New Decks! Red Arti-Sack

My new card desk :)

So I got my box and a few extra packs of New Phyrexia this weekend, time to see what fun decks I can come up with! So far I've got about 4 or 5 new deck ideas that have stacks of cards waiting to be honed into their 60 card line-up. Two have more or less been constructed but still need play-testing to figure out how certain cards actually play out in real gameplay. The second deck I built, which still needs the most work, is a mono-green infect deck that focuses strictly on getting as many cheap infect creatures in play as possible. The key idea here is to have 20 lands, Lead the Stampede and Genesis Wave, and then nothing but infect creatures (8 different play-sets, 32 cards), but more on this in a different post (once I've worked on it a bit more).

Today I am much more excited about a deck I came up with when I started trying to use a combo my brother pointed out to me at one of the pre-release with Immolating Souleater and Assault Strobe. The basic idea here is to play the Souleater on turn 2, and then turn 3 cast Assault Strobe on it (using the remaining one or two mana to buff the Souleater once) and then pay between 14 and 16 life (depending on how much mana you had) to buff the Souleater that much more. Since it has Double Strike it will then deal 20 damage, which is a 3rd turn kill from a two card combo. While this is an amazing combo, it can be rather difficult to ensure that the Souleater will actually hit your opponent safely (no blockers and no creature destruction/burn spells), and since there is obviously a ton of extra room in the deck I had to fill out with ways to deal with my Souleater combo not working.

There are three apparent ways to handle this issue, two making the combo require an extra card, and one just adding more kill conditions. The first improvement can be placed in either of the other two since it doesn't require an extra color and is simple. Here we just add a way to make a creature (or two) unable to block by using Smoldering Spires and/or Panic Spellbomb, either of these can be easily used on third turn to prevent a single creature from blocking the Souleater, and still leaving room for lots of diversity.

Probably the most common way people will use to make this combo better will be to add blue in the deck. Most good players will try to splash blue in almost every deck they make if they can find any excuse at all to do so. The card that will entice everyone will be Distortion Strike, which is already used in blue-black infect, so everyone knows about it. This does not delay the third turn kill, it does require a blue mana and an extra card (but note that it still does not need more than 2 lands). This strategy enables the deck to contain blue control spells and other helpful cards.

The third strategy is what I am going with so far, and that is to add a bunch of artifacts with come into play or goes to graveyard effects and Ferrovore. Now I have a bunch of red/artifact control by using cards like Necropede and Perilous Myr, and card advantage with Ichor Wellspring. I also have a fairly strong secondary kill condition. I decided just having the Ferrovore wasn't enough to guarantee that I would be able to sacrifice artifacts when I needed to, so I added Piston Sledge since it just makes any creature I put it on better and I can always sacrifice it to Ferrovore if I needed to for some reason (if it wasn't equipped and I didn't have any other artifacts in play). Since I have so many artifacts going to the graveyard all the time in longer games I added Slag Fiend as a third kill condition.

I haven't had the chance to play-test my build against an actual deck yet since I've been busy all weekend moving into my new place, but from the solitaire hands I've played out it looks like it is very consistent and always has a lot of card draw and control on the board. I am playing with possibly adding Smoldering Spires and/or Panic Spellbomb to the deck to enhance the possible early game strategy with Souleater, but so far I haven't been able to justify it.