The Power of Pauper: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bogle

Howdy folks! It's time yet again for another edition of The Power of Pauper! I'm your host, Joe Dyer, and this week we're going to be continuing our journey into various archetypes in the format with a current look at Bogles! In addition to that we've got two Challenges to look at and of course a Spice Corner.

How Bogling!

For as long as cards like Gladecover Scout and Slippery Bogle have existed, there has been a deck like Bogles. Leaning on the idea that your creature is hard to interact with through common removal because of hexproof and then loading up that creature with all sorts of enchantments to make it scary is a strong strategy for sure. This deck can easily push out a lot of damage over a few turns as many of its auras cost very little to play and mana ramp like Utopia Sprawl help it get the mana fixing it needs.

The core of the deck is pretty simple. Play a hexproof creature. Put Auras on it and attack and kill your opponent as quickly as possible before they can interact. Most recently the biggest boon this deck got out of the format was the downshift of All That Glitters, giving the deck another redundant copy of cards like Ethereal Armor and Ancestral Mask.

The way this deck can push its damage through is by having access to evasive auras like Rancor and Armadillo Cloak giving trample. Generally the Bogle creature is going to be bigger than any other creature in play and it can push that damage over with trample. Armadillo Cloak and Spirit Link give a triggered ability form of lifelink, which also makes it hard for the opponent to interact by killing the opponent outside of a combo kill.

The best way to interact with this deck is to either run effects that force the opponent to sacrifice creatures (Chainer's Edict is good for this) and hope they don't have additional creatures to sacrifice, countering the spells they mean to cast and preventing them from creating the clock, or ignoring them and planning out a combo strategy that doesn't care about their clock. You can also play cards like Standard Bearer post board to force your opponent to have to put their Auras on the Standard Bearer.

This deck is fun, strong, and very linear. It has access to some strong sideboard material, but it is a strong part of the format and a great deck to get into the format with overall since the strategy is very straightforward to understand.

Pauper Challenge 10/7

The first Challenge event of the weekend was the Saturday event. Because there was no data for this event we only have the Top 32 to go off of.

You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here. There was no data for this event, so let's look at the Top 8.

Not a huge amount of diversity here. Three decks make up most of this Top 8 (Gates, Affinity, Terror) and at the end, it was Azorius Affinity that won.

Leave No Trace is very clever as an answer to things like Bogles enchantments (like we talked about above) and All That Glitters on the opposing side of the field. It can even be prudent to hold back your own Glitters to deploy after destroying all the others.

In Second Place we had Boros Ephemerate.

I actually think this deck looks kind of cool. It's a lot like the Orzhov deck but it gets some things like Ardent Elementalist and Lightning Bolt and that is sweet.

Further down the Top 8 we had Mono Blue Terror.

Jace's Phantasm is kind of a cool sideboard card. A one-mana possible 5/5 flier in the mirror seems quite strong given that your opponent is going to want to have cards in their graveyard too for Cryptic Serpent and Tolarian Terror. Going over the top makes sense.

Pauper Challenge 10/8

The second Challenge event of the weekend was the Sunday event. This event had 61 players in it thanks to the data collected by the Castle of Commons Discord.

You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the datasheet here.

Burn was highly represented here and its win rate was really good. Mono Blue Terror was also highly represented but its win rate suffered a lot. Everything else above the cutoff was 50% or higher.

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Again some stifled diversity in the Top 8 with multiples of three decks. At the end of the event it was Beicodegeia (who has been on a Pauper tear lately) continuing to win events this time with Azorius Affinity.

Of One Mind is cool here because more than likely you're going to get to cast it for U with how easy it is to deploy Moon-Circuit Hacker and a non-Human card (more than likely the Ornithopter or Gingerbrute you ninjutsu'ed).

In Second Place we had Burn.

Leaning more on the Thermo-Alchemist pinger-style game plan here, and no Sticker Goblin to be seen. This list is more focused on slogging through turns to ping your opponent to death quickly.

Near the bottom of the Top 8 we had Orzhov Ephemerate.

Really haven't seen this deck in the top tables of events in a hot minute. This looks fairly stock for the most part. Omen of the Dead is pretty cool.

Around the Web

• StompyMTG has a video on Izzet Terror. Check it out here.
• The Card Market deck of the week is Sticker Infect. Check it out here.

The Spice Corner

You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here.

Madness Burn!

Wrapping Up

That's all the time we have this week folks! Thanks for continuing to support the column and join us next week as we continue our journey into Pauper!

As always you can reach me at all my associated links via my Link Tree! In addition, I'm always around the MTGGoldfish Discord Server and the MTGPauper Discord Server.

Until next time!