The Power of Pauper: What's New With 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 back to the Pauper column to see what's happening with Pauper as of late. We took a bit of a break from this column for a bit just because a lot of other stuff was going on with my other columns (Eternal Weekend NA was a big week for me), but now we're back! We've also got some Challenges to discuss from this past weekend which will help us get an idea of what's happening with the format.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
The Current Happenings of Pauper
It has been a hot minute since we had an article focused on the current Pauper metagame and just general vibe checks on how Pauper is looking lately. Let's start by checking out the Top 10 decks in metagame share that we're seeing on MTGGoldfish.
For the most part, the format seems like it hasn't really shifted all that much in a while, and honestly that's sort of fine? There hasn't been a bunch of huge shakeups really, and not only that the deck that I think most folks were wondering about seems to have settled well and that is Broodscale Combo.
I think there were a lot of immediate concerns about this deck in general. Comparisons to things like Splinter Twin are there, and yes the deck does have a very raw power level that it broke through the format to become one of the Top 10 decks of the format, but in general it seems like the format has had a lot of chances to adapt to the deck and has found ways to combat it. As most combo decks in Pauper, it's a deck that relies on a creature to do the combo, so that in of itself presents a challenge to the format that is already hyper focused on having ways of dealing with creatures.
The other thing here is that the deck does have to pull together two different cards in a deck that can draw cards but not easily tutor for either half and sometimes the deck is slow at piecing this together while an aggressive deck can take them down before they get a chance to do their thing.
Burn and Affinity still seem to be at the top of the metagame here, but realistically I have really only seen one or two Burn lists in most Top 8s in general, sometimes not even at all. The deck is pretty hyper focused and there are a bunch of ways to interact with it, so I don't really believe it's a huge issue right now. Same with Affinity. While Refurbished Familiar seemed quite huge, it didn't really push the deck as hard as something like Cranial Ram would have from MH3.
The rest of this looks nicely varied and interesting. There's a lot of different aspects of decks that fit traditional Aggro/Midrange/Control/Combo archetypes, and they all seem to pillar back and forth with each other. It's a solid place for a metagame to be. I do think it is worth keeping an eye on one singular card and it's really only mainly because of how homogenizing it is to deckbuilding in decks it goes in, and that's Writhing Chrysalis.
I do think this is certainly an exceptionally powerful card, one of the best commons from MH3, and does have a very strong effect on deckbuilding within Red/Green decks but also decks that can splash into either color easily. I don't think it's generally worth a ban right now, but it is a card that could move quickly to the top of the format on sheer power level if something did come along that busted it open.
Regardless, I find that Pauper is in a reasonably healthy spot right now. The games look varied and fun, and there really is a lot more than just these ten decks, and so much more that is able to do well in an event.
Innistrad Remastered on the Horizon
Another set much like Ravnica Remastered is on the way and being actively spoiled, this time being Innistrad Remastered. These sets generally always have some number of downshifts and also some great reprints (for those who like to bling out their decks), so I definitely recommend keeping an eye out. We'll be covering any new downshifts if there are any once the set is fully spoiled!
Pauper Challenge 32 11/29
The first Challenge event of the weekend was the Friday event. This event had 40 players in it thanks to the MTGO website. There was no data for this event.
You can find all of the decklists for this event here. The Top 8 is below.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Dimir Terror | 1st | carvs |
| Golgari Broodscale | 2nd | Beicodegeia |
| Cycle Storm | 3rd | Tyerube1618 |
| Mono Blue Terror | 4th | discoverN |
| Grixis Affinity | 5th | outZEROo |
| Burn | 6th | Xuxa |
| Mono Blue Terror | 7th | Luminati |
| Grixis Affinity | 8th | LuffyDoChapeuDePalha |
Pretty reasonable spread of decks here. At the end of the event it was Dimir Terror that won.
Very solid looking list here. Sneaky Snacker has proven itself to be a very good asset in a lot of decks and it looks very good in Dimir Terror as well.
In Second Place we had Golgari Broodscale.
As we noted above, it seems like the format really has adapted to this deck in a lot of ways and it has settled well into the metagame, despite a lot of fears over the deck possibly being too broken. Shambling Ghast is a super sweet addition to the Golgari builds, since it makes tokens when it dies or simply -1/-1's something, and it's an easy card to sacrifice to something like Deadly Dispute (making two Treasures with Dispute is sweet).
Also in this Top 8 we had Cycle Storm.
Siege Smash from Modern Horizons 3 is a very cool card in the sideboard here. Having a split second function to destroy an artifact or to pump your Horror of the Broken Lands and give it trample without being able to be responded to is nice.
Pauper Challenge 32 11/30
The second Challenge event of the weekend was the Saturday event. This event had 41 players in it thanks to the MTGO website. There was no data for this event.
You can find all of the decklists for this event here. The Top 8 is below.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Grixis Affinity | 1st | LuffyDoChapeuDePalha |
| Dimir Faeries | 2nd | barff |
| Cycle Storm | 3rd | Tyerube1618 |
| Grixis Affinity | 4th | __Noob__ |
| Mono Blue Faeries | 5th | Ixidor29 |
| Izzet Terror | 6th | Foresterf |
| Dimir Terror | 7th | SPyromancer |
| Madness Burn | 8th | NMT_Sco94 |
This is a very nice set of Top 8 decks here. The winner at the end of this one was Grixis Affinity.
This is certainly a well built version of this deck. Luffy is a really solid Affinity pilot, so if you're looking to get into this archetype, their lists are a really good place to start learning it.
In Second Place we had Dimir Faeries.
Nice to see Faeries is still a fun deck in this format. Again, Sneaky Snacker looks really good here. Surprised to not see Moon-Circuit Hacker, but there's a lot happening in this list that there's likely no room.
Further down the Top 8 we had Izzet Terror.
I really like the Izzet variations of this deck. Getting to have both Lightning Bolt and Skred is very cool for sure.
Pauper Challenge 32 12/1
The final Challenge event of the weekend was the Sunday event. This event had 56 players in it thanks to the MTGO website. There was no data for this event.
You can find all of the decklists for this event here. The Top 8 is below.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Grixis Affinity | 1st | outZEROo |
| Mono Blue Faeries | 2nd | NMT_Sco94 |
| Burn | 3rd | Mahers |
| Golgari Broodscale | 4th | NickNorman |
| Dimir Terror | 5th | O_danielakos |
| Grixis Affinity | 6th | LuffyDoChapeuDePalha |
| Burn | 7th | carrot_eater |
| Jund Broodscale | 8th | othavirium |
Again, another very reasonable spread of decks in the Top 8. At the end of the event it was Grixis Affinity that won again.
This deck hasn't had a ton of innovation since MH3, but that's fine, it hasn't really needed any, and it's still one of the better decks in the format right now to be playing.
In Second Place we had Mono Blue Faeries.
Very aggressive and clean looking deck here. This deck can really get interesting with some of its lines, especially anything involving Snap since Snap'ing a Spellstutter Sprite can rebuy the mana to recast the Sprite if you need to.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we had Jund Broodscale.
This is primarily only Jund because of the sideboard stuff and the Writhing Chrysalis in the main deck. Not so much like the Jund lists doing the Cleansing Wildfire gig.
Around the Web
- Pauperganda has a CYCLOPS VIDEO. Check it out here.
- TeasdaleMTG has a video on Elves. Check it out here.
- TeasdaleMTG also has a video on Mardu Breathless Knight. Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
As League results are now spread out across the week, let's dig in and find something spicy!
RUG? RUG!
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!
