[Deck] Pox

[jebus]

I actually went and tested the Factory build [albeit just in MWS, which is pretty much a shuffling worst-case scenario], and the mana seems to be hulding up well so I guess that's no point of contention after all.

It seems it's really down to just personal preference [maybe even meta considerations, ie heavy nonbasic hate] as to what build to go with. The point made earlier about being able to fit in more disruption when running Factories is actually negated by the fact that you also have to run Crucible while Idol builds don't. In the end, the same 18-22 slots of disruption are available for either build, comprised of a mix of 4 Duress + 4 Hymn + 4 Sinkhole, mixed with about 3-4 Smallpox, 2-4 Pox, and maybe Funeral Charm.

Has anyone actually tested going without Pox in the maindeck? I think Aggro zombies mentioned something along those lines before, when he attempted to make a primer several pages back. Has this been discussed? Yes, I know the effect is too big and evil to cut [heck, I was the guy who once said that 4 Pox was best], but perhaps this should be given at least token consideration.

[Bane of the Living]

Has anyone actually tested going without Pox in the maindeck?

Yes, everyone playing Deadguy and Red Death. Apparently its going well but you need a color splash to make up for the lack of devestation.

[Clark Kant]

Lol, the entire reason for the creature/threat base we run, the entire reason we run Crucible, Innocent Blood and pretty much half our deck, is to abuse Pox and Smallpox.

Now why would we go and cut out 50% of what makes this deck what it is? If we cut Pox, we might as well replace our threats with Hypnotic Specter and Phyrexian Negator. And we would need to splash red to replace the removal/damage roles pox plays, and we still wouldn't be as effective at mana screwing our opponents.

Just as an update, here's my most current list, it's very close to the deck in the opening post, but with a couple of tweaks...

Variant One

4 Swamp
4 Snow Covered Swamp
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Tomb of Yawgmoth

2 Cabal Pit
2 Funeral Charm
2 Duress
4 Hymn to Tourach

4 Wasteland
4 Sinkhole
4 Smallpox
4 Pox

3 Innocent Blood
3 Sensei's Divining Top

3 Crucible of Worlds
3 Nether Spirit
3 Phyrexian Totem
3 Mishra’s Factory

Sideboard (Meta Dependent):
2 Duress/Pithing Needle
3 Expirate/Cabal Therapy
3 Null Rod/Powder Keg
3 Infest
4 Engineered Plague

Mana: 25 (28 Including Totems)
Land Destruction: 16
Discard: 16
Creature Kill: 15
Threats: 9 (6 Recur)
Card Quality: 6 (Crucible, Top)

I'm still not sure where I fall in the whole Duress versus Funeral Charm versus Innocent Blood debate. I think I'm leaning slightly more towards Duress and Innocent Blood so I will likely switch it up to 4 Innocent Blood, 3 Duress, 0 Funeral Charm within the next few days.

I'm still not sure where I fall in the whole Duress versus Funeral Charm versus Innocent Blood debate. I think I'm leaning slightly more towards Duress and Innocent Blood so I will likely switch it up to 4 Innocent Blood, 3 Duress, 0 Funeral Charm within the next few days. Also I may either switch down to 2 Top or add 2 Fetchland.

[Bane of the Living]

I'm still not sure where I fall in the whole Duress versus Funeral Charm versus Innocent Blood debate. I think I'm leaning slightly more towards Duress and Innocent Blood so I will likely switch it up to 4 Innocent Blood, 3 Duress, 0 Funeral Charm within the next few days.

Heres where I stand amoung the three options. Innocent Blood is blacks StP, would you play 3 StP in thresh? Its a lackey answer and kills Trolls and Mongoose. Its a keeper.

Duress is amazing but not against zoo and gobs. If gobs is all over your meta dont play 4. I wouldnt recommend playing none in the maindeck.

Funeral Charm is flexible which is why its appealing. The ability to stop lackey is good and all but thats almost as far as it goes. Choice discard just plain sucks. You dont want people discarding Rootwallas, Flash of Insight, Akroma, Life from the Loam, ect. Choice discard just plain blows..

I play 4 Blood 4 Duress and sometimes move 1-2 duress to the sb.

[Clark Kant]

Good input. I agree with you, which is precisely why I decided to switch over to 4 Blood, 3 Duress, 0 Charm.

I think the maindeck is tuned enough now, aside from the number of fetchlands and divining top issue, to focus almost entirely on the sideboard.

Here's cureently what I'm running...

Sideboard:
1 Duress
1 Pithing Needle
3 Expirate
3 Null Rod
3 Infest
4 Engineered Plague

Powder Keg, Cabal Therapy, and Duress if you're not running 4 in the maindeck are also good options.

The reason I cut back to 1 Pithing Needle is because I have Null Rod to do most everything Needle used to do, and the meta generally seems to have adjusted to it a bit. Decks like Survival that were very vulnerable to it and uneffected by Null Rod are almost nonexistant now and both Landstill and Train Wreck seem to have died down too. Yes it stops Vial and artifact mana, but so does null rod. And null rod is much better against combo.

Expirate is a card that's almost a must have against Life of the Loam and decent against combo of all sorts.

The others need no explanation.

[jebus]

Haha I was just asking. I think it was brought up before, just didn't know what happened to it. You guys pretty much confirmed what I thought of the idea in the first place.

@ Kant:
I'd go with 4 Blood and 3 Duress, or you could also try running 4 Duress and put the 4th Pox in the sideboard.

Speaking of the sideboard, a 1-of Needle in the side would be next to useless. I would make it Infest [or Extirpate] #4. And how does Extirpate compare to Leyline? I haven't had any real time to test it, and I'm not willing to shell out the cash for it yet. Also, isn't Null Rod messing with your Totems and SDTs?

I like how the maindeck looks with 4 Blood and 3 Duress, though. Just about everything that needs to be there is there, and in the right amount. Nice job.

[Clark Kant]

Thank you very much for the kind words and solid input.

This deck has very few bad matchups, so I had no problem devoting lots of sideboard slots to those few matchups.

I mainly brought in Null Rod in place of some Pithing Needles very recently because I was getting sick of tendrils combo killing me most of the games especially if I can't get an early Hymn/Duress off (yes I always did side in a playset of Duress postboard). I tried siding Cabal Therapy as well but it's not nearly as good against combo decks that win on turns three or four most of the time since you will have the resources to flash it back by then. And unlike Solidarity, Iggy Pop and such aren't effected anywhere near as much by land destruction.

Null Rod was the only solution I could think of that seemed to work really well and proved to be far better than Pithing Needle against Tendrils combo by shutting out such a massive chunk of their manabase. And if I draw and cast it, the deck rarely loses, making the card worth it even if it forces me to sideout good cards. And I hadn't run into any better options.

It actually wasn't until you just posted that the thought of running Leylines to slightly weaken tendrils variants and hate on Loam decks and Thresh (was already a fantastic matchup) in one fell swoop occured to me!! So thank you for that. I was aware of the card but I guess just had a brain fart and overlooked that it does deter Iggy Pop a bit too. It should atleast let me cut some Null Rods. That actually sounds like the best way to go forward.

So I think it's safe to say you can ignore my sideboard as it's about to be completely overhauled.

[jebus]

No problem. 4 Leylines have always been a staple in my sideboard, even though my maindeck has been constantly in flux.

I'm currently working on the Idol build:

4 Dark Ritual
15 Swamp
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wasteland

4 Chimeric Idol
2 Phyrexian Totem
2 Nether Spirit

3 Sensei's Divining Top

3 Pox
4 Smallpox
4 Sinkhole
4 Hymn to Tourach
3 Duress
4 Innocent Blood

SB:
1 Duress
4 Infest
3 Powder Keg
3 Pithing Needle
4 Leyline of the Void

Having just 8 threats hasn't really been much of a problem [although I have now gone back to 2 Spirits in the deck after much deliberation], unlike my experience with the Factory build. What I'm now testing is if the deck can work with just 2 SDT [maybe the 3rd in the side? Although that seems a bit off], so I could squeeze the 4th Duress in. I'm also trying out
-1 Infest
-3 Keg/Needle
+4 Plague
in the side.

[Androstanolone]

I'm glad to see at least a few people cutting rituals and discovering that the deck does fine without them.

Gerrard's verdict is fairly strong, but vindicate is slow and clunky. White isn't worth splashing for in pox, only in B/W confidant/jotun grunt.

After lots of testing I cut the crucibles again. I tried totem a little and was dissapointed. The strength of spirit/idol still shines. My landbase is 18 swamp, 4 wasteland, 2 tabernacle. The tabernacles have been pretty awesome, especially when they lackey out SGC and I drop tabernacle next turn... Puts the smack-down on the goblin god draw. Not to mention that tabernacle is easily accompanied by a crushing sinkhole/wasteland/smallpox. Tabernacle has a great deal of synergy and is a good colorless land to run now that we have Urborg. Of course, if you're running a crucible version you probably want to use your colorless lands on factories.

If your meta is full of creatures you probably move duresses to the board. I always run duress alongside charm/blood. Solidarity is relatively popular so I use funeral charm. For my purposes funeral charm is superior because it has an effect on solidarity and goblins at the same time. When I play madness I usually wait for the best time to play charm, so it usually nets me a positive effect. But again, by all means, if your meta is full of creatures and low on solidarity/combo in general then run innocent blood. Along with all the other hate in pox, innocent blood just makes aggro decks cry. While funeral charm just makes them annoyed.

I can't foresee a meta where I wouldn't have powder keg in the maindeck. Pox can't deal with artifacts at all, especially artifact mana is trouble. Keg just fills the role as best it can be filled in mono B, straight up hands down. Besides that, it's another elimination spell. Save totem/idol from needle, take out a couple weenies, blast 3/4 of affinity's lands. I was playing against a scrubby deck the other day and ramped my keg up to 5 when he dropped Spirit of the Night (game went long). Killed it dead. The same day I killed a fledgeling dragon with keg in a long game against thresh after my other removal had run dry. I say run some, it's good for you.

I would say more but I need to run right now. Lots of great discussion going on, keep it coming, the decks are looking more and more tuned :).

[Clark Kant]

jebus, yeah, I definately recommend 4 Plagues in the board. Also, since you've been running Leylines for a while, how good have they been against Iggy Pop? Also what do you think I should do about top. Do you think I should stick with 3 Top and go up to 6 Fetchland, or should I go down to 2 Top or should I just keep things as they are? Top has been really good to me in tons of matchups that I really don't like the idea of cutting Top.

Andro, I think you were right about Dark Ritual, the deck can do fine without it and I've been loving Top.

You mentioned 24 Land (only 22 of which tap for mana) and 0 Tomb of Yawgmoth. Don't you get mana screwed pretty often? I would atleast cut 2 Swamp and add 3 Tomb of Yawgmoth

I was playing against a scrubby deck the other day and ramped my keg up to 5 when he dropped Spirit of the Night (game went long). Killed it dead.

Umm... you sure you're using keg correctly. Keg needs to ramp up to 9 to be able to kill SotN. And if your opponents are casting Spirit of the Nights and Fledging Dragons when they know you already have a keg with enough counters to blow them up in play instead of tempting the Keg activation with other creatures first, they are either really bad players, or had something even nastier in their hand that they didn't want Keg to blow up (doubtful). But it's not important.

Your build is very different from mine. I can see Keg being neccesary in your build as extra creature kill where I can make due with just boarding in Infests and Plagues for a couple of reasons...

I'm running Innocent Blood where you're running Funeral Charm

I'm running 3 Nether Spirit, the 0cc recurring chump blocker that also kills 2/2s dead and just won't go away but have poor synergy with Tabernacle. Factories have the potential to do the same thing but as 3/3s esp. when I have a Crucible in play.

And yes Keg kills lots of nasty artifacts too which makes it very good versus goblins, affinity and Chrome Moxes. It really doesn't do that much to combo though since most of their artifact mana is one time use.

I tried the card for a short time and wound up cutting it for Top because it didn't do much for me and was kind of slow and let my opponents play around it and occasionally forced me to blow up my own Crucibles and Totems for it to take out anything. Top has since won me loads of games.

But the card is versatile enough and you were right about Ritual so I may switch up to...
-1 Duress
-1 Swamp/Totem
-1 Top Maybe
+2/3 Keg

If not, I'll make room in my sideboard for it.

[Androstanolone]

Hey guys, I made my last post in a bit of a rush and made a few mistakes:

It was Nightmare, not Spirit of the night, sorry about that. Nightmare costs 6, I had keg sitting at 5 because the highest CC I'd seen so far had been 5. The turn after he played nightmare I upped it to 6 and killed it.

I forgot to mention that I am, indeed, running 4 tomb of yawgmoth. So it's 14 swamp, 4 tomb, 4 wasteland, and 2 tabernacle. That was a mistake. This has worked very well with 16 consistent sources of black and often 24 (20 on average? haha yay meaningless statistics).

Thanks for the feedback Clark. You make several good points. A good opponent can play around keg. But, the beauty of keg in this deck is that, because of all the other removal, it often ends up being a moot point. What I mean is that you end up killing everything anyway, so it doesn't matter if keg hits their werebear early and you smallpox fledgeling later or you just happen to keg a fledgeling mid-game and smallpox a topdecked werebear later. It is important to note that keg is dead against combo, but I accept this because of its wide versatility otherwise. Innocent blood is also dead against combo but doesn't share the versatility of keg. Blood can have a potentially powerful effect on the board against thresh/madness whereas keg is more likely to take out the lowest threat. You are also right that keg is slow, but this deck is slow. You can stall for the 1 or 2 turns you need to use it. It is highly versatile, solves some nasty situations (vial, artifact mana), and is always worth some maindeck slots imo. If you'll try some kegs I'll try some tops, fair deal? Here's my build then:

4x nether spirit

4x chimeric idol
3x powder keg
2x sensei's divining top

3x Pox
4x smallpox
4x hymn
4x sinkhole
4x duress

4x funeral charm

10x swamp
4x bloodstained mire
4x urborg
4x wasteland
2x tabernacle

sb is usually leylines, ankh of mishra, E. plague, and something else. Varies between spinning darkness, infest, or some kind of utility.


I run 4x nether spirit, they're all-stars. But sometimes I don't get nether spirit, in those times I'd hate to have phyrexian totem as my "blocker". So I stick with chimeric idol and, as a corollary, 0-1 mishra's factory.

[jebus]

@Androstanolone:
I'd love to run just Spirits and Idols, but I keep drawing multiples of Spirit in an inordinate amount of games [and often against the wrong matchups, ie decks with no STP]. It's crazy, really. I have no idea if I'm just shuffling wrong or what, but for some unknown and probably irrational reason I have just rotten luck with the damn thing. That's why I've dropped them down to 2, and had it at 1 for a while - and I still consistently draw them.

With Ritual, I've found it good in the Idol/Tempo build [can we come up with better names for the two main builds already?], but is better off being cut in the Factory/Pseudo-Control build. As for Keg, as Bane already said some pages back, it's versatile and has wrecking ball potential but is much too slow. I once had it main, but have since moved it to the board.

EDIT: However, I haven't tested cutting Rituals for Kegs in the Idol build yet. I'll try it out over the next week or so. And I'd love to run Tabernacles if I had any.

@Kant:
Leyline has the potential to piss an Iggy player off [especially the net deck-ing ones] - no one likes their own tech smacked in their face, right? And I can't really think of a better option for this deck to bring in against Iggy than Leyline anyway [Null Rod hurts too much with Idols, Needle does next to nothing, Therapy is good but ultimately redundant], so it's a keeper.

I'm still testing running just 4 Fetch + 2 SDT, and it's been fine. It's basically the deck above -1 SDT +1 Duress. It's been doing surprisingly well so far, with SDT often going online right after that first wave of disruption, just as it's supposed to. Then again, with 3 SDT main I keep drawing multiples, so it may be the Spirit thing at work again. As it stands, though, 4-5 Fetch + 2-3 SDT seems like the right mix. I wouldn't go over 5 Fetches maindeck, with 4 probably being the right number, as the damage does tend to add up.

[Androstanolone]

I just call them Pox and Crucipox. But the crucible players might take offense to that because they consider crucible a "natural addition" to old pox decks. Meaning their deck deserves the moniker "Pox" because it's just a natural upgrade. Crucible is, however, a defining feature and a great way to distinguish between versions. There are pox decks with crucible and there are those without.

I think cutting rituals for kegs would be an excellent move.

In probably hundreds of games I've been running 4x spirits I think the drawback has come up twice. I don't know why you're having so many issues, I assume you pile shuffle. I also assume you don't have old sticky sleeves that would cause 2 spirits that happen to be together to cling to each other indefinitely.

[jebus]

I use ancient black sleeves, if that matters. And I've tried different ways of shuffling, and I always make sure the Spirits are separated before I do shuffle, and they still come up a lot. It even happens on MWS. Anyway, when I post a list, just assume that there should be more Spirits than I actually run. I would love to run 5-6 Idols, though

Pox and CruciPox, yeah that makes sense.

[Clark Kant]

Andro, there's no way that out of a 100 games, you only ran into the two Spirit problem twice. That said, it's not a big enough problem or a bad enough drawback to not run atleast 3 copies of such an exceptional card.

Jebus, IMHO you can safely afford to run 3 Spirit even in some crazy meta where StP isn't the single most common removal spell you run into. One cluster of bad games with 3 Spirit doesn't really mean that much, it'll average out in the end.

Sadly, I won't get to do much testing till next weekend I don't think. And I simply couldn't figure on what to cut for Keg, so next weekend, I'll be running the build below, but am starting all of my games cutting any combination of three cards from below for Keg, just to test how it fares in different slots....

1 Polluted Delta
1 Duress
1 Innocent Blood
1 Sensei's Divining Top
1 Phyrexian Totem

Most Current Decklist:

6 Swamp
4 Wasteland
4 Tomb of Yawgmoth
3 Mishra’s Factory
3 Bloodstained Mire
3 Polluted Delta
2 Cabal Pit

3 Duress
4 Hymn to Tourach

4 Innocent Blood
4 Sinkhole
4 Smallpox
4 Pox

3 Sensei's Divining Top
3 Crucible of Worlds
3 Nether Spirit
3 Phyrexian Totem

Sideboard:
3 Powder Keg
4 Engineered Plague
4 Infest
4 Leyline of the Void

[Androstanolone]

I am not lying. There are plenty of times I drew 2 or 3 spirits. Only 2 of those times did 2 spirits actually end up in my graveyard.

Good luck with your new build.

[Clark Kant]

Nm, I misinterpreted what you said.

Yeah, my ratio is pretty much the same as yours.

Of course there were a good bit more games where I wound up having to discard stuff I wanted to keep to Pox and Smallpox just to keep the 2 Spirit thing from happening (probably 12% of games), and plenty more where my opponent StPing my Spirit was a huge help and let me smallpox without having to discard something I wanted over the Spirit in my hand.

All this and I never went above 3 Spirits. In spite of all this, Spirit is such as exceptional card, I mean it's a 0cc infinately recurring chump blocker + win condition for godsake, that I would never ever ever go below 3 either.

[Androstanolone]

Agreed, spirit does just about everything you want except be fast, which idol picks up the slack on (imo).

I occasionally have to discard things I don't want to also. A way to avoid this is to plan ahead. If you can, keep a land or dead card in hand as discard fodder in case you draw an extra spirit and want to spx/pox before having time to hardcast it. I don't know if you do this already, but it helps me evade a lot of potentially bad nether spirit situations.

[jebus]

I know that I should be running 3 Spirits, and that I could easily play around the problems brought about by drawing multiples of it, but my experience with it is that I consistently draw it [even with just 2 copies] anyway, so why put myself in a position to have to play around having multiples? Yeah, I know, it's a flawed and irrational approach, but it has worked. I am fully aware, though, that 3 is the right number of copies, with 4 being necessary if you're running no other threats but Idols.* But for me and my rotten/amazing [depends on your point of view] luck with the card, 2 has been enough so far. But i'll try squeezing in a 3rd somewhere to see if it leads to any crap.

I'll also test going
-4 Dark Ritual
+2 Keg
+1 Swamp / Fetch
+1 Spirit / Duress / 3rd Keg
with my list posted above.

*edit: can the deck go down to just 4 Idol and 3 Spirit? Hmm...

[Top Deck]

I'm glad to see at least a few people cutting rituals and discovering that the deck does fine without them.

Rituals in my opinion is a neccessary evil because sometimes you have two lands and a pox in hand and a ritual.

Gerrard's verdict is fairly strong, but vindicate is slow and clunky. White isn't worth splashing for in pox, only in B/W confidant/jotun grunt.

Verdict is good because it acts as another discard outlet + life gain. I use vindicate in my build to gain a strong positional advantage. Vindicate can act as the third form of spot removal. (most of the time I end up taking out their land with it)

After lots of testing I cut the crucibles again. I tried totem a little and was dissapointed. The strength of spirit/idol still shines. My landbase is 18 swamp, 4 wasteland, 2 tabernacle. The tabernacles have been pretty awesome, especially when they lackey out SGC and I drop tabernacle next turn... Puts the smack-down on the goblin god draw. Not to mention that tabernacle is easily accompanied by a crushing sinkhole/wasteland/smallpox. Tabernacle has a great deal of synergy and is a good colorless land to run now that we have Urborg. Of course, if you're running a crucible version you probably want to use your colorless lands on factories.

I agreed that totem does not have the power of idol. Totem to me feels like a win more card for this deck since most the time you have very few perms in play. It is hard to power up the totem.

I can't foresee a meta where I wouldn't have powder keg in the maindeck. Pox can't deal with artifacts at all, especially artifact mana is trouble. Keg just fills the role as best it can be filled in mono B, straight up hands down. Besides that, it's another elimination spell. Save totem/idol from needle, take out a couple weenies, blast 3/4 of affinity's lands. I was playing against a scrubby deck the other day and ramped my keg up to 5 when he dropped Spirit of the Night (game went long). Killed it dead. The same day I killed a fledgeling dragon with keg in a long game against thresh after my other removal had run dry. I say run some, it's good for you.

I would say more but I need to run right now. Lots of great discussion going on, keep it coming, the decks are looking more and more tuned :).

Yaw I agree that pox can't deal with artifacts or at least monoblack can't deal with artifacts and thus it is stronger to splash white to shore up black's weakness. Another solution though is dropping in a disk even though it wrecks your side of the table as well. Disk is a common come back card found in MBC.