The Calumny of Apelles by Sandro Botticelli (1494). Prossh by Todd Lockwood.
I have a deck I pull out when really, really want to kill an opponent.
When I play this deck at a table with more than two players, I can almost always kill one opponent, but I don't think I've ever won a table.
If I'm playing games of one-on-one Commander, this deck is probably my strongest pick. I don't play French or the new "Leviathan" variant. Pretty much any time I'm playing against just one person it's because we don't have enough players for a multiplayer game. When that happens, we play with the decks we have and with the rules we're familiar with. Life totals are 40. Banlist is the same as multiplayer. It's just easier that way.
Today I'm going to tell you about my silver bullet deck for one on one play, and no - it isn't Prossh.
My First Commander Cookies
I run an EDH league, and one of the things I do is bake cookies every week. I didn't always bake cookies and I didn't always run the league I play in. Before the current league at NexGen comics, I played at Myriad games in Salem, NH. That's where the "cookie thing" started.
One week I decided to build and play the filthiest, nastiest deck I could possibly build. I think it was around Halloween and my goal was to make a "scary" deck.
This was before I knew about truly horrible things like Prossh / Food Chain. I didn't really grasp how truly scary a deck could be, but I wanted to get nasty. I wanted to build a black deck, and I wanted to build something that would make my opponents nervous.
I built Skithiryx.
Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon was the nastiest commander I could possibly imagine.
Skithiryx has Infect.
A creature with Infect deals damage to a player in the form of poison counters.
In a normal game of Commander, it takes only 10 poison counters to knock a player out.
Skithiryx is a 4/4, so with the slightest amount of pump against a player without flying blockers, your victim is looking at a 2-turn clock.
Did I mention that for the low, low cost of 1 black mana, you can give it haste?
You can also regenerate it for 2 black mana. A few of those four (flying, infect, haste, regen) would make for a good commander. Having all four available, even if you have to pay for two of them, is fantastic.
My quandary wasn't whether or not I'd be able to make an impact with my shiny new Skithiryx deck. We were a few weeks into a new league and my challenge was to find a way to play such a potentially salt-inducing commander and still get along with my fellow players.
Maybe that sounds silly, but it mattered to me that players had a good time and wanted to come back. I knew we would have a mix of experienced and newer players and I was going to do everything I could to both play Infect and yet inspire as little saltiness as possible.
The next thing to know about Skithiryx is that he has a nickname.
Skithiryx is called "Skittles".
Yeah. Something like the picture above. Fruity sugary candies but with a little letter "S" on each one.
Nicknames are weird. There isn't anything particularly sweet about Skithiryx, but gamers have a sense of humor and I guess it just stuck.
My initial plan was to bring skittles candies and give them out as poison counters, but that plan had an obvious flaw. Players would want to eat their poison counters, and really - who could blame them? The things are kind of addictive and if an opponent suddenly went from 8 poison counters to 4 in one sweet, surrepetitious mouthful, who would be the wiser?
In the end I did go with skittles poison counters but I ALSO used dice to measure out the real poison count.
Also, I made skittles cookies.
This wasn't necessarily a good plan.
The question of what kind of cookie to try to put skittles into was a big one. Pick the wrong flavor or type and they could be so epically bad that players would tell stories about the jerk with the infect deck and inedible skittles cookies for years to come. I didn't want that.
In the end I went with a sugar cookie recipe.
I don't actually have the recipe on hand, but they came out pretty well, and everyone liked the idea that I was trying to head off any saltiness by feeding everyone skittles and skittles sugar cookies.
Skittles First Day Out
That first time I played my Skithiryx deck wound up being fairly telling for how the deck would almost always play.
In both rounds I was able to knock someone out. It wasn't even that hard. You just get rolling and next thing you know somebody has been knocked out of the game.
There's a funny thing that happens when knock someone out of a game alarmingly early using infect.
Everyone pauses.
They look at each other.
They look at you.
They look at each other again.
Then, they all combine to put every single once of energy, every creature, every bit of damage, and every possible shenanigan into their one shared goal of making damn sure you are the next one to die.
Few things will unite a table like an infect player knocking someone out just a little too quickly.
I'm pretty sure on this first day out for Skittles, one of my losses was to my kid, who played his Sakashima deck and killed me with not one, but TWO copies of Skittles.
Sakashima can copy a legendary creature but keeps her own name. This means she gets around the legendary rule. You can easily get away with having two copies of something legendary on the table if your deck is built to try to do that. He copied my Skithiryx, then used Sakashima to make another copy of it, and was able to kill me fairly quickly.
I'm pretty sure the rest of the table fell soon afterwards. It was a brilliant play.
Uphill Sledding
Winning with Infect in EDH is a challenge because folks will game up on you. They should. Infect is effective.
It's even more effective when you only have to get to 10 poison counters on an opponent.
For some reason, in our EDH League I had the bright idea of suggesting that we play with 15 as the number of poison counters to knock a player out instead of 10.
You read that right.
Me.
The Infect player.
I suggested we use 15.
I think I was anticipating how folks would react to my Skithiryx deck and wanted to make it feel fairer. I wanted to make poison a little easier to deal with and I wanted to have fewer players be pissed off after getting blindsided by a surprise Blightsteel Colossus, or a pumped up Skithiryx.
If I knew then what I know now, I might not have offered to have it be 15, but everyone was delighted to use that number.
Normally in a 20 life format, you use 10 poison counters as the number to kill a player, so it makes sense to have a higher number. EDH is a 40 life format, but doubling it to 20 poison seemed insane, so 15 was what we went with.
It's stuck with us ever since, and I don't think anyone in our current EDH league has a problem with it.
The infect players understand, and the non-infect players are just grateful it isn't 10.
That does mean it's a little like sledding uphill. It's still kind of fun, but you never really get to the top.
Maybe that means we should use 10, but every month we vote on rules changes and it hasn't come up yet, so at this point I'm thinking it's going to stay at 15.
To be honest, I'm a little stunned the Commander rules committee still has it at 10.
Just How Filthy?
With my relative lack of experience in EDH, just how filthy was I able to make my Skithiryx deck?
Given that the deck has never won a multiplayer game, maybe the answer is "not filthy enough" but I'll run down the basic steps I went through so you can see how I built it. I won't show every card, but I'll share the better cards in each category.
Short-Term Ramp
Black isn't the easiest color to ramp in, but with the right cards you can do just fine. The first goal of any Skithiryx deck is to get your commander out and swinging as soon as possible, so Dark Ritual and Cabal Ritual were an obvious starting point. Crystal Vein and Ebon Stronghold are lands that you can sac to get extra mana. Bubbling Muck is another one-shot ramp option. These are all short-term options to get swinging quickly.
Long-Term Ramp
I own one Mana Crypt and one Mana Vault. If I were going to play this deck more often, they would definitely find a home in here, but currently they live with Narset. Mana rocks are good long-term options, though, as they give you extra mana for many turns or for the rest of the game if you are lucky enough to not see them destroyed. Charcoal Diamond, Mind Stone, Gilded Lotus and Sol Ring were the rocks I went with, along with Jet Medallion to drop the cost of all my black spells. Cabal Coffers and Magus of the Coffers also went in and are both spectacular for producing large amounts of black mana. Crypt Ghast was another must-have, as we're going to have a lot of swamps, and Lilliana of the Dark Realms was the final bit of long-term ramp. While she won't often get to her limit break, Lilly is a great final piece to this deck's ramp package.
Removal
No black deck is complete without a nod to one of the color's greatest strengths - removal. Flesh to Dust, Tragic Slip and Ruinous Path wound up being my choices - probably because they were cards I had lying around. Virulent Wound also went in, mostly for its ability to give an extra poison counter. On its own, giving a creature -1/-1 isn't much to write home about in our format. Royal Assassin is repeatable removal on a stick but after that we don't actually have much removal in this build.
Pump
With our 4/4 infect commander having to get to 15 poison counters to knock someone out, pump is going to be incredibly important. Anthem effects like Bad Moon, Hand of the Praetors, Paragon of Open Graves and Hall of Triumph will help out a little. Howl from Beyond and Endless Scream both let me pump any amount of mana into powering up a creature. If I had been able to find a copy of Hatred, that would be in as well. Strata Scythe and Lashwrithe are our last really good pump options. We're going to have a lot of swamps so they should each be able to pump a creature enough to make a real impact. Fireshrieker, while not technically pump, is going to double our damage output so it also seemed like a must-have.
Backup Plans
The first build of this deck went with a wide array of smaller infect creatures as a way to try to stay with the infect theme and give us some backup options in case an opponent was able to deal with Skithiryx. With enough small infect dudes and some well placed removal or pump, the goal was to be able to get to 15 without Skittles on the field. In retrospect, I think that would be a challenge even trying to get to 10, so at 15 it's a long shot at best. That's why we have bombs.
Bombs
In an infect deck, there is no better bomb than Blightsteel Colossus. Nightmare and Squelching Leeches will also have the opportunity to have an impact if the game goes long enough. While those last two don't have infect, we run Phyresis and Tainted Strike, so in a pinch we can turn their damage into poison counters. The last major threat we're packing is a neat little blade called Elbrus, the Binding Blade, which can turn into the slightly monstrous Withengar Unbound.
Shenanigans
Because EDH is supposed to be fun, at least for the person playing the deck, I also had to add in some fun stuff. For this deck, fun means cards like Relic Putresence so I can enchant someone's Sol Ring and have them glare at me every time they tap it for mana and give themselves another poison counter. If the game goes long enough, Rise of the Dark Realms is a possible game-changer and getting an army of infect dudes back from the graveyard all at once is potentially huge. The biggest combat trick I'm hoping to someday use is hitting someone's big creature with Tainted Strike as it swings on another opponent. Yes - this is called fun.
I run Contagion Engine, but haven't yet added Contagion Clasp. At one point it had tutors, but I went through a phase where I pulled many of my tutors out of my decks to see if the drop in consistency would make them more fun to play. I'm certain there are many other glaring omissions. This deck wasn't built to be a mainstay of my EDH play, and doesn't get dusted off more than a half dozen times a year.
So how filthy is this deck? Well, It rarely loses in 1 on 1 games in my current playgroups but it lacks any tutors, boardwipes or combos and clearly has some issues.
You can view the decklist on TappedOut.net at the link below.
Conclusions
Upon reviewing the deck, it is clear to me that it's built like a dragster. The goal is to go from 0 to 15 infect as quickly as possible, but it lacks nuance. It lacks resiliency. It lacks adequate levels of important stuff like targeted removal, board wipes and card draw. It's pretty good at one thing - killing a single player, but isn't able to deal with a full table of opponents and would probably struggle against a top tier deck or even a well-built, well-piloted midrange deck.
That begs the question - if I was going to rework the deck to be able to reach that next level, what would I change?
I'll again break down my thoughts into a few basic categories.
Card Draw
The current decklist has Midnight Oil, which is a way of saying that I resigned myself to not having any reliable card draw and having to top-deck in the late game, if not in the mid-game. The deck won't have any reliable way to gain life unless I add in Basilisk Collar, Loxodon Warhammer and dudes like Vampire Nighthawk, so I'm not eager to pay life in exchange for card draw. Probably the best plan would be to go with stuff like Sensei's Divining Top and Illuminated Folio, though adding life gain and more traditional pay-life-for-draw cards might be worth a look as well.
Meaningful Blockers
Having an army of tiny infect dudes isn't bad with 10 infect but nobody will think twice about swinging into them. They're tiny, and they'll probably be tapped anyways if you're trying to use them to deal damage. I would probably replace a bunch of them with deathtouch blockers - preferably flying ones if possible. Making your opponents think twice about swinging in on you might buy you enough time to build your board and make more opponents dead.
Boardwipes
This is one of the most glaring omissions in the deck. I have plenty of ramp but no way to deal with an opponent who is out of control short of killing them with Skithiryx. If they've got a way to deal with flyers, I'm pretty much out of options. That Rise of the Dark Realms would make a whole lot more sense in this deck if a few board wipes were added to the mix.
Pillowfort
Making it harder for your opponents to attack you is a key part of dealing with a table full of opponents Ascendant Evincar will pump your black creatures and destroy any opponent running a 1/1 weenie strategy. Cards like Blood Reckoning and Hissing Miasma will also help with anyone trying to go wide. Koskun Falls will tie up one of your creatures, but having a Propaganda effect is well worth it. No Mercy will make anyone think twice about swinging on you for less than lethal with a creature that can be destroyed.
I do think that with a fairly thorough rework, this deck could perform better against multiple opponents. I still think it will always suffer from getting hated off the table for playing infect. If I ever do such a rework I'll definitely post about how it works out. Any suggestions about how to make a Skittles deck multiplayer-ready are more than welcome. I'll keep an eye on the reddit and facebook posts I make for this post and will definitely respond to any ideas you have to share with me.
Thanks for reading!