Standard Spike: UB Infect

Posted on April 22, 2011 by _ShipItHolla

You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “Standard Spike: UB Infect”.

 

  1. You’re one of the few players (along with lsv and a couple others) who consistently impresses me and stays at the top of the game, keep it up!

  2. could you explain to me 1 treasure mage? do you really need an extra body that much? great videos love them, disagree with many of your card choices though :p each to his own.

  3. I was just looking at and thinking about the new blue infect creature right before seeing this and I guess you could make a blue black infect deck. Overall I like your deck and hope you play it some more when NPH is released online. Also it it just you or your program your using that makes you sound so quiet? I’m tried of getting scared the heck out of when something happens on my PC cause I got the sound up so loud.

  4. Why in the world are you playing 2 Evolving Wilds? Creeping Tar Pit is going to be better if you want a CIPT Blue or Black land, and if you just want to fetch, play like one Verdant Catacomb and one Scalding Tarn, although with only 2 Jace fetches seem pretty bad.

    I’m also not sure I get the one Treasure Mage target. Obviously you don’t want to load your deck with six drops, but having only one target, it will be a vanilla bear half the time. Why not also include a Contagion Engine? Your deck can really use that effect, it is good in the aggro matchups you would board it in for, and it gives you two quality targets.

    I would also add a few lands to this deck – you mention losing to flooding, but you have four lands that are infectors, and you can always proliferate with extra mana. Running more lands also compliments a “get big” board plan that is good vs a lot of decks, and let’s you at least “threaten” Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon, although I assume you aren’t playing him for a reason.

    I’d like to see a competitive Jund build, I’m curious how they stack up in this environment. With the drop off of Valakut, I think a midrangey or slightly bigger jund type deck could be competitive.

    Seems like this is a decent starting point (I haven’t tested it, pulled it from a daily)

    Creatures [13]
    1 Acidic Slime
    2 Grave Titan
    2 Inferno Titan
    4 Lotus Cobra
    1 Oracle of Mul Daya
    2 Precursor Golem
    1 Wurmcoil Engine
    Planeswalkers [6]
    1 Chandra Nalaar
    2 Garruk Wildspeaker
    1 Liliana Vess
    2 Sarkhan the Mad
    Spells [15]
    4 Explore
    2 Go for the Throat
    3 Inquisition of Kozilek
    4 Lightning Bolt
    1 Red Sun’s Zenith
    1 Slagstorm
    Lands [26]
    3 Blackcleave Cliffs
    4 Copperline Gorge
    1 Dragonskull Summit
    3 Forest
    1 Lavaclaw Reaches
    2 Mountain
    4 Raging Ravine
    1 Scalding Tarn
    3 Swamp
    4 Verdant Catacombs

  5. r1g3 you could just play magnet, tumble magnet his magnet, then activate nexus and make it a 5/5, he cant tap it.

  6. Great videos as always.

    I’l put in a vote for a grixis planeswalker deck, something like this:

    Creatures (9)
    2 Wurmcoil Engine
    1 Inferno Titan
    2 Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon
    4 Phyrexian Crusader
    Spells (27)
    4 Inquisition of Kozilek
    4 Galvanic Blast
    4 Everflowing Chalice
    4 Sphere of the Suns
    4 Tumble Magnet
    4 Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas
    3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
    Land (24)
    2 Mountain
    4 Creeping Tar Pit
    4 Darkslick Shores
    4 Scalding Tarn
    4 Blackcleave Cliffs
    3 Inkmoth Nexus
    2 Island
    1 Lavaclaw Reaches
    Sideboard (15)
    3 Mana Leak
    2 Slagstorm
    3 Memoricide
    2 Pyroclasm
    2 Go for the Throat
    3 Crush

  7. Good videos, shame that we only really saw how the deck plays against cawblade, would be good to see it against another deck

  8. Another 32 Jace T8 at SCG.

    Frankly, I think we might as well give up on standard until mystic or jace is banned.

  9. In that third match against Caw Go, you should have pretty much ignored Jace and hit him up to 6 poison counters. At that point, with two Clasp, you can pretty much sit back on Mana Leak and kill him with Proliferate in a few turns, with him also having to play around Inkmoth and/or Tezzeret the entire time. Instead, you gave him a ton of time to draw Planeswalkers and blow you out with Spell Pierce.

    Otherwise, I love this deck and thanks for playing and making the videos. I definitely think Tezzeret is bad here, though, compared to Skithiryx. His +1 ability basically always moves things you want to draw to the bottom and instead gives you either nothing or things you don’t really want to draw (tiny creatures only good in the early game, Magnets, Clasps). I get that he’s a good answer to Jace, but you can also just run a bunch more Beleren than Kibler did if that’s a huge problem.

    I blogged about this rather extensively, but Tezzeret is a trap unless you’re playing him in some heavily artifact-based decks where your *trump* cards are +1′able.

    My two cents :-)

  10. Making a Nexus a 5/5 Infecting Flyer is a good idea though, that’s a 2-hit kill that needs your opponent to deal with it on their turn.

  11. @Hades: I mentioned in the vid that Treasure Mage used to be a 2nd copy of Wurmcoil, but I changed it because I didn’t want to be stuck with multiple Wurmcoils in hand. One copy should be enough to handle most games, and having the 2/2 body isn’t irrelevant. If you ever plan on beating Luminarch Ascension, then the 2/2 matters even more.

    @Neros: There’s not much from NPH that’s got me excited about this deck. I don’t think it got the tools it needed.

    @drn: I was trying to make Drowned Catacombs better because they were coming into play tapped too often. In the end, I settled on bringing back Tar Pits because the deck does need access to both colors and because the deck needs those answers to Jace. Treasure Mage will only be a vanilla creature the times when you already have the Wurmcoil, in which case it hopefully won’t matter that it’s not getting soemthing like a Contagion Engine. If I didn’t want to avoid adding more 6-drops, that and Mindslaver would both be options, but I just figure that Wurmcoil can clean up games well enough.

    The Jund list looks very similar to RUG, but instead of Jace you have 6 other (seemingly random) Planeswalkers. I would probably go with either BUG or RUG before Jund, speaking competitively of course.

    @durdle: You probably have a good point, but I checked r1g3 and even r3g1 and didn’t see the play in question.

    @Joshua: I like the idea, but that list looks a bit too similar to the UB Infect list, albeit a bit greedier. I will probably do a vid with a couple decks that are supposed to be good against CawBlade to display how good they are.

    @Justin D-Z: I think you’re right about the way I played in that match. I could have gained inevitability and put him under immediate pressure.

    As for as Tez vs. Skithiryx, I think Tez is much better. Skithryx costs 6, Tez costs 4. One is just a 4/4 beater, one is a card advantage engine or a 5/5 beater that sticks around to do more. And Tez with Inkmoth is Skithiryx!

    With that being said, the deck is a few artifacts short of making Tez optimal. NPH wasn’t as good for the deck as I would’ve liked, but it did at least give it one artifact to make use of, Phyrexian Metamorph. I think two copies of that should make Tez work.

  12. i think durdle means match 2 minute 22… the play durdle described was the best play imo

  13. Yes, the jund list is definitely janky, however it was the only deck I found in those colors that went 4-0. I can only assume Sarkhan, Chandra and Liliana were chosen due to their 5 cmc and the 4 lotus cobras.

    I would probably cut Chandra, and I think Sarkhan is there because the list was modified from one that played Abyssal Persecutor? He seems decent in a deck that can get him out T3 consistently with explore and cobra. Maybe -1 Chandra, -1 Slime – 1 Red Sun’s Zenith (WTF?) And just add 3 Persecutors.

    I just figured out would be something different without blue – I’m planning on playing Jace through rotation.

  14. It seemed like there were several mistakes made in the UW match. For instance, G1 when you played the Tezzeret on turn 3, why didn’t you turn the Plague Myr in to a 5/5? You would be able to untap in to activating Nexus, turning it into a 5/5 as well, playing the Clasp to put him at 5 poison and dead without a DoJ, and relatively dead with a DoJ.

    In game 3 around the 36 minute mark your opponent also makes a pretty big error. You have one untapped Magnet, one untapped land, and an untapped Crusader. All he has to do is bounce the Crusader with the Jace (the brainstorm was pretty bad there), tap your Magnet prior to slamming the Sword on Mystic, and then subsequently play 2 more Hawks to keep your Nexus at bay. Instead he does… nothing?