[Deck] Contamination Stax

[Captain Hammer]

Contamination and Ensnaring Bridge or both solid lockdown bombs, and both combo well with small and recurring/recurrable threats like Spirit, Bitterblossom and Factory (with Crucible recursion)

I wanted to build a deck around that synergy.

It quickly became clear that the Stax engine is perfect for that...

Contamination Stax - Alpha Build

4 Crucible of Worlds
4 Contamination
4 Ensnaring Bridge
4 Chalice of the Void
3 Trinisphere
3 Smokestack
2 The Abyss/Nether Void/Meekstone/Tangle Wire/Smother/Edict/Damnation/Phyrexian Totem/Braids

4 Nether Spirit
4 Bitterblossom
4 Mishra's Factory

4 Mox Diamond
3 Ancient Tomb
3 City of Traitors
4 Wasteland
8 Swamp
2 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

The deck is all about internal lockdown combos...

Ensnaring Bridge and Meekstone combo with any of your 12 1-2 powered recurring or evasive threats to let you attack freely but prevent your opponent from attacking.

Contamination combos with any of your 12 recurring threats to lock down your opponent completely.

Crucible combos with Wasteland to rob your opponent of all nonbasics.

Crucible, Bitterblossom and Nether Spirit combo with Smokestack to rob your opponent of all their permanents.

Chalice and Trinisphere are solid lockdown cards entirely on their own.

The sideboard could consist of additional lockdown cards like Chains of Mephistophles, Engineered Plague, Powder Keg, and Leyline of the Void among others.

The deck is still early and needs work, but I think it's off to a fine start.

[rufus]

Ensnaring Bridge and Meekstone are so-so since a decent number of decks can basically ignore them.

You should probably be running 4 Trinispheres, and seriously looking at Nether Void.

An alternative approach might be to run the deck as BR prison deck with Goblin Assault, Magus of the Moon, and SSG.

[Captain Hammer]

Good ideas all of them. The BR idea is interesting.

I do think you're underrating Ensnaring Bridge though. Aside from goblins to some degree, what can ignore Bridge?

Even the scary golbins like Piledriver are screwed over by Bridge.

[scarlet_moon]

Contamination is a bad card on it's on and Magus of the Moon / Blood Moon are lockdown-bombs on it's on.
Also, Contamination only shut down the manaproduce. Player can still use the abilities of lands (while Mooneffects shuts down Wastelands, etc.).
Contamination has no gamebreaking effect against decks with Mox, Aether Vial, big black splash, and so on...

In Imp Stompy i played Contamination a while ago.

//land 19
7 Swamp
4 City of Traitors
4 Ancient Tomb
2 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
2 Tomb of Urami

//creature 19
4 Stinkweed Imp
4 Dusk Urchins
4 Shimian Specter
3 Braids, Cabal Minion
4 Shriekmaw

//enchantment 7
4 Bitterblossom
3 Contamination

//artifact 15
4 Chrome Mox
4 Chalice of the Void
3 Trinisphere
4 Sword of Light and Shadow

SoLaS+creature as a clock and recurring Shriekmaw / Stinkweed Imp for creature-removal, recurring Dusk Urchins for draw. Bitterblossom+Braids/Contamination and Shimian Specter also disrupt permanents and hand/gameplan.

After some tests i removed Contamination, because it's really bad on it's own and can only lock down with Bitterblossom or Imp+other creature in game...
But your deck has more elements of Stax and i am interessted in your first results after playtesting.
Ah, and remove the plains for swamps in your decklist :)
(Edit: Ah, you did ^^)

[rufus]

I do think you're underrating Ensnaring Bridge though. Aside from goblins to some degree, what can ignore Bridge?

Even the scary golbins like Piledriver are screwed over by Bridge.

Until he's attacking, Pilli will have a power of 1.

Some decks that can mostly ignore ensnaring bridge:
Storm combo decks - Tendrils, Brain Freeze, EtW
Belcher
Aluren
Burn
Reanimator/Hulk combo using the Reveillark/Shapeshifter/Fanatic loop
Goblins
Enchantress

[ScatmanX]

Nevertheles, Ensnaring Bridge is good agains´t:

Anything Running Goyf: ThreshThreshThreshThreshThresh, Goyfslith, Agroo Loam...
Anything running Toombstalker: TA, The rock, Deadguy...
Anything running Dreadnoughts: Dreadstill and variants...

[Captain Hammer]

I agree with you that Contamination is poor if you don't have one of the 12 recursive creatures to combo with it. But Bridge is a bomb.

Thanks Scatman, don't forget about Sea Drakes, Mystic Enforcers, Nimble Mongeese, Exalted Angels and all that other nonsense.

Yes rufus, Bridge doesn't stop combo decks or burn.

You have Chalice, Trinisphere, and your whole sideboard agianst those decks.

No one expects Bridge to stop combo or burn. Just like no one expects Moat or Magus of the Tabernacle etc to stop combo or burn.

Bridge stops the majority of the decks in the format, the ones that win by attacking, and that's what matters.

It can stop goblins if you're desperate, just get to top deck mode asap and attack with 1/1 BB flying tokens beore playing out your card each turn.

Or even if you stay at 1 card during your opponents turn, it stops the overwhelming majority of the creatures that goblins plays, while you have Factories and Nether Spirits to pick off their few eligable attackers one by one.

[Paradigm Shift]

4 Chalice
4 Trinisphere
4 Crucible
4 Bitterblossom
3 Night's Whisper
3 Ensnaring Bridge
2 Terminate
2 Smokestack
1 Blood Moon

4 Magus of the Moon
4 Nether Shadow

4 Mishra's Factory
4 Wasteland
4 City of Traitors
2 Ancient Tomb
4 Bloodstained Mire
2 Badlands
2 Urborg
4 Swamp
1 Mountain

Sideboard:
4 Red Blast
1 Ensnaring Bridge
1/2 Blood Moon
Combo/Burn hate et al (Bottle Gnomes? :P)

I just wrote this up to spark ideas for a BR build of the deck. BR gives us terminate, and could potentially give us Void, though that card seems bad in Legacy, but who knows.

Geddon Stax has always been looking for some good card draw, and this black/red Prison deck gets that in the form of Night's Whisper. Obviously this has some anti-synergy with Ensnaring Bridge, but I feel it's probably going to end up being worth it, or perhaps Bridge should be cut entirely.

Obviously all numbers can and should be tuned, and cards could definitely be cut, but this seems like a good basis overall for a black/red prison deck.

P.S. Nether Shadow seems weak in a two-color build, especially with Magus.

[scarlet_moon]

An alternative solution to the problematic of aggro-decks could be this creature:

Bane of the Living
Creature - Insect 4/3, 2BB (4)
Morph {X}{B}{B}
When Bane of the Living is turned face up, all creatures get -X/-X until end of turn.

Advantages when compared to Bridge:
- It's faster against mass token (stormbased decks)
- You can play more draw (example: Dusk Urchins, Graveborn Muse, Phyrexian Arena)
- possible use as clock

[ssilver]

NECRO!

With the release of Zendikar, so far one new card could possibly make the contamination lock good enough to be played.

Bloodghast BB

Creature - Vampire Spirit Rare

Bloodghast can't block.

Bloodghast has haste as long as an opponent has 10 life or less.

Landfall - Whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, you may return Bloodghast from your graveyard to the battlefield.

2/1


Pros: This card can be played with Nether Spirit.

Cons: Can't block goyf :(

Needs a discard outlet to be good (same thing as nether spirit really)

Any good cards to discard this guy with? Maybe something that could fit in with the Bridge theme...

[edgewalker]

You don't really need to discard him since BB isn't hard to cast. I never understood why people insist on discarding this and cards like nether spirit. Instead of playing silly discard antics you could always just hard cast these two guys.

[Mystical_Jackass]

Yea, but you gain big virtual CA discarding cards like these through POX, and because of his ability he isn't entirely useful early game either way.

The way I think about it, the cards pretty much say "if you can get this card in your graveyard, you may play it for free". So hardcasting is deffinitely viable but not the most mana efficient or effective, in the sense that one of the cards is a poor attacker and the other one plain cant block anyways lol

And yes, BB sometimes is harder to cast than you think running a lot of colorless accel.. in my MBC deck (similar to this) I got caught up a few times with Ancient tombs, factories, and phyrexian totem out and stuck with a nether spirit, dystopia, and Damnation in my hand as I get raypd @.@ I was pissed as I slowly got killed; this doesn't always happen but still it can

[Signatus]

but then you have to run pox and stuff like that, which might not be helpful given your deck's overall strategy. see what he meant? to get discard you have to deviate from your objectives and ultimately run a sub-par deck. and anyway, bloodghast's ability only works when the opponent has 10 life or less.