[modern][opinions] Rushing the Poison

The way most modern infect decks play go something like this:

T1: Noble Hierarch or Glistener Elf
T2: Infect creature
T3: Cast some combination of Might of Old Krosa, Groundswell, Rancor, Apostle's Blessing, Vines of Vastwood and Mutagenic Growth, swing for 10 poison at once.

A good infect player will mulligan aggressively to get one of these hands. The bloodrush option exists, but to be honest is probably slower and less reliable than existing builds. You're already running blue, green and black for the infect creatures and tricks, and adding red for bloodrush and Assault Strobe means you have to hit just the right land drops. If you cut either blue or black, what happens when you don't get one of your infect creatures out? In general, if you play an infect creature, it will be bolted/unsummoned/exiled almost immediately, which means you may not even want to run it out on Turn 1. On turn 2 you can put it out and have Vines as protection, but that means you need to deal all 10 in a single strike. Countering combat tricks is a losing strategy in this matchup, so the uncounterability of Bloodrush doesn't help as much as you might think.

Death & Taxes gets played quite a bit online, but I've never seen it in person and wouldn't call it a "stereotypical" build. Here's the most common decks that you'll realistically run into:
- Jund (BRG good stuff)
- UWR Midrange
- Splinter Twin combo
- Storm (just had a key component banned so this may become less popular)
- Birthing Pod, either with Kiki-Jiki or Melira to infinite combo
- GW Hatebears
- Scapeshift
- Tron

Other builds:
- Death & Taxes
- Zoo
- Gifts Ungiven/Reanimator
- Infect
- UW or UWR Cryptic Control

If you're looking for a list to use Bloodrush in, look at Living End. It's a combo deck that uses lots of huge cycling creatures to fill the graveyard quickly, then casts a Cascade spell to cast Living End for free, wrathing your opponent's board and bringing your whole army in. It's already in Jund colours anyways, and it's a good way to start re-filling the graveyard for the next Living End if you need one.

It's a lot of fun! I like it way more than Standard right now. The big advantage of decks like Death & Taxes or Merfolk is that they are mono-coloured, so if you're on a tight budget you don't need to pick up fetchlands or anything. If you like the format you'll probably want to pick up fetchlands anyways, though, as they go in literally every single deck. Even the burn decks in modern run black.

On the Lightning Bolt front, thanks for the heads up.  I have a ton of them from my old Revised playing days and just assumed they stopped reprinting them long before the start of the blocks covered by modern.

I can see the definite appeal of Vines of Vastwood to provide cover from removal and potentially removal for the elves and myrs.  Groundswell also seems like a better Giant Growth essentially every time, so another good call.

I'm actually leaning toward either removing Wild Defiance outright or dropping it down to a 1x as I can see where it'd be useful in some circumstances, but there are two issues - 1) It would essentially be without any benefit on my T3 play, when, to be honest, I hope to be finishing them off; and 2) Bloodrush wouldn't trigger it, which definitely sucks.  Sure it protects against some burn, but I'm thinking that just some regular run of the mill Rancors might be more effective to provide the trample damage.

From what I observed during my fact-finding expedition this past FNM (it was modern), games were lasting quite a few turns despite people running fetches (I can only think of two decks I saw that weren't running them, one being a TRON build and the other being some sort of mono-white thing).  In either event, if I can pull T3 kills consistently, I would imagine I'll be in pretty good shape.