the same turn that Livewire would get onto a creature, turn 3. A lot of people are concerned that you'll get 2-for-1'd by Piston Sledge, to those people I say you don't know how to run the deck. We have 8 protection spells between main and sideboard, and that is often more than the number of creature removal spells that any decks run.

There are two decks that run enough creature removal to make this not work well. Vampires and K-Red. These are easily the toughest matches for us. A deck that removes the first few creatures on our board is a nightmare, as it will usually take us a while to find another. This means that you will often want to leave mana open if you're holding a pump spell that will save you.

Public Enemy #1

The hardest part of playing this deck is working with the sideboard. There is almost never anything that you want to take out of the mainboard in order to side in answers. That is really where the experience of playing with this deck comes in. Anyone can play an infect deck with pump and ride that to some turn 3 blowouts, but you really need to understand the interactions in the deck to be able to sideboard correctly.

I've been playing this deck for a long time now, and I can say that I still don't know exactly what to sideboard half the time. Typically you need to look at what in the deck you would have hated to draw. For example, if you're playing against a deck that has a bunch of walls, Contagion Clasp isn't that great. Twisted Image is amazing against walls, it kills one off and draws you a card.

Finally, don't be afraid to side out some of the pump in order to fit in Apostle's Blessing. It doesn't give your guys a power boost, but it keeps them around long enough to swing a second and third time, which is often more important.

Here is the link to the tournament results if you're interested!
http://www.magic-league.com/tournament/info.php?id=70971&view=decks

Thanks for reading, see you next time!