Beware, I Live!

Seriously, what's with
this card art? BITE
SOMETHING!

Been a while since I posted here. After I made my last post, I wound up playing a different deck due to missing two of the cards I needed (Vines of Vastwood has mysteriously become difficult to find... fancy that!). Then two FNM's ago, I finally did get to play it, and I guess I just didn't feel like blogging about it. A bit anti-climatic reason wise, but there you go.

While I am going to keep RG Infect and the WWN model in mind for the future, I don't think it's competitively viable in its current form. It's not a bad deck, but it's not consistent enough. Assault Strobe, while good in conjunction with pump spells and Livewire Lash, is kind of dull on its own when most of the creatures have low power. Lightning Bolt is nice, but it falls a bit short of fully justifying the use of red. Splashing black would at least give more consistent forms of creature removal, even if the duel lands are less user friendly.

I still like the concept, though. I'm hoping the next set gives red some better options (if for no other reason than to make red decks that aren't RDW more common), and increases the number of artifact creatures with infect. I'd love to make a viable white infect deck.

Last week, I played black infect, which was more consistent in playability. It had pump spells, discard spells, lots of little critters, and even Skittles! I made the huge mistake, however, of not including Sign in Blood or Mimic Vat. Infect creatures are very prone to removal, especially in a black deck where you're likely pumping power but not toughness. As such, one needs to be ready to replace lost critters faster than they can get taken out, and a lack of card advantage and/or reliable creature spawning meant I couldn't pull that off.

I actually want to retry it with Sign in Blood (Mimic Vat is cool, but I think card advantage would serve me better), but there's a good chance I'm going to bust out knights this week. Or elves. It'll depend on my mood on Friday, I guess, but I've been wanting to make an elf deck since high school and finally have the cards to make a halfway decent one, and people were talking smack about knights prior to the Scars release and I think my old knight deck might be even better post release.

I really wish there was just one more standard tournament each week in my area. There are legacy tournaments I can play in, but legacy frustrates me. Any environment where combos like Sneak Attack + Emrakul are possible is an environment where I'm going to get frustrated even if I win, and that's spoken from experience. In standard, I usually have fun whether I win or lose so long as my deck is actually functional.