Pox Copter
Modern
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Smallpox Synergy Boost —Oct. 27, 2017
After playtesting with Smallpox, I was amazed at how much it hurt my opponent...when I could play it. My land count is low (20 until further notice) because I am an aggro deck with mostly 1 and 2 drops. That said, I still hurt quite a bit when I did cast Smallpox, because the odds of me drawing a replenishing swamp were low in games where I wasn't flooding out.
I also realized that if I'm going to play Smallpox, I need to go all-in on the creatures that can reanimate themselves. I replaced Night Market Lookout with Bloodghast. When my opponents saw that they would be pinged one life per turn by a crewing Lookout, they were quick to use removal on it. I also hated scenarios where I didn't have a choice but to sacrifice either a Lookout, a Zulaport Cutthroat or a Pack Rat to a Pox because I didn't have any immortal crewers out.
I quickly learned that one playset of life draining besides Aethersphere Harvester is good enough. Zulaport Cutthroat is better in some respects than Night Market Lookout in this deck. When opponents see the Lookout, they know it's a guaranteed per-turn life loss and don't hesitate to kill it. When they see the Cutthroat, they are torn over which creature to use removal on. Kill a crewed vehicle to spare yourself from aerial attack, but the Cutthroat still triggers. Block or spend removal on an immortal crewman to save yourself from that extra point or two of damage on the ground, but they can still come back and the Cutthroat will still trigger. Use removal on the Cutthroat and you just wasted a valuable spell on a 1/1, plus you still have 3+ damage coming at you in the air. Other opponents that actually think the 1/1 isn't worth wasting life on woefully underestimate how much life that little dude can drain in a single game. It adds up quick: unlike the Lookout, the Cutthroat can trigger multiple times per turn.
I also took out 8 swamps and replaced them with playsets of Drownyard Temple and Dakmor Salvage. These nonbasics were added as new tech to reduce the pain of the biggest drawback to playing Pox: sacrificing lands. The level of synergy in this deck gets a major boost. The lands make for perfect discard to Smallpox, Pack Rat and the Loot trigger on Smuggler's Copter. The all-star is clearly Dakmor Salvage. When the Copter's loot trigger goes off, I can dredge Dakmor Salvage back to my hand instead of drawing a card. If I do, I'm likely to mill an immortal crewman, giving me more options in my postcombat main phase.