Wireless networks contain an inherent distributed spatial diversity that can be exploited by relays. Relay networks can take advantage of the broadcast-oriented nature of wireless transmission, but require more radio resource to transmit data for their multi-hop traits. Fortunately, incremental relaying technique, which can choose direct or multi-hop transmission adaptively, can efficiently utilize resource. In this article, the incremental transmission with amplify-and-forward (AF) relays is focused on. A practical hybrid-automatic retransmission request (HARQ) protocol is designed, and the related optimal relay selection strategy is proposed. To analyze the cooperative diversity of system with the proposed protocol, the capacity lower bound is deduced. Simulation and analytical results indicate that by adopting the optimal relay selection strategy, the system with the proposed HARQ protocol can achieve an order of cooperative diversity that equals the aggregated number of the relay and source nodes.