To win with the "Infect & Defile" deck, you'll need to be patient. Your deck is not designed to be aggressive, and if you simply cast your creatures and attack with them, you may find yourself quickly outmatched. Your deck has two primary advantages: first, a potent long-term plan—that is, given enough time, you'll draw more cards, have more creatures, and cast more spells. Second, you can eff ectively ignore your opponent's life total. Your deck is packed with creatures with infect. Every damage dealt to opponents from these creatures takes the form of poison counters, and a player with ten poison counters loses the game.

Early on, use cards like Smother, Mana Leak, and Necropede to stall the board and trade with your opponent's creatures, getting in a point of damage here and there. It's okay to let some of your early creatures die; you can get them back later with Corpse Cur. Then, use spells like Foresee and Consuming Vapors to pull ahead after the initial assault has been blunted.

One important thing to remember is that, if your opponent lets his or her guard down, you can win with shocking speed. Say you've just cast a Phyrexian Vatmother, and your opponent taps out next turn for a Baneslayer Angel. Even if you haven't attacked once this game, a single Corrupted Conscience on the Angel will have your opponent facing down a lethal attack the very next turn. So look for opportunities to put your opponent on the defensive when he or she least expects it.

Your main deck is designed to compete against an open field, but your sideboard gives you backup against a variety of opposing strategies. Bring in cards like Go for the Throat and Doom Blade against faster creature-based strategies. On the other hand, if your opponent is also playing for the long game, Negate will ensure that their most powerful spells never see the light of day.

You may choose to evolve the deck, taking it in one of several possible directions. One route would be to focus on adding more creatures with infect like Phyrexian Vatmother and Phyrexian Crusader to assume a more proactive approach. Alternatively, you could focus on controlling the long game with countermagic like Mana Leak and removal like Black Sun's Zenith, polishing the opponent off with huge finishers like Consecrated Sphinx.