Infectwire

So I've been playing an infect deck at my local FNM for the past few months to great success, find the current deck list after the jump.



24 Lands
8 Island
8 Forest
4 Inkmoth Nexus
4 Misty Rainforest

20 Creatures
4 Necropede
4 Plague Myr
4 Core Prowler
4 Viridian Corrupter
3 Putrefax
1 Phyrexian Hydra

16 Other Spells
4 Livewire Lash
4 Preordain
4 Distortion Strike
4 Prey's Vengeance


The general idea of the deck is get out an infect creature, put Livewire Lash on them, and then bounce Distortion Strike off them, which is 12 poison over 2 turns thanks to the Livewire Lash triggers and the rebound on Distortion Strike.



The deck works excellent when you get out a Livewire Lash. However, without the lash, you are basically just a slow infect deck with only 4 pump spells and 4 evasion spells. Not a terrible strategy, but also not a very winning one.


With this deck I've slipped into the top 4 three times out of 4 FNM tournaments (4-0 record). Not a large sample size, but not insignificant. Note that at my local shop there are 3 people that play Caw-Blade, a couple Boros players, and a ton of RDW and Goblins decks. YMMV depending on your local meta.


The one time that I got blown out of top 4 I lost to a Boros deck in the first round. Terrible draws from my deck (3 livewire lashes in a row with no creatures left alive) pretty much sealed my own fate. I went on to win the next 3 rounds, but didn't make the cut to top 4.




Looking forward to New Phyrexia, there are a bunch of great cards that can be swapped into the deck.
In green we get:
Glistener Elf - The much needed 1 drop
Mutagenic Growth - A "free" pump spell
Phyrexian Swarmlord - Clutters up the battlefield in the late game
Spinebiter - Perfect trample
and
Viridian Betrayers - Huge power with a small drawback and low toughness

Meanwhile Blue gets:
Bighted Agent - Perfect evasion
Chained Throatseeker - Huge creature with a small drawback
Viral Drake - Flying infector that is also a proliferate engine


I've already composed my post-NPH FNM build, but I'm not going to post it quite yet... I'd like to see what other infect builds come from the new set, but it seems like all that anyone is talking about currently is the Splinter Twin and Deceiver Exarch combo. I truly hope that this little 2 card combo does not become the standard-defining build for the next 6 months. I don't think I could take that after the past 4 months of Caw-Blade shenanigans.


-D