#thought-knot

As with its physical appearance I avoid too directly canonizing much lore about Pawbo (except its antifascist views lol) but I have mentioned before--not on this website I don't think--that its most likely origin is as the offspring of Soul of New Phyrexia. So maybe something similar to that?

My own Abzan infect deck is Ixhel, not Vishgraz, and I admit for that reason I haven't really focused on him before (though I adore him as a character). This is my decklist. I know it's not Vishgraz, but at least it could give some direction for Abzan infect in general. It's aggressive and Phyrexian typal oriented. I do have a bad habit of including too few lands, so you probably want more.

As a non-Vishgraz but experienced EDH infect player, here are my free-flowing thoughts:

All the themes you mention are viable potential directions to go in, and they will all involve poison one way or another, so you can take that for granted to an extent.

That said, one of the reasons I find Vishgraz himself so strange to assess is that he gets larger and larger as you progress your infect gameplan but only ever has toxic 1. It starts to bifuricate your plan--are you shooting to kill with infect, or commander damage? (Luckily, you're in the colors of Phyresis, Tainted Strike, and Glistening Oil, so sometimes this will not be quite a conflict. Grafted Exoskeleton is nice, too.)

In my personal experience, tiny toxic creatures like mites are good on turns 1-3 and quickly drop off from there as opponents gain any blockers at all. That's why I'd been hesitant about Vishgraz who comes down around turn 4-5, even though 3 tokens is nothing to sneeze at.

When you go really wide you can overpower opponent blockers with numbers, but I've never been fond of small non-evasive tokens in EDH. (Then again, maybe I've just never gone wide enough to see the light, who knows.) There's enough go-wide support in the colors that you can find broad buffs to mitigate this a bit, but whether allocating deck space to those enablers (as opposed to infect support) is worth it is a hard question. In situations like these, I almost always pick the infect support.

Voltron and flicker feel at odds, as flickering would cause auras and equipments to fall off, and there's also the tall/wide conflict.

Aristocrats is the most interesting direction to me personally (and you'd want a flicker subtheme in this deck, to generate fodder with your commander repeatably and maximize value out of cards like Metastatic Evangel). MOM commander is a nice source of Phyrexian/artifact aristocrats proliferate support. My immediate thought for Vishgraz aristocrats is: place the first poison counter on turns 1-3 with small 1-2 drops or Ichor Rats, and then sit back for a grindier defensive game as you repeatedly churn out mites by flickering your commander and sacrifice them to proliferate outlets. Take advantage of incidental proliferate on cards like Unnatural Restoration that also increase your resilience. TBH, I might try this myself and find those MOC cards a home. NOT THAT I NEED ANOTHER ABZAN DECK.

7. Most underrated card(s)?

Maybe it's just the MtG players I hang out with, but people tend to sleep on MDFC lands (both land-land and spell-land). I can believe that maybe they're not the best for every deck, but I love them and run them in every deck I own.

8. Best mechanic?