  We consider two-flavor asymmetric QCD combined with a low-energy effective
model inspired by chiral perturbation theory and lattice data to investigate
the effects of masses, isospin and baryon number on the pressure and the
deconfinement phase transition. Remarkable agreement with lattice results is
found for the critical temperature behavior. Further analyses of the cold,
dense case and the influence of quark mass asymmetry are also presented.
