The Power of Pauper: Black Cat Magic
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 diving into a fun deck I saw last week utilizing Cauldron Familiar! In addition to that we've got two Challenges to look at from this past weekend.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
Foods and Cats and Food
I saw a really interesting and fun list last week (that was supposed to make it into the Spice Corner but unfortunately that was a flub due to an editing mistake on my part) that was utilizing the card Cauldron Familiar, typically used in other formats with cards like Witch's Oven (except that card is sadly an uncommon). I thought it would be a super fun deck to look at this week.
Ok, I find this list super interesting. There's lots of ways to generate Food tokens here and also cards like Lembas and Candy Trail that are inherently Foods. Being able to recur Familiar by blocking with it or sacrificing it to Reckoner's Bargain or Deadly Dispute is incredibly fun and interesting to me.
This deck definitely gives me a lot of the same sense as the Golgari Gardens decks do, except with a much more recursive threat in Cauldron Familiar that just can drain the opponent's life total down while drawing cards and making more tokens. The card that also impresses me here is Rowan's Grim Search since it can sacrifice any number of different cards in this deck, from the tokens themselves to the above two cards, it seems quite good here.
This is a deck I would certainly enjoy trying out myself. It seems like a lot of fun!
Pauper Challenge 9/23
The first Challenge event of the weekend was the Saturday event. This event had 58 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 the most popular deck here, followed by Mono Blue Terror. Both of thse decks had less than 50% win rates, but of these two Mono Blue Terror did much better in the top tables. Mainly these decks are both exceedingly popular enough that they draw in players who pick up the deck and that overall average drags down just a bit. This doesn't mean these decks have poor win rates and it's important to keep that in mind when looking at data like this as popularity does influence these sorts of things. Of the decks above the cutoff here Gates did quite well.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Mono Blue Terror | 1st | Beicodegeia |
| Mono White Heroic | 2nd | Ramelao |
| Golgari Gardens | 3rd | cicciogire |
| Walls | 4th | Aldreen |
| Jeskai Gates | 5th | Heisen01 |
| Mono Blue Terror | 6th | boytriton |
| Burn | 7th | Walker735 |
| Bogles | 8th | Make_it_Right |
Fairly varied Top 8 here. At the end of the event though it was Mono Blue Terror that won.
The power level of this deck is just so incredibly high and you can see how much the arms race we talked about last week between these decks and Red Burn decks has progressed to where we are seeing things like full eight Blast effects out of the sideboard just for those matchups.
In Second Place we had Mono White Heroic.
All That Glitters definitely beefed up this deck quite a bit as well, giving it some really strong velocity in pushing through kills. Having both it and Ethereal Armor is pretty good.
Also in this Top 8 we had Golgari Gardens.
Oh man Rancid Earth is a super sweet card in the sideboard here. I am digging that.
Further into the Top 8 we had Walls.
Very classic-looking Walls list here. I like Crashing Drawbridge as another way of granting haste outside of Tuktuk Rubblefort. This deck is one of my favorite Pauper decks though. It's so very goofy.
Pauper Challenge 9/24
The second Challenge event of the weekend was the Sunday event. This event had 63 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.
Mono Blue Terror had the highest popularity here and it was also the best-performing deck at a 66% win rate. Burn was the next popular deck but it's win rate was quite low. Azorius Affinity and Mono White Heroic had strong win rates here as well.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Mono Blue Terror | 1st | Beicodegeia |
| Mono Blue Terror | 2nd | FerMTG |
| Mono Blue Terror | 3rd | boytriton |
| Ephemerate Tron | 4th | TheManLand |
| Burn | 5th | kaikas |
| Jeskai Gates | 6th | Gcool_ko |
| Mono Blue Terror | 7th | Darthkid |
| Mono White Aggro | 8th | DenisevichAlexey |
Wow, so much Mono Blue Terror here in this Top 8. Half of the Top 8 is just that, and the finals was a mirror match. Who won? Well it was the same pilot who won the Saturday event.
The big differences here are in sideboard differences, primarily the inclusion of Murmuring Mystic in the main deck in the Second Place list. Dispel is a nice inclusion in the sideboard.
Further into the Top 8 we had Ephemerate Tron.
Fairly sweet and standard list here. Ephemerate Tron definitely seems quite fun and interesting for sure.
Also in this Top 8 we had Burn.
Our first appearance of the Sticker Goblin! This card seems quite good in these shells to just cast and drop a bunch of spells off of in a single turn depending on how much mana you net off of it.
Around the Web
- Bryant Cook has a videe on One Land Spy using the Sticker Goblin! Check it out here.
- Our good friend Alex Ullman has a recap of last weekend's events. Check it out here.
- Card Market's deck of the week is Burn with Sticker Goblin. Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here.
Haven't seen Devotion in a hot minute!
Jund TOKENS!
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!
