It isn’t often that a card revealed early in spoiler season makes me sit up and take notice with regards to Pauper, but that is just what happened with Phyrexia: All Will Be One. The card in question is Anoint with Affliction, and it’s a doozy.
Let’s start with the baseline version. A 1B that exiles any creature with a mana value of three or less is pretty darn good. It hits several mainstay creatures in the format including Seeker of the Way, Moon-Circuit Hacker, Kor Skyfisher, Axebane Guardian and Spellstutter Sprite. While it doesn’t hold a candle to Cast Down or Terminate in what it does hit, the upside of exile is a big deal these days given how important the combination of Sacred Cat and Basilisk Gate is to ending games. That Anoint with Affliction can be fired off in response to a Basilisk Gate activation and make sure the Cat only has one life is enough for Pauper players to consider adding it to their repertoire.
There are a few elephants in the room, however. The first is Monastery Swiftspear. Even though this spell can kill it dead, it is, at its best, going to do so after Swiftspear chips in for some damage and even then will come at the cost of skipping a turn of board development. The fact that it also misses Myr Enforcer in its base mode is also a pretty big deal, and don’t even get me started on Tolarian Terror. Because of these reasons, I would be wary of maxing out on four copies in the main once Phyrexia hits the shelves.
The other elephant is the corrupted mode. Turning this into a Doom Blade with some significant upside makes Anoint with Affliction one of the best removal spells in Pauper. But giving your opponent three poison counters is not an easy task. While Glistener Elf and other Scars of Mirrodin block creatures with infect can get the job done, those decks are all about getting damage in quickly and Anoint is too slow and expensive to clear the path – and in games where the spell would matter, the regular version of Anoint will pick off early blockers just fine.
At the time of writing, there are no officially revealed creatures with toxic – the new ability the gives players poison counters – that seem playable for Pauper, so for now we have to make do with those with infect, Virulent Sliver and any cards that might generate Phyrexian Mite tokens – pesky 1/1s that can’t block but have toxic 1. If you’re really looking to get a jump on brewing with some of the oil, you can look at Virulent Wound. Giving a creature a -1/-1 counter is not nothing and it provides two counters – the -1/-1 and the poison counter – for proliferate shenanigans. All that being said, even without going full corrupted, Anoint with Affliction looks to be a potent tool for any Pauper player who’s willing to pay the price.
