Covered by: Chris Lorensen

There is a fair amount and variety of debate in the commander community as to the power level of aggro infect.

Outside of the realm of combos, people say that 10 poison counters is too easy to get to, others refute, saying since the creatures are small and limited that it’s a similar battle compared to a normal aggro player. Some claim it leads to ‘feel bads’ when one player is taken out fast and has to wait for the next game but supporters of infect would point to voltron commanders that can do the same thing before being stopped.

“I’m not gonna deny the fact that there was definitely, probably some salt out there,” second place CPCL finisher Stephen Dunwoody said. “I don’t think it’s that deserved because it’s [infect] a viable strategy and it’s something that you have to think about: Are you going to allow this damage to come through.”

Regardless of the reasoning, in one on one, the little critters of the infect community scored a second place finish. Their leader was Atraxa, Praetor’s voice and the pilot of the deck was Stephen Dunwoody, also known as “Combo Steve.”

(Side note here: Many players will use removal against and attack a known combo player during the early game until the aggro player finishes ramping out big creatures. Dunwoody said he really liked the one on one aspect of the game because he knew the only reason people were attacking him was because he was the only target. 🙂

Anyways, most people know Atraxa as a fairly powerful commander. While not quite cEDH, her synergy with +1/+1 counters and planeswalkers makes her an attractive option for higher levels of play.

When a limiting factor in deck building becomes budget however, those strategies run into problems.

To solve that, there is a more budget option that Atraxa supports – infect.

“A lot of combos have at least one piece that is expensive. +1/+1 was a strategy where it was very close to being not expensive and had I been able to find a damaged Ashnod’s Altar here I could have actually been able to do that strategy off the get-go,” Dunwoody said. “But I couldn’t take that risk so I decided to go for the combat strategy where I was trying to mid-range control it.”

Dunwoody said while he would still be relying on very specific cards out of a hundred to win, being in four colors allowed him a variety of options for cheap tutors. Among them he named Lim-Dul’s Vault, Eladamri’s call, and Wargate.

Outside of combos, it can be rather difficult to get 30 points of infect spread throughout a 4 player table, Dunwoody said it was far more viable one on one. Especially, he said, when you can get in early with cheap creatures and then just sit back and let your commander naturally finish the job. In other words, “Play atraxa and win.”

Dunwoody said there were multiple games where all he had to do was cast Atraxa, pass turn and win by letter her proliferate do that last point of poison.

That being the case, even though it saw him to second place he will not be returning with another infect deck in season 2. In fact, he may even continue to go his non-combo route even though the increased price-per-week will make that play style more possible, he said.

“There are a lot of cheap combos, it’s just hard to get two 6-dollar-cards at once with the old system,” he said. “Also, the guarantee that you’ll hit that combo, that’s an issue too.”

Dunwoody said that if you go for the combo route, you are likely to take some early losses. A way around this, he said, is gearing the combo towards infinite combats so that you have an aggro strategy to fall back on.

“It’s going to be intriguing and exciting to see what they [combo players] figure out,” he said.