Welcome to the fastest Mono Green Infect deck in the Pauper format!
All feedback and comments are much appreciated. For details, click to expand each of the Accordions below. Special thanks to FancyTuesday for posting code to make customized Accordions.
Want to just decimate in the Pauper format? I've got the deck for you! This is a Mono Green Infect deck with an emphasis on speed. It sacrifices the evasion that comes with splashing blue for Blighted Agent and instead relies solely on Trample to roll over early game creatures. With the deck being mono-color, it makes it far more reliable which is essential for being able to hit early creature drops and cast pump spells. I personally believe that this deck is the fastest infect deck in Pauper, or perhaps even in Modern, given a few tweaks.
Below is the list of core strategies you will want to follow when playing this deck.
Do not be afraid to mulligan to 5 or even 4 cards. If you want to win as early as possible, it is important that you have either a Glistener Elf in your opening hand or at least two of either the Ichorclaw Myr or Blight Mamba. This will ensure that you will have a creature to pump, since your next few draws are most likely to be only pump spells.
Remember that this deck is meant to be very fast. You do not need more than one or two lands in your opening hand.
If the opponent has put down some creatures, the best strategy is to attack and pump with your instants after the opponent declares blockers, prioritizing your unblocked creatures. Cards like
Predator's Strike
make it very easy to roll over the opponent's early game defenders with *Trample and top off the 10 poison counters.
Glistener Elf: This card makes the deck. Dropping it for on turn one sets you up for turn two or turn three wins.
Blight Mamba: This card gives the deck some resiliency by reliably having a creature on the field. For , you can consistently regenerate it to protect it from cards like Lightning Bolt.
Ichorclaw Myr: This card is an absolute nightmare for early game defenders. When blocked, it is a 3/3 for with Infect, and when pumping with
Predator's Strike
or Rancor it can win games very quickly.
Rancor: Again, this is another resiliency pick so in case our creatures don't make it, this card gives us a recurring pump spell. The added Trample is essential for dealing with your opponent's early game creatures.
Apostle's Blessing: Probably our best protection spell. For just and two life, we can protect our creatures at instant speed.
Giant Growth: A very efficient pump spell, giving +3/+3 for just and at Instant speed.
Groundswell: In such a fast deck, this card will almost always be utilized with its Landfall ability, making it our best pump spell.
Mutagenic Growth: Can't tell you how many times I've caught people by surprise with this. For I highly recommend you only pay 2 life to cast this spell. This card is essential to the deck for making the turn two wins possible.
Predator's Strike
: Without Blighted Agent, we need this as an additional option to grant Trample and have that much needed ability to push poison counters to the opponent.
Vines of Vastwood: Essential for protecting your creatures. For just , granting Hexproof and the option of becoming an instant speed pump spell, this is an auto-include to any green infect deck.
Gitaxian Probe
: This card essentially allows us to cycle through our deck for free, by paying 2 life, and find the critical pieces to set up early game wins. In addition, it allows us to look at our opponent's hand to ensure that our creatures are safe from removal before attacking.
Lotus Petal: This hidden gem was a Common back in the Tempest block, which allows it to make a home here in our deck. This will be one of our strongest enablers for Turn 2 wins by providing us extra mana on Turn 2 for pump spells or even Turn 1 to churn out an Ichorclaw Myr or a Blight Mamba.
Forest: The extremely small amount of Forests is to make room for the 4x Lotus Petal, which allows for very reliable Turn 2 wins.
Tranquil Thicket: Although this will be a rarer occurrence, if we find in our hand a few extra mana sources than needed, we can pay the to cycle this card to draw into the very important creatures and pump spells our deck needs to succeed.
Sandstorm
: As Burl suggested, this card shuts down decks like Storm or other token decks.
Vitality Charm
: A great suggestion by Scorprix. This card is sort of a swiss army knife in that it can pump, grant Trample, or give us a 1/1 Insect token to deal with cards like Chainer's Edict.
Below is the summary of recommended budget replacements and the budget version deck list.
Notes: If you can afford Rancor, it will GREATLY speed up the deck. In addition,
Gitaxian Probe
is soon to be banned in Modern so it will be going down in price drastically.
Below is a list of my personal deck building tips. If you like this deck, please leave a +1 and use some of these to help you craft a version of your own!
Count the total number of individual colored mana symbols (, , , etc.) of your deck.
Input the number of symbols in the corresponding field at this site. Make sure the number at the top next to "Enter Mana Amount" is equal to the number of lands you would like in the deck.
Numbers next to each of the fields will appear, telling you how many lands should have that color in your deck.
Just wanted to thank everyone for all the upvotes and for all the great comments/suggestions. While there is no such thing as perfect, I feel that this decklist is close to its most final iteration! For that, I did a makeover of the mainboard and sideboard selection tabs so they can look really effin cool
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