The Power of Pauper: Inside and Out
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 taking a look at a sweet combo deck known as Inside Out. In addition to that we've got two Challenges to look at as well as a paper event from Poland.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
Going Inside and Out
Pauper decks often find very unique ways to win games. We've covered a number of various decks over the course of this column so far and plenty of decks have some very interesting ways to win. The deck we're looking at this week is very unique in how it wins through combat.
Inside Out is an interesting card. It has a ruling that states that "Effects that switch power and toughness apply after all other effects that change power and/or toughness, regardless of which effect was created first." Basically this means that based on how the layers system in MTG functions, if you were to cast Inside Out on Tireless Tribe, resolve the effect and then discard a card to boost Tribe by +0/+4 it would actually turn Tireless Tribe into a 5/1 (because the toughness boost gets applied and then the switch is applied later on).
It's a pretty unique functionality and makes for a very interesting deck utilizing these two cards.
This deck focuses primarily on getting a way to give Tireless Tribe evasion of some sort (be that Shadow or "can't be blocked") and using Inside Out to flip the P/T and discard cards to kill the opponent. It also gets to play a few Madness spells like Circular Logic so that it can pitch a counterspell to save a Tribe from some piece of removal. You can also use Squadron Hawk to put more cards in your hand to pitch to Tribe.
This is definitely a really wild deck and is really interesting overall. It's also quite cheap so it's a fun deck to possibly have to spring on an unsuspecting tournament.
C'mon! Katowice 9/9
There was a paper event in Katowice, Poland over the weekend as well. This event had 65 players in it, which is pretty awesome to see. The name of the event was C'mon! Katowice.
You can find all of the decklists for this event here. Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | Player Name |
|---|---|---|
| Golgari Gardens | 5-0 | Fridrich |
| Azorius Affinity | 5-0 | Karol Guzy |
| Kiln Fiend Aggro | 5-1 | Jordanescu |
| Golgari Gardens | 5-1 | Lukasz Kowalewski |
| Familiars | 5-1 | Maciej Pukrop |
| Jeskai Gates | 5-1 | Mirco Ciavatta |
| Mono Blue Terror | 5-2 | Kamil Gral |
| Burn | 5-2 | Kemoris |
Looks like a really solid Top 8 for a really sweet paper event!
Pauper Challenge 9/9
The first Challenge event of the weekend was the Saturday event. This event had 46 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 data sheet here.
Burn was very popular here but only had a middle-of-the-road win rate. Gruul Ponza performed very well as did Gates and Mono Blue.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Kiln Fiend Burn | 1st | Lorwy |
| Gruul Ponza | 2nd | MagicTonga |
| Burn | 3rd | bernardocssa |
| Gruul Ponza | 4th | LasVegasChaos |
| Boros Bully | 5th | Kirblinxy |
| Jeskai Gates | 6th | twister66 |
| Jeskai Gates | 7th | -sin |
| Mono Blue Terror | 8th | outZEROo |
Quite a bit of Burn and Ponza here. At the end of the event, it was the Kiln Fiend version of Burn that won.
This deck operates more on the Prowess/spell triggering function of Kiln Fiend by having spells that boost its stats as well as give things like double strike or protection than a traditional burn shell.
In Second Place we had Gruul Ponza.
This deck has a lot of strength to it. Ramping while denying your opponent land drops is quite good. Hilariously enough, Reclaiming Vines is a Naturalize effect that also hits a land so it can be boarded in place of one of the existing spells and its still flexible.
Further down the Top 8 we had Jeskai Gates.
The red splash here is primarily for the blast effects out of the sideboard. I liken this a lot to UW Control decks in other formats that splash into red for sideboard cards. Pretty smart list overall though.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we had Mono Blue Terror.
These Terror lists being so good is a lot of the reasons why we are seeing red decks rise to the forefront as more and more decks are playing Red Elemental Blast and Pyroblast. This list is very interesting though and it's neat to see Delver of Secrets finally be a real card in the format after so long.
Pauper Challenge 9/10
The second Challenge event of the weekend was the Sunday event.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here. There was no data collected for this event, so let's look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Burn | 1st | JuaKi |
| Burn | 2nd | bernardocssa |
| Burn | 3rd | biguh |
| Burn | 4th | iNickStrad |
| Gruul Ponza | 5th | _Noob_ |
| Azorius Affinity | 6th | Beicodegeia |
| Burn | 7th | boom_bust |
| Grixis Affinity | 8th | O_danielakos |
Holy moly that's a lot of Burn in this Top 8. In fact, it was the finals match and both lists were exactly the same!
Very stock and definitely strong. This seems to be defining variant of this deck at the moment.
Further down the Top 8 we had Azorius Affinity.
It has been interesting watching this deck's trajectory. I feel like it's really settled into the metagame for sure.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we had Grixis Affinity.
Conversely at the same time it feels like we have not seen too much of this deck since the Azorius build became the defacto variant. I still think there's a lot of reasonable space for this shell though.
Around the Web
- Pauperganda has a video on Azorius Affinity. Check it out here.
- The Card Market deck focusing on Eldraine cards is focusing on Goblins. Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here.
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!
