Legacy Pox deck
UPDATED MARCH/2022
Pox, or sometimes known as Smallpox, is a control deck. It's a more specific genre inside the Mono-Black Control umbrella term. It receives its name originally from the card Pox, which was mostly replaced by the newer Smallpox after its printing.
Overview
Pox is a strategy that is present in Legacy and Modern.
It is a type of Mono-Black control deck and can be particularly strong against combos.
The most frequent ways to build a Pox deck can be:
- Mana-denial
- Board control
- Hand disruption
But it is common to find a deck using a mix of those game-plans.
Although it may suffer from faster combos (Such as Reanimator, Oops, All Spells and Belcher), it usually has a variety of cards to dismantle the opponent's strategy.
Also, the average strength against combo matchups tend to greatly increase post-Sideboarding (in games 2 and 3 of the match) once the Pox player knows what they are dealing with.
It is a classic deck that has been around the format since its inception.
The average land count in the deck ranges from 23 to 29. And it may also splash Green for slight deckbuilding variants - such as Life from the Loam in the Mainboard and cards like Abrupt Decay, Assassin's Trophy and Weather the Storm in the Sideboard.
Even though the most used Reserved List card in Pox is Cursed Scroll (which is present in not all decklists), it may be replaced by Urza's Saga + Retrofitter Foundry.