The upcoming Magic: the Gathering set Phyrexia: All will be One will introduce a new level of deck archetypes for the Standard format. One that is most I am excited about is the new version of the Infect deck: Toxic. We had Infect decks before during the Mirrodin Besieged Standard and so this time is another deck strategy to impose using the Toxic mechanic.

For a quick explanation of this new mechanic, the player damaged by the creature with Toxic will take life point damage and the number on the card after the Toxic keyword will give them the same number of Poison Counters. This effect and the return of Proliferate will surely have the deck a sure-win condition that disregards life gain effects and a high life total.

I assume the colors would be Black and Green or Golgari but other options such as Red-Green is also possible. My first choice is Black-Green as based on the previous builds of the Infect decks in Scars of Mirrodin Standard. Using Green has huge trample creatures with Toxic, and Black for access to spot removals, and recursion spells and to disrupt opponents with discard spells to carry out your gameplan as smoothly as possible.

We will do a check again once the Phyrexia: All will be One complete spoiler is out. We will see and consider some relevant Toxic creatures from the set as a potential candidate for the deck. Also, I will be posting a Standard deck tech discussion to feature this archetype.

That is a wrap for now, until the next blog post.