The Power of Pauper: New Pauper!
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 examining what impact sofar it seems that Commander Masters has had on the format overall. In addition to that we've got the first Challenge events of the weekend to dig into.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
The First Week of New Pauper
We've now got Commander Masters on Magic Online and well... it seems like very few of the new cards are showing up at all from over the weekend? The league results from last week are fairly bare too, but I suspect that is because those results got posted on the same day the cards were legal and were actually for the week prior, so we may see more this coming week, but it definitely seemed like a lot of players this weekend in the Challenges fell back on old habits and decks.
That isn't to say that players definitely didn't try new cards. We did see some new stuff, like All That Glitters in a Red/White Affinity shell over the weekend. Unknown if this is the best shell for this, but it looked pretty good.
Of course we did see it in a Bogles list and a Mono White Heroic list too. Of the new cards in the set this seemed to be the most common one we saw out of the weekend.
In addition to that we did see some Murmuring Mystic in the Azorius Familiars shell, which seems pretty interesting.
One card that I only really saw one decklist for in the Challenge events, but I did see a bit of hubbub here or there from content creators was Dread Return. I am honestly very surprised we did not see more of this card this weekend. Having cast a lot of this card in my career as a Magic player, nothing about Dread Return is very fair, and I feel like in the long run it has the most potential out of all of the cards in this set to be the most broken and powerful. I was very much told by a number of players in this regard that they didn't think it was good, and I tend to disagree with this assessment. I have a feeling we'll see this card show up more as time goes on and I think it will end up being very good.
So... despite the lack of many of the new cards, New Pauper is basically kind of like Old Pauper still, but I am curious how that will shift in the coming weeks as more and more players become comfortable with trying out some of these new strategies.
Pauper Challenge 8/5
The first Challenge event of the weekend was the Saturday event. This event had 60 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 ended up being the most popular deck here, but it's win rate was dragged down quite a bit. Boros Synthesizer did very well, as did Dimir Terror and Jeskai Ephemerate. Wildly, despite a great finish by Affinity, its win rate was dragged down a ton by the fact that the other pilots on the deck did not do as well.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Boros Synthesizer | 1st | Nulyan |
| Affinity | 2nd | O_danielakos |
| Burn | 3rd | Ed_Elric |
| Izzet Faeries | 4th | cicciogire |
| Dimir Terror | 5th | pepeteam |
| Dimir Terror | 6th | _against_ |
| Boros Synthesizer | 7th | rinazina |
| Jeskai Ephemerate | 8th | TopGrinder |
Half of this Top 8 was taken up by Boros and Dimir Terror, with some smattering of other decks. At the end of the event it was Boros Synthesizer that won.
This deck looks pretty powerful overall. It's got a lot of strong cards in it. Main deck Relic of Progenitus is a real strong thing.
In Second Place we have Affinity.
Very much a stock-looking list here. Very similar to what we've seen before out of these decks.
Also in this Top 8 we had Izzet Faeries.
This list topping out at five with Lorien Revealed is cool, but that's also a land and a draw spell late game which is very strong. This list looks quite fun and proactive.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we had Jeskai Ephemerate.
Another really fun and proactive deck here. I still really enjoy this deck quite a bit. It does a lot of powerful things.
Pauper Challenge 8/6
The second Challenge event of the weekend was the Sunday event. This event had 80 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 again was very popular here, and it had a much better win rate overall. Boros Synthesizer absolutely crushed the win rate of this event for sure, while Dimir Terror and Izzet Faeries did quite poorly.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Mono White Aggro | 1st | jwaves |
| Izzet Terror | 2nd | Purgatory_01 |
| Burn | 3rd | boom_bust |
| Izzet Faeries | 4th | WhiTe TsaR |
| Boros Synthesizer | 5th | Lollopollo2001 |
| Boros Synthesizer | 6th | FerMTG |
| Boros Synthesizer | 7th | LabroNico |
| Mono White Heroic | 8th | medvedev |
Boros Synthesizer was a big portion of this Top 8. At the end of the event though it was Mono White Aggro that won the event.
Very clean and straightforward aggro list here. This deck is cheap and very powerful.
In Second Place we have Izzet Terror.
Murmuring Mystic here seems like a strong card in this type of deck where it wants to throw spells at the opponent, and generating a bunch of 1/1s is very powerful.
Further down this Top 8 we have Burn.
Burn is definitely a deck to think about and consider when building in Pauper. It's very strong and has a lot of proactive gameplay to it.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we had Mono White Heroic.
A reasonable result by All That Glitters here, which looks really strong in a deck that wants to cast Aura spells onto its Heroic creatures. Very strong indeed.
Around the Web
- CardMarket has an article on the Top 4 decks upgraded by Commander Masters. Check it out here.
- Bryant Cook is playing some Dread Return! Check it out here.
- The deck of the week is Infect! Check it out here.
- Our good friend Alex Ullman has a recap on this past weekend's events. Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here.
Mono Black Devotion is a deck I haven't seen in a minute.
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!
