Fumulus, the Infestation is one of the legendary creatures featured inMagic: The Gathering’sJumpstart set. It’s a mono black commander, meaning you can only play black and colorless cards in your deck. However, this is hardly a downside.
A Fumulus, the Infestation deck is all about sacrificing creatures. This comes in the way of sacrificing your own creatures, and forcing your opponents to sacrifice theirs. The restriction to only black cards doesn’t hurt the deck, as most of the mass sacrifice and enables for sacrifice strategies are in the color anyway. If you like flooding the battlefield with tokens and sacrificing a ton, Fumulus, the Infestation is the perfect commander for you.
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War Room
Witch’s Cottage
The decklistcontains 30 creatures, nine sorceries, ten instants, ten artifacts, six enchantments,and34 lands. The majority of the deck is cards that force your opponents to sacrifice creatures or to benefit from your own creatures dying.
Key Cards
Fumulus, The Infestation
The commander,Fumulus, the Infestationis what makes the deck function. It turns any player sacrificing a token into a 1/1 Insect token. Notably, Fumulus countsboth you sacrificing your own cards as well as your opponents sacrificing.
Fumulus counts every instant of a nontoken creature dying to trigger, so if multiple creatures are sacrificed at once, they’ll all give you a 1/1 Insect with flying.
Thesecond effect helps you to push your advantage and regain life you lost in the earlier stages of the game. The tokens that Fumulus makes alsogive you your own sacrifice fodder, letting you get rid of weaker creatures as opposed to your key oneswhen you need to sacrifice a creature too. However, sacrificing these tokens won’t net you new ones.
Dictate Of Erebos
Dictate of Erebosis one of the best cards in the entire deck. It causes any creature dying on your battlefieldtoforceall your opponents to sacrifice a creature. Dictate of Erebosdoesn’t care how the creature dies, so it dying from sacrificing them yourself or by dying in combat, both will trigger Dictate of Erebos.
The biggest benefit to Dictate of Erebos isit becomes a prime removal target. This allows you to keep your commander safer, as Dictate of Erebos will be prioritized when it comes to dealing with a permanent.
Mirkwood Bats
You aregoing to be making a ton of creature tokens, soMirkwood Batsis the best card for turning those tokens into burn damage. The burn happens whena token is created or sacrificed, giving a lot of your burn cards an extra kick.
Theburn from Mirkwood Bats combined with the burn from Fumulusquickly stacks up,the two complimenting what the other wants to do perfectly. It turns the tokens generated from Fumulus into damage, and if you opt to sacrifice those token creatures, you’ll still get the value that Fumulus doesn’t provide on its own.
Meathook Massacre II
Meathook Massacre IIis a way to get a ton of extra value out of your creatures. A lot of creatures in the deck enter and make every player sacrifice a creature. Bypaying three life, you can sacrifice that creature and bring it back right away to force everyone to sacrifice two creatures.
Most of the time, paying the X for Meathook Massacre isn’t worth it unless it’s late in the game. It’s better to get it down early than to wait to have enough mana to turn on its sacrifice ability.
More often than not, your opponent will opt to pay three life as opposed to giving you a creature they sacrifice. However, sincethe deck can win through burn damage, this chip damage is something that eventually your opponents can’t risk paying, giving you extra creatures to work with.
Blood Artist
Blood Artistis one of the most consistent ways to get extra burn damage. It triggers off ofany creature dying, and with how many creatures will die throughout a match, it’s not unlikely Blood Artist very quickly does damage in the double digits.
Blood Artist canonly target one player with its effect. As such, it’s best to use it on the opponent that’s the biggest threat. You can also use it on an opponent you aren’t attacking with the creatures that cause burn damage from Fumulus to keep the burn spread out evenly to all opponents.
How To Play The Deck
A Fumulus, the Infestation deck isall about forcing everyone to sacrifice creatures and slowly building up value and resources from it. This is largely done in the way of burn damage, both fromFumulus' effect and the effect of various permanents.
Your best source of forced sacrifice arecreatures that cause everyone to sacrifice a creature, as they trigger Fumulus a total of four times. These cards includeAccursed Marauder, Demon’s Disciple, Fleshbag Marauder,andMerciless Executioner. You also have mass sacrifice options inMake an ExampleandBlasphemous Edictwhich both act as board wipes.
You have multiple payoffs for creatures dying as well.Revel in Richesgives you Treasure tokens and an alternate win condition,Black Marketgives you rampthat grows with the death of every creature, andDictate of Erebosleads to more creatures being sacrificed.
Theprimary wincondition of the deck is winning through burnand combat. Fumulus can make a lot of creature tokens with flying (making them harder to block) and burn with all of them. If your opponent doesn’t have blockers,they each essentially do two damage.Blood Artist, Bastion of Remembrance,andMirkwood Batshelp to get extra burn damage to close out games. Alternatively, you can win withRevel in Richesby having ten or more Treasures at your upkeep.
Thebiggest downside of the deck is its lack of plays in the early game. You have a few one-drops, but it takes a while for your sacrifice plays to get going. In addition,your commander needs to stickto the battlefield. Without Fumulus, it becomes much harder to reach your win condition. Luckily, there is adecent bit of lifegain in the deck, which helps to catch back up in life while taking your opponents' life totals down.
