Magic: The Gathering Thread XXV: 3 Vorthoses barely clinging to sanity and 45 Spikes

[Man_Over_Game]

TBH, it sounds like you're going to have a rough time because you're giving yourself restrictions that your opponents don't have. Proliferate infect is, by design, very hard to interact with, and ramp can be a pretty "solitaire" deck archetype, your opponent either has a board wipe on the right turn or they don't and die.

You could play counterspells, or discard, or stax, or land destruction, or just a ton of removal, but if your goal is to play a non-combo (so your opponents can interact with it) non-control (so that your opponents can still play cards) deck that can fight an aggressive ramp deck and a value-engine proliferate and infect deck, you don't have a whole lot of options.

You could try to be more aggressive than they are, maybe? Not easy to pull off in EDH, but there are some pretty effective Voltron decks that can beat people to death quickly. It's definitely interactive since you're relying on dropping permanents and attacking with creatures, and it tends to punish decks that don't pack removal reasonably well if it's aggressive enough.

My BiL (the Atraxa deck) recommend I focus on making a deck that functioned on its own, one that doesn't necessarily need the commander to work properly, which is good advice. Feather's cheap to play, which makes building a deck around him fairly easy, but it barely functions without him.

I think I might go with a Breya or Zur deck and just force them to take on more control. There are a number of powerful combos with both (Zur can pull both Phyrexian Unlife and Solemnity to become immortal by about turn 5, Breya has several ways of getting infinite mana or damage). Neither of them really bother trying to build decks that consider the opponent, so maybe I should just not bother trying to play fair until they do. It certainly hasn't been doing me any favors so far.

As an aside, why the hell did WOTC think that Infect was better than Wither? I am surprised by the shear number of infect-support cards that Atraxa deck is able to pull out regularly, which seems really odd for how unfun it is to play against. Wither, on the other hand, just makes me reconsider how I treat midgame combat. In the last game, he didn't even have to hit me; simply having a specific creature on the board and summoning another creature with infect was enough to put an infect counter on a player.