January 8-9 Pauper Weekend in Review

Okay who am I kidding. We’re going to talk about the Pauper Format Panel. But first, there were two Challenges this past weekend and we started the third segment of Crimson Vow season. Here’s a breakdown of both Top 32s:

To the surprise of no one, Grixis Affinity continues to rule the roost. Two of the other successful decks – Azorius Familiars and Burn – need their opponents to pack specific interactive pieces to have a chance, and those cards tend to be bad against Affinity. As I’ve said for a while now, unless something changes we are likely going to be living in Affinity’s world for the foreseeable future.

But that’s not interesting. The Pauper Format Panel – a group of players working with Wizards of the Coast to monitor format health and make recommendations – is far more intriguing than me pontificating on what might be the second best deck in Pauper. The article and video from Gavin do a fantastic job of explaining exactly what we are going to do and our task.

I want to reiterate what I said at the end of the video interview: that Pauper has given me so much and I consider it a privilege to try and steward the format into the next era. I know a lot of folks out there have reservations and if I were in their shoes, I’d agree. Pauper is in a rough spot but I honestly believe this group can right the ship.

What does this mean for this blog and my Patreon? My posts here are not going to change much. I am still going to be looking at the Top 32 data from every Challenge and talk about trends. What I won’t be doing anymore is talking about specific cards with regards to bans. I don’t want to mention a card here and then when the announcement rolls around, it’s still legal (or the opposite). I feel very comfortable talking about how Affinity is a dominant strategy and something needs to go, but I won’t speculate here as to what that card might be.

Similarly I am going to rework my Patreon. Currently there is a Patrons only channel in the #MTGPauper Discord and, just like ban talk, I don’t want there to be a perception that those folks have any undue influence. In reality it’s mostly people badgering me for my taste in sports teams. That being said, these changes are going to roll out more slowly as I want to ensure that the folks who have supported me are getting what they expect.

I’m very excited for this next era of Pauper. I genuinely hope that the work we do makes the format more enjoyable and that I see a few of you in the leagues.

Eight Weeks of Crimson Vow

Happy New Year everyone!

After a brief hiatus, I am back to talk about – what else? – Pauper! The second four weeks of Crimson Vow season have wrapped up which gives us another huge set of data to examine. For reference, these images include every deck that either finished with at least one Top 8 or had 2% of the Top 32 metagame.

Here is the chart recording the first four weeks of the season:

And here are the four most recent weeks:

I am going to hold off on a deep dive for the time being, but instead I want to focus on what I see as key points:

  • Bogles has emerged as the premier Ethereal Armor deck. Heroic made a case for itself in the first four weeks but more or less fell off in the December. Only Affinity, Boros Bully, and Delver had more Top 8s in the past four weeks than the slippery ones.
  • Dimir Faeries continues to fall. The deck is still fairly popular but access to good artifact removal seems to be pushing Izzet Faeries back up the power rankings.
  • Delver is still solid. Some folks like to sleep on plain old Delver decks as they do not do anything flashy. Six Top 8 finishes is impressive.
  • If you want to attack, you better have Rally the Peasants. There’s no other way to say this – attacking without some sort of force multiplier is just a losing proposition these days.
  • Affinity remains stupid good. Almost 29% of the Top 32. Almost 36% of the Top 8 slots. Five wins in eight challenges. Affinity remains the defining deck of the Pauper Challenge metagame. Heck, across the entire season so far, Affinity has over 40% of all Top 8s alongside 9 wins out of 19 Challenge level events.

Here’s one more chart. This takes into account every deck with at least 2% of the Challenge meta or a Top 8 finish. Decks in the red did not meet the 2% threshold but have a Top 8:

Affinity might be defining the format right now, but both Boros Bully and Delver are top tier strategies with Flicker Tron and Izzet Faeries not that far behind. If not for the sheer volume of Affinity that is seeing play (it has more Top 32 finishes than the next four most populous combined), the metagame would appear to be fairly vibrant,

Like so many other times in Pauper’s history, there’s an amazing metagame taking place outside the dominant strategy. I am hopeful that this year, we can get a metagame that doesn’t have an asterisk.

December 18-19 Pauper Weekend Recap

Another year draws to a close. Just like last the waning weeks of 2020 a specter is lingering over Pauper. The December 18 and December 19 Challenges are telling a similar story to the events from earlier in the season: Affinity is the deck to beat by a wide margin and everything else is fighting for edges.

The following chart pulls information from the past four Pauper Challenges. It features every deck that has at least 3 finishes in the Top 32. While Rakdos Affinity is taking a step back, Grixis Affinity is making moves to reassert its dominance.

What is going on behind Affinity? First, Boros Bully remains a strong contender. We have seen a greater variety in Bully builds and have even seen a return to Kuldotha Rebirth based Boros Decks fueled in part by Voldaren Epicure. After Bully the next best deck appears to be Izzet Faeries, but this is largely buoyed by two strong performances on Sunday. In reality, I would place Delver and Azorius Familiars as a tie for the third best archetype at the current moment.

Delver decks are never a bad choice. The core conceit of Delver of Secrets, Spellstutter Sprite, and Ninja of the Deep Hours represents a powerful foundation. The ability to run the correct suite of counterspells and tempo plays a given metagame means that Delver can consistently adapt to the field of battle. Even with cheap counters it can be hard to constrain Affinity but that does not stop Delver from getting a foot on the rung of the metagame.

After Delver it should be no surprise to long-time Pauper players that Familiars is making waves. The Familiar shell uses Sunscape Familiar to reduce the cost on powerful blue spells and combines cards like Snap with Azorius Chancery to have turns where chaining Mulldrifters is a breeze. While the deck can just out value opponents and win with flying fish the deck originated as a combo with Ghostly Flicker, Archaeomancer, and Sage’s Row Denizen as a kill mechanism. The deck is highly resilient and can catch unsuspecting opponents off guard. Beating Familiars requires either a quick clock or the ability to disrupt an attempt to Snap or Flicker and win on the crack back.

Familiars is a difficult deck to master and is made more problematic by the Magic Online interface, requiring several clicks to make it through the engine. This eats both the clock and patience. The result is that some people shy away from the power due to the learning curve but as dedicated pilots pick it up, the deck emerges as a formidable choice.

Because of these decks making a comeback, I would anticipate seeing a rise in decks using Vines of Vastwood. Vines is a tricky card that can be used to not only protect your creatures from cards like Snap, but can also be used offensively. Using Vines on your opponent’s creature means that only you can target it for the rest of the turn. This effectively turns off Ghostly Flicker and Ephemerate loops out of Familiars. While this alone will not be enough to stop the deck, when coupled with a quick clock it could provide an opportunity for a deck like Stompy to have a solid showing (provided, of course, it can solve that Affinity matchup).

December 11-12 Pauper Weekend Recap

When we last left off, Affinity was at the top of the heap. Moving into the second four week chunk of Crimson Vow season with the December 11 and December 12 Challenges, there has been some movement but not enough to unseat the current top deck.

The biggest trends to be continued over this weekend revolved around Boros Bully and Delver. While Rakdos Affinity continues to assert itself as the go-to option for Atog these days, the other two archetypes mentioned had fairly good weekends of their own. Boros Bully continues to put up solid numbers – both the traditional and more token based build – including a Sunday win by former World Champion Javier Dominguez.

The rise of Delver is interesting as well. While the deck has never fully faded away, it has taken a backseat as of late to both Dimir and Izzet Faeries. Currently, Delver is performing slightly better than both of those options. This may be in part due to the mana base, as it is far more consistent than either of the two-color decks. It might also be related to the pressure of a first turn Delver of Secrets, as Affinity does struggle when put on the defense early. Regardless, Delver is back, which could open up a window for Kor Skyfisher based midrange.

I do want to take a minute to talk about the mono white aggressive deck that has come into vogue recently. It is very likely that this deck will supplant Stompy as the traditional aggro deck in Pauper, at least given the current metagame. While it lacks the “go tall” plan of attack that Stompy can employ, it excels at going wide. It can also churn through cards faster than other aggro decks with Thraben Inspector and Search Party Captain.

Looking to next weekend, I would be looking to have a solid game plan to beat Affinity but would focus more energy on Delver and Bully. These two decks look to be making up more and more of the metagame and at this point if you’re playing, you should believe you have a solid matchup against Affinity, or be playing it yourself.

The First Four Weeks of Crimson Vow

Folks, I’m here to tell you that Affinity is good.

Shocker, I know.

Here is a chart breaking down the macro-archetypes from the first four weeks of Pauper’s Crimson Vow season. While this does not tell the whole story it does give a pretty good image of what is going on:

Affinity is the clear best deck in the format. Recent builds have opted to forego Thoughtcast and Prophetic Prism in favor of Wedding Invitation to provide yet another way to make Atog lethal. Whether it’s Grixis or Rakdos, Affinity is a confirmed monster, with nearly twice the volume and win share of the next best macro archetype. It also has 32 out of 72 recorded Top 8 slots and 4 wins out of 9 tournaments.

Like I said, Affinity is good.

After a significant gap the next best decks are all clustered together. Faeries, Ephemerate/Flicker decks, and Boros all make a clear Tier 1.5 when compared to Affinity’s Tier 0. Boros might be the most impressive of these archetypes. Buoyed by Bully, which has an easier time running Dust to Dust main than most decks, the deck has picked up steam. There’s another version running around which leans harder on small life advantages from cards like Lunarch Veteran and Sacred Cat. This build still is Boros Bully, but takes a slightly different approach in its creature base.

The emergence of Rakdos Affinity and Lunarch Bully are two trends from the past month. The other major trend is the decline of Dimir Faeries and the rise of regular Delver. The latest Delver builds have a more aggressive slant, leaning on Mutagenic Growth and cards like Force Spike to press their advantage. That being said, Delver is still under 5% of the Top 32 metagame and has just over 7.25% of the winner’s share.

So where does the format go from here? There are no new cards hitting the scene for several months so unless a ban is coming down the pike we can expect the metagame to largely resemble this one heading into 2022. Affinity is not going to go quietly and, despite the sideboard and main deck slots we’ve seen dedicated to dismantling the machine, it still succeeds. My advice is to have a good plan of the metal menace or just accept it as a bad matchup and try to beat the other major players.

November 27-28 Pauper Weekend Recap

This past weekend there were three major Pauper events. In addition to the Saturday and Sunday Challenges, there was also a Championship Qualifier. While the Qualifier won’t be added to my season end spreadsheet (it only posted the Top 16 as opposed to the Top 32), the format trends continued – Affinity accounted for 10 of the 24 Top 8 slots handed out over the weekend. After six Challenges, here is where the Top 32 metagame shakes out (accounting for every archetype with at least 4 appearances):

If you look at Affinity as a whole (there’s one more Jeskai Affinity deck not listed here), the archetype makes up almost 33% of the Top 32 metagame and has taken down 52% of all Top 8s awarded in Crimson Vow season.

I am not going to spend more time talking about how the format needs a ban – I’ve done that enough and frankly I’m tired of repeating myself. Instead I’m going to repeat myself in another way: talking about why this always feels like this is happening in Pauper.

As formats add cards, combos are going to be uncovered. If not for serious limiting elements and lock pieces, formats like Vintage and Legacy would arguably be more dominated by combo decks than they are today. To a degree, non-aggro, non-prison decks in Vintage do have some combo element – we see you Vault-Key and Tinker. In these other non-rotating formats there are important limiting factors. Cards like Trinisphere, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Damping Sphere, Blood Moon, Wasteland, Force of Will – all of these and more help to keep the broken decks in check to some degree. These cards help to bear the weight of an ever additive cardpool that is constraining existing strategies and taxing “unfair” decks.

Pauper has the ever additive cardpool but completely lacks powerful limiting agents. The result is a format that hangs in a tenuous state where adding the wrong suite of cards has the potential to push an “almost good” combo deck into the stratosphere. At this point we all know that any Storm spout is liable to break the format in half. Currently we’re living under the auspices of Atog – a combo deck that existed for years but was held at bay by one of the true broken limiting agents in Gorilla Shaman.

There are two paths to forge with Pauper. The first is to take more action against these combo decks. Given the nature of the cardpool that means more aggressive bans when these combo decks do arise. Please stop asking for more powerful hate bears at common, that’s not going to happen folks. Force of Will isn’t walking through that door and neither is Dryad Millitant, so let’s stop wishful thinking. For what it is worth, I believe this is the correct path to take.

The other is to just have Pauper be a combo format – one where the game is decided on turn two or three. We have already seen what Pauper looks like with combo running roughshod, so maybe the “answer” is to just do that. For what it’s worth, again, I think this would make for a miserable format where the old Vintage axiom would hold sway: The early game is shuffling, the mid-game is the mulligan decision, the late game is turn one.

What should Pauper be? In my opinion it should be a place where people get to play with commons that may have been overlooked at one point and not have to thread the needle of hoping not to die to an over-the-top combo deck. Given that the best tools against combo decks are not viable at common, the answer becomes a more aggressive management of the ban list.

November 20-21 Pauper Weekend Wrap Up

After four Crimson Vow challenges Pauper is in an unenviable spot. Grixis Affinity took home six Top 8 slots on Saturday and another six on Sunday. Over the course of the weekend 22 players took Grixis Affinity to a Top 32 finish – 11 on each day. The next most popular deck was Dimir Faeries with 4 appearances in the Top 32 on Saturday and none on Sunday.

Folks, this ain’t good.

This chart showcases every deck that has at least 3 appearances in the Top 32 this season or a Top 8 finish. Affinity is almost 29% of the metagame while no other deck has reached 8% Top 32 volume. Affinity is approaching if it has not already reached Splinter Twin status and things are not going to get much better.

Affinity has been around Pauper since the beginning and was the subject of the format’s initial banlist in Cranial Plating. Even after Atog was released as a common on Magic Online in 2011, the deck was merely another good choice for specific metagames. The Artifact Lands, which caused huge problems in other formats, were largely held in check by copious artifact removal headlined by Gorilla Shaman. Running Affinity always meant risking your board development in the face of a turn two or three Mox Monkey. As has been noted several times, the printing of the Modern Horizons 2 Bridge cycle made Affinity far more consistent in the face of hate. While Chatterstorm got a ton of press, Affinity was a strong contender during the reign of squirrels as well.

Now Affinity is not only remarkably consistent with regards to developing its board thanks to dual lands (that, by the way, effectively tap for more than two mana every turn), they also can present a fantastic natural clock in Myr Enforcer, a combo clock in Atog, and multiple combo-kill angles with Atog and Fling or Atog and Disciple of the Vault. It has one of the best removal spells in Galvanic Blast and access to some of the format’s best draw spells in Thoughtcast and Deadly Dispute – that latter of which is basically mana neutral in the deck. And let’s not get started on Blood Fountain which is basically a Sol Ring you can cash in for two creatures in the midgame.

Realistically, what deck can keep up with that?

Normally this is where we could talk about sideboard options. Cards like Dust to Dust and Deglamer have some utility but Fangren Marauder cannot stop Disciple from killing you – on the Fangren player’s turn your Disciple triggers will resolve before their Marauder triggers and well, we know how that ends. Without effective countermeasures, the deck will continue to add tools at a rate other decks cannot match. Affinity cannot continue to exist in its current form as there is no real way to fight the deck except to try and race.

I’m not going to get into the weeds about what should be banned as I’ve already made my opinion well known. We’re past the time for observing, for trying to figure out if something can reliably keep Affinity in check. After months, we know it’s the best deck by a fairly clear margin. There’s only one path forward and the people in Renton have to be the ones to walk it.