Quote Originally Posted by Man_Over_Game View Post
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.
What do you mean by 'better'? The mechanic was designed to be tricky to play against and feel inevitable. No way to undo it, every proliferate card brings you one step closer to death. This was back in '10 and planned earlier, before Commander was officially supported by WotC and way before any thought to it was involved in the planning process, so competitive was what was being designed for—in which playing a 4 mana 3/2 and then another Infect creature if it survived was horribly inefficient in the format.

The problem is that Commander didn't decide to go up to 20 poison counters to kill. That's honestly all there is to it. In no situation should Scion of the Ur-Dragon be able to one-hit-kill someone with Skithiryx and fire-breathing without getting an absurd amount of mana.