Magic Arena: Historic Pauper Decklists
With how fun Historic has been, I couldn't wait to dive in and try to make a few lists for the Historic Pauper event coming up!
For those that don't know what Pauper is, its a format where you can only use commons and Historic is a format that is currently an Arena exclusive that allows us to play with cards in our collection. Combine the two and we have Historic pauper
Here's more info on the event :
- When: March 28 2020 at 8:00 AM PT – April 4 2020 at 8:00 AM PT
- Format: Best of One Historic Pauper
- Entry Fee: 500 Gold or 100 Gems
- Event Structure: 4 wins or 2 losses (whatever happens first)
Rewards:
The event rewards you with ICR (Individual Card Rewards) that aren't standard legal anymore I.E. Ixalan etc but this excludes Historic Anthology cards. The ICR rarities can be anywhere from Uncommon to Mythic Rare. Now that we got a few details out of the way, let's jump into the decklists!
Up first is a more aggressive deck that has a ton of combat tricks and is about protecting one of our creatures and killing them in one swing. One of the biggest power houses we have is Kiln Fiend which backed behind cards like Spell Pierce and Dive Down can be pretty scary. Ontop of that, we play cards like Crash Through to try to trample over chump blockers. This deck is very much so all in but is pretty fun for a best of one format.
What about another "all in" playstyle? Here's my take on an attempt for Pauper Bogles aka known as Hexproofers:
Pretty straightforward here, as soon as I knew we had Ancestral Mask my mind went straight to Simic as there are so many things at the common rarity that have hexproof like Jungleborn Pioneer and Jade Guardian. We also have some closers like Soul of the Rapids. My original list had too many creatures and not enough auras so I cut Cold-Water Snapper as I don't think we want to hit six mana anyways. The answer to chump blockers with our massive creatures will be evasion so Arcane Flight and Talons of the Wildwood should be good enough to help us push damage over things like a bunch of 1/1s.
How about something a bit more controlling? Here is the deck I play every pauper event!...
What do I win with? Exactly, just Ill-Gotten Inheritance. So if you're in for a long grind game, this deck always gets the W's for me reliably. We should be able to keep ourselves afloat with all of our counterspells and kill spells until we find our wincon. We also have Omen of the Sea to dig deeper whereas before, we only had Opt. I'm not entirely sure how harmful milling our opponents with Didn't Say Please is, as the last time I played pauper was before THB. If there are enough escape threats then maybe we can just flat out play Cancel. If you want to really mill our opponents out, we can probably squeeze a few copies of Thought Collapse just to really grind out the games to a decking contest. We usually win this as Devious Cover-Up allows us to loop itself back into the deck.
I really wanted to make use of Tendrils of Corruption as that card is sweet but the only deck that can truly reward us for playing that is Mono Block Control.
This version is a lot like the Dimir variant where it only wins with Ill-Gotten Inheritance and if you're lucky, you can deal the full 20 damage with a Saproling token from Fungal Infection. Other than that, instead of counterspells, I just added all the kill spells I could find. Theres a discussion to add something along the lines of Epicure of Blood as it is a body and makes our Inheritance kill a little bit faster. I assume many people will try to play some form of go wide decks which is what Mephitic Vapors will help with. Pharika's Libation is a new card that will help us deal with the Hexproof decks as long as we line up our removal spells properly. Lastly, we have Reaper of Night as another way to sort of win even though its really there to just grind our opponents out of cards.
Conclusion
Pauper probably runs deeper than the archetypes I've presented so let me know what you're playing! Otherwise, thanks for stopping by and reading! Good luck in the event.
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