Hey Dolf, I recently just started playing Magic and I've heard Mono Green Infect decks are pretty good. The problem is since I'm new to the game I'm not really sure what's best to use. I've heard of using Blight Mambas, Putrifax, Llanowar Elves, and Giant Growths for like a beatdown type style. I'm also kinda on a budget, can you give me some ideas for a good Mono Green Infect deck? Any help is appreciated, thanks.

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Before I get into this deck fix I'd just like to apologize to those of you who submitted your decks to me several weeks back that I wasn't able to get to them right away. Unfortunately taking on a 2nd job on top of raising a family eats into your free time a lot. In any case I'm going to try and at least get a couple of fixes in a month going forward so I'll be on the lookout for your deck submissions. OK onto the deck!

Dakota,

Mono green (and artifact) beatdown infect sounds like a plan to me so let's see what we have to work with. The objective here is pretty straightforward, poison your opponent to death in as quickly as possible using infect and creature pumpers. Right now I'm foreseeing lots of small cheap guys with infect capped off with a Putrefax as the finisher to get those last poison counters in. We'll probably get a little proliferate in there as well so we can keep the pressure on once we have some poison counters on them.

So starting off with the 1 drops I'm liking the already mentioned Llanowar Elves to help accelerate into our infecty goodness. There aren't any 1 drops with infect in and of themselves in our color so moving on. For 2 drops we can run Blight Mamba, Ichorclaw Myr, and Necropede. Each of these in addition to infect have good secondary abilities that make them tough on opposing blockers. Between all these quick drops we should be able to get some poison on our opponent and keep the pressure on from there.

For the 3 spot Rot Wolf is a good play and especially with some creature pumping should have no problem drawing you some extra cards if your opponent blocks it. Viridian Corrupter is another good 3 drop which can destroy a lot of things in standard these days. No 4 drops are needed as we want to get out a bunch of fast creatures to get the initial poison counters flowing. Once we do this we can finish with Putrefax which is basically a green fireball here since you should be ready to end the game in one shot when you cast it. Now we want to make sure we get a good amount of poison counters in whenever one our guys goes unblocked, so on to the creature pumpers!

There are many choices in standard to fill this need but I'd say Groundswell and Primal Bellow are the best in this deck. The one gives you +4/+4 so long as you played a land which you're going to be doing anyway. The other buffs by +1/+1 for each forest you control which should at least be 3 since that's the first turn we'd really be attacking with anyone in this deck. As such Primal Bellow is basically going to be a Giant Growth at minimum anyway but will get so much better as the game moves on. I'd also say that you should run a copy or two of either Garruk or Overwhelming Stampede in order to get an overrun effect in the deck just to get that last poisonous strike in should you end up in a stalemate.

The last thing we should include would be a way to further our infectious ends should the ground game stall out, enter proliferate. Looking over the options I'm going to recommend both Contagion Clasp and Contagion Engine. The clasp will likely be a four of while the engine will more than likely only be a single copy as another finisher to complement Putrefax. Both allow you to possibly finish opposing blockers when they come in and their tap abilities allow you to further kill off creatures or just up your opponents poison counters whenever you have the spare mana.

Overall it's a fairly straightforward build and none of the cards are really that expensive so it shouldn't cost you too much to put together. If you want some sideboard ideas check out my previous R/G deck fix as it's got some nice green tech in it. Also you're mainly just going to have forests but you could also throw a few copies of Quicksand in here just to help against flyers. So now that we know what we want our final list could look something like this:

25 Creatures

4x Llanowar Elves
4x Blight Mamba
4x Ichor Claw Myr
4x Necropede
3x Rot Wolf
3x Viridian Corrupter
3x Putrefax

12 Spells

4x Groundswell
4x Primal Bellow
2x Contagion Clasp
1x Contagion Engine
1x Garruk Wildspeaker

23 Lands

20x Forest
3x Quicksand

As always do some playtesting to finalize your numbers and let me know how it works out.

-Dolf