Landscape with the Chateau de Marimont by Jan Breughel the Elder (1568-1625). Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon by Chippy.

Welcome to another installment of Commanderruminations' monthly column devoted to finding ways to try to up your win rate. Nothing can replace the fundamentals of good deck design, solid play and a good sense of how to navigate the complexities of a multiplayer EDH game, but every month I try to explore additional ways in which you can try to take your underperforming decks and try to get them to actually win once in a while.

Today I'm going to dive into a keyword that inspires fear and loathing in way too many Commander players: infect.

When a creature takes damage from a creature with infect, the damage is dealt in the form of -1/-1 counters. If that sounds familiar, you might be thinking of another old keyword in wither. The difference between wither and infect is that if a player gets hit by a creature with infect, that player gets poison counters instead of being dealt damage.

If a player gets 10 poison counters, they lose the game.

Why Infect Isn't a Big Deal

If you believe infect is overpowered and shouldn't be allowed in EDH, or at least should have a number higher than 10 to actually kill someone, I've got to tell you that I firmly disagree.

Creatures with infect generally have a lower power, and Commander is the format of big, splashy spells and big, powerful creatures.

Your Cat tribal deck isn't going to become ridiculously overpowered when you throw in a two-power Lost Leonin.

The real danger with infect is when you're faced with a player clever enough to combine things that give infect with methods of dealing out damage to the entire table at once. I've got a Ramos, Dragon Engine deck that aims to make Ramos big enough to kill the table with Phyresis and Chandra's Ignition. Anyone familiar with Nekusar, the Mindrazer knows how bad it can get if their Grafted Exoskeleton hits the field and doesn't get removed quickly. Killing a table is hard, but when you only have to count to 10, it gets much, much easier.

So is infect overpowered?

I still don't think so. It's a powerful tool that you can use to win games, but infect creatures still don't measure up to the kinds of threats you see in Commander. When you compare infect strategies with combo, infect looks even weaker. Most combo decks will win outright but infect often requires you to swing and kill each opponent. Even if you're only counting to 10, you'll still have to deal with removal along with a much bigger problem: table hate.

Players overreact to seeing cards with infect on them.

I'm not even kidding. As soon as a casual player sees a card that will put them on a 10-count and will ignore however much life they gain, they become remarkably good at banding everyone together to kill the infect player first. Experienced players do this too, of course, so the bottom line is that the best way to use infect is to kill the table at once.

Today's list is an attempt to see if we can "play fair" with infect and wind up with a powerful enough deck to actually win games. We won't be killing the table all at once, but for once we should be able to play with those little infect creatures and win or threaten to win games.

A Brokkial Infection

If the problem with infect is that most creatures have only one or 2 power and don't scale well to a multiplayer environment, the perfect solution would be to somehow have a way to make your infect creatures bigger.

This Nightmare Beast Elemental can mutate onto another creature and if Brokkos is on top, that new creature will be a 6/6 with trample and all the abilities of both cards. While there are lots of small infect creatures, there also happen to be lots of evasive infect creatures.

There's only one Blighted Agent, and your opponents will wish they had removal if you manage to mutate Brokkos. There are lots of flying infect threats in Brokkos' colors, from Flesh-Eater Imp and Plague Stinger to Viral Drake and Whispering Specter. If your opponents wipe the board and you've got your Inkmoth Nexus on the field, you can even turn it into a creature, mutate Brokkos onto it and swing for another six poison counters. Casting Brokkos out of the graveyard means that more often you'll get away with recasting him for just 5 mana.

While evasive infect creatures are best, we'll want to run a lot more so that we can maximize our chances of being able to swing early with a 6/6 infect creature that will have trample. Remember that the mutated creature has all the abilities of all the cards involved, so our infect 6/6 will always have trample.

If we're unlucky enough to not hit our Swiftfoot Boots and we're even less lucky and someone Imprisons our Brokkial Monstrosity in the Moon, turns it into a forest or does something else unhelpful, we'll still have a boatload of infect creatures and some ways to proliferate poison counters up to try to get the job done.

Our main plan is going to be to hit with a hefty 6 power infect threat and to eventually kill the table that way, If things go well, we'll leave in our wake a trail of players convinced that infect should probably be at a number higher than 10.

The Decklist

Adding infect to your deck or just building and playing today's list outright is unlikely to launch you to a 10-game winning streak. Infect can be a powerful tool when played correctly, but as I've said, it can be a double-edged sword. You might get a little extra table hate when your opponents figure out you're using infect. I've also never seen a better commander to pair with a deck full of little infect creatures, so I'm optimistic that this deck should win its share of games.

Brokkial Infection | Commander| Stephen Johnson

• Commander (1)
• 1 Brokkos, Apex of Forever

• Creatures (25)
• 1 Amphin Pathmage
• 1 Birds of Paradise
• 1 Blackcleave Goblin
• 1 Blight Mamba
• 1 Blighted Agent
• 1 Caustic Caterpillar
• 1 Consecrated Sphinx
• 1 Contagious Nim
• 1 Cultivator of Blades
• 1 Cystbearer
• 1 Flesh-Eater Imp
• 1 Glistener Elf
• 1 Ichor Rats
• 1 Muldrotha, the Gravetide
• 1 Phyrexian Crusader
• 1 Plague Stinger
• 1 Rot Wolf
• 1 Septic Rats
• 1 Thrummingbird
• 1 Viral Drake
• 1 Whispering Specter
• 1 Wild Beastmaster
• 1 Ichorclaw Myr
• 1 Necropede
• 1 Plague Myr

• Instants (8)
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Cyclonic Rift
• 1 Growth Spiral
• 1 Harrow
• 1 Heroic Intervention
• 1 Naturalize
• 1 Swan Song
• 1 Tainted Strike

• Sorceries (8)
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Demonic Tutor
• 1 Diabolic Tutor
• 1 Farseek
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Planewide Celebration
• 1 Rampant Growth
• 1 Triumph of the Hordes

• Enchantments (5)
• 1 Corrupted Conscience
• 1 Leyline of Anticipation
• 1 Mystic Remora
• 1 Phyresis
• 1 Rhystic Study

• Artifacts (17)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Conqueror's Flail
• 1 Contagion Clasp
• 1 Contagion Engine
• 1 Dimir Signet
• 1 Elbrus, the Binding Blade
• 1 Glaring Spotlight
• 1 Golgari Signet
• 1 Hero's Blade
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Mana Crypt
• 1 Simic Signet
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Swiftfoot Boots
• 1 Trailblazer's Boots
• 1 Vedalken Orrery
• 1 Whispersilk Cloak

• Lands (36)
• 7 Forest
• 7 Island
• 7 Swamp
• 1 Alchemist's Refuge
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Inkmoth Nexus
• 1 Llanowar Wastes
• 1 Morphic Pool
• 1 Opulent Palace
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Temple of Deceit
• 1 Temple of Malady
• 1 Temple of Mystery
• 1 Underground River
• 1 Watery Grave
• 1 Yavimaya Coast

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My mix of staples, mana rocks, equipment, ramp and draw is pretty standard for decks I build. You'll see a few "pet" cards like Elbrus, the Binding Blade alongside Vedalken Orrery and Leyline of Anticipation so you can flash Brokkos back in from the graveyard just before damage is dealt.

A Word of Warning

If this deck performs as well as I'm hoping it will, you might run into another problem. When you're playing Commander with friends, you don't always want to play a deck that will knock a player out early, leaving them with nothing to do but sit around and wait for the game to end so they can jump in on the next one. Infect, like Voltron, can be a powerful way to deal with players who are looking to combo off early, but it can also leave someone on the outside looking in.

I don't know how your meta deals with playing Commander. I don't know if you and your friends have a cutthroat attitude about winning and losing or you're all happier playing a more casual brand of EDH. There's nothing wrong with playing to win and there's nothing wrong with playing "patty-cakes" so long as you're all having fun.

I don't even know if today's list will perform as well as I'm hoping it will, but please make sure you play to the level of your meta. If you do find that your friends weren't prepared for what this (or any) deck brings to a game, do your best to win gracefully. If it turns out that you're the only one having fun, maybe switch decks or let someone else pilot it for a game.

Final Thoughts

I've already started second-guessing my reliance on only one creature with mutate for this particular build, so it's likely my first steps in making a second draft will be to add a few more mutate creatures that can drop down and become legitimate threats right away.

Brokkos gives us access to blue, black and green, so there are five additional creatures with mutate that we could run. Archipelagore is a 7/7 that mutates for 6 mana. There are three 6/6 creatures with mutate: Sawtusk Demolisher, Auspicious Starrix and the ever-playful Otrimi. Mindleecher is a 5/5 that mutates for 4B, and all of these can mutate onto a Blighted Agent and put an opponent on a two-turn clock.

This strategy isn't going to outpace combo, and it probably isn't going to become a top-tier deck because it kills the table one by one, but I think it might be one of the most viable approaches to playing small infect creatures I've come across in a long time. When you absolutely, positively have to kill one player, infect is a pretty solid way to go. From there, winning games isn't always easy, but if you can overcome the table's reaction to you playing infect, I think you should have a decent shot at winning your fair share of games.

That's all I've got for today. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!