[Deck] Pox

[Alfred]

You can run Confidant. You can run Shade. Nobody said you couldn't.

Sure you can run them, but they both suck in this deck. Neither work well with Pox, and Shade is even worse because you don't want to play more than 3 lands! Building around Pox neccesitates using terrible win conditions, or risk making Pox too symmetrical.

The reason people run Cursed Scroll is because in addition to being a kill condition (not to mention if you get 2 of your kill conditions on the board, your doing 4-5 damage a turn to an opponent thats already at 10-13 because you Poxed them) Cursed Scroll also picks off creatures.

Cursed Scroll as a win condition is a peice of garbage. I agree it's great at controlling opponent's creatures, but when you are paying 3 mana and having to play the extra lands that you draw so that you can deal 2 damage to your opponent a turn, it's ass. Especially seeing as it isn't being used as a reach element that is difficult to deal with, like most Sligh decks do, because it is actually one of the main win conditions.

Dark Ritual may be card disadvantage, but its amazing to go 1st turn Swamp, Ritual, Duress, Hymm. That rips your opponents hand down to 4. While you might be at 3 cards, you just fucked Combo completely, or you just ripped valuable card advantage from Threshold. Dark Ritual is a much needed card in order to keep up with the speed of such decks as IGGy pop, Solidarity, and Goblins.

Swamp, Ritual, Duress & Hymn rips YOUR OWN hand down to 4, or even 3 if you are on the play. And in this deck, there are no good creatures that can take advantage of the momentary window that this discard creates. The only good play I can see with Dark Ritual is the fact that it makes Hypnotic Specter come out on the first turn, which is admittedly quite good. Other than that, Dark Ritual accelerates you into a whole lot of nothing at all.

The whole point behind a Pox deck is to recover from Pox faster than your opponent, then deny them the ability to ever recover. Until you do that, I normally wouldn't drop a threat. The only exception to this really is 1st turn Nether Spirit to get around Lacky if you have no other option. Nether Spirit is also the most amazing creature to have with Contamination if you try it. It works really well for me

What I'm saying is that Pox is fundimentally flawed deck. It is totally built around breaking the symmetry of Pox, which forces you to run a completely awful deck. Like, look at the manabase for christ sakes! The deck can't run over 21 lands because it doesn't want to play more than 3. There is no draw engine whatsoever, because aparently having more than 3 cards in your hand is a "bad idea". It runs probably the worst threats in the whole format because you don't want them to die from Pox. It also sucks against aggro because Pox takes away between 5-7 life when you cast it the first time, which means you made their job waaaay easier. It also sucks as removal too, because you are spending 3 mana to (most of the time) kill a single one of their creatures. That simply isn't efficient.

Smallpox is easily way better than Pox because you can put it into a Monoblack control deck, or virtually any control deck that can afford BB and not even think twice about it. Sure it may not be as "powerful", but it doesn't pigeonhole you into playing a suboptimal deck. It also does everything a Control deck would want: It's cheap creature removal, it kills a single land which is usually what Pox does anyway, it doesn't make you discard most of your hand and you lose a much smaller amount of life.


EDIT: If you really want to run a Pox deck, run a Smallpox deck, but build it more like a mono black control deck with a real draw engine, and like 25-26 lands. You can still run the hand disruption and land destruction, but you can also run good win condition, a draw engine and a stable manabase.