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We’ve made it four weeks through Spider-Man/Through the Omenpaths season. Traditionally this is where I check in with the format as opposed to recounting what happened in the previous week. So let’s do that by examining what I consider to be the ten best decks in the format over the past month.
10. Faeries (-2) – 7 Top 8s; AMSAR: 0.21
Faeries remains a stalwart of the format. Despite a recent surge in the popularity of Dimir Faeries, the mono blue version continues to put up solid results. The game plan of sticking evasive creatures and turning them into ninjas, all while backed up with counterspells, has stood the test of time. Faeries might not be the flashiest deck in the format but it gets the job done.
9. Dimir Faeries (-3) – 3 Top 8s; 2 Wins; AMSAR: 0.23
How can Dimir Faeries be above the other two decks considering it has worse seasonal metrics? Recency bias. While Dimir Faeries might be lacking in raw numbers it has come on strong over the past few weeks and is gaining popularity. The ability to play a traditional Faeries game with access to removal is potent, especially if you manage to fit in a threat like Murmuring Mystic or Gurmag Angler to help turn the corner.
8. Rakdos Madness (+2) – 2 Top 8s; AMSAR: 0.31
Another well established archetype that tries to turn the downside of Faithless Looting and similar cards into an advantage. Rakdos Madness can pile on the damage and has adopted Swarm, Being of Bees/Wekhdu, Midnight Hunter as another threat, giving the deck more options to flash this out or to access it post combat with Mayhem.
7. Elves (Not Ranked) – 7 Top 8s; 1 Win; AMSAR: 0.37
Elves has restablished itself as a real player in Pauper. The deck is capable of spitting out a ton of creatures and present a lethal combination involving Timberwatch Elf. Elves also has adopted Avenging Hunter as another top end threat which makes sense considering the deck is quite capable of gumming up the board to defend the Initiative.
6. Aristocrats (-4) – 6 Top 8s; 1 Win; AMSAR: 0.38
Aristocrats – or Black Sac – is a mono black aggressive deck that leverages sacrifice outlets and creatures that leave behind material to generate massive threats. The deck strategy has been on the fringes of Pauper for quite a while and has broken out this year thanks to Perigee Beckoner. With two copies of the Beckoner, Aristocrats can generate an unbound number of death triggers and an arbitrarily large Carrion Feeder. It is this additional gear that has boosted the deck from jobber to contender.
5. Madness Burn (+2) – 9 Top 8s; 1 Win; AMSAR: 0.5
What happens when you cut the black cards from Rakdos Madness and replace them with Guttersnipe and more burn? You get the best red deck in the format. Madness Burn can pile on the damage and when it is doing the thing a single Lava Dart can represent nearly a third of a starting life total. Things get scarier when Guttersnipe is joined by Kessig Flamebreather or two, turning any one damage spell into a Fireblast level threat.
4. Jund Wildfire – 10 Top 8s; 1 Win; AMSAR: 0.5
The Midrange Deck of the format, Jund Wildfire is just a collection of good cards. Stitched together with a Cleansing Wildfire engine, the deck runs solid threats, top tier removal, and can even have maindeck Duress as a treat. It’s hard to describe this deck as anything other than Jund and while it is falling back to the pack just a bit it is still quite capable of Jundin’ them out.
3. High Tide – 8 Top 8s; 1 Win; AMSAR: 0.53
I wrote my piece on High Tide last week so I will not rehash it here. Suffice to say the deck is quite good but hardly Storm levels of broken. It remains a polarizing strategy due to the fact that some decks are simply incapable of presenting meaningful interaction. In it of itself this is not a bad thing, but the list of decks that fit this bill may be too long.
2. Grixis Affinity (+3) – 11 Top 8s; 2 Wins; AMSAR: 0.93
The only reason Affinity is not higher on this list is because it has only recently put up strong numbers. It is also hard to separate the deck’s success from the pilot that is LuffyDoChapeuDePalha, who has put up the vast majority of Top 8s and wins with Grixis Affinity. Make no mistake – the control deck is powerful – but like any control deck it takes some time for the metagame to settle before it can present the proper answer suite.
1. Blue Terror – 11 Top 8s; 1 Win; AMSAR: 0.87
Tolarian Terror better watch out – Grixis Affinity is coming for its crown. Blue Terror can present a quick threat and protect it with counterspells. Blue Terror’s threats are some of the largest available in Pauper and rarely come at full price. Whether or not this strategy can stay on top remains to be seen, but it almost certainly isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
I want to take a moment to thank all my Patrons. I am going to do my level best to keep providing you with the kind of content that brought you here in the first place. If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sign up for my Patreon starting at just $1.
Can’t make a commitment to Patreon? I have a Ko-Fi where you can make a one time contribution.
I want to take a moment to thank all my Patrons. I am going to do my level best to keep providing you with the kind of content that brought you here in the first place. If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sign up for my Patreon starting at just $1.
Can’t make a commitment to Patreon? I have a Ko-Fi where you can make a one time contribution.
Want to learn more about the metrics I use in tracking the metagame? You can find an explainer here.
It is impossible to tell the story of last weekend’s Magic Online Pauper Challenges without addressing High Tide. The deck made eight total appearances in the Top 32 and five of those ended in the Top 8 (including a win). Gavin Verhey of Wizards of the Coast and the Pauper Format Panel announced that the update on the format had been moved to November to align with the other Banner and Restricted List updates. This announcement is supposed to decide the fate of High Tide – whether it is banned once again or allowed to persist. The anticipation is palpable and if you are following the discourse then you probably know how people feel about the deck. Almost no one feels it is oppressively strong in the metagame and yet many people want the deck neutered in some way because of how it impacts tournaments.
High Tide is non-deterministic. When the deck goes for it there is a high chance of success but it is not guaranteed, which means the correct play in a tournament setting is to hope the Tide pilot fizzles; that they run into a sequence of cards that opens the window for you to take one more turn and hope they don’t go for it again. The High Tide combo turn can be a plodding ponderous thing that requires constant attention and tracking. The Professor recently featured such a turn as a part of the closing credits of his Shuffle Up & Play series and if you have a quarter hour to spare you can check the turn here. Yes, this is played for laughs and yes, there are pilots who can move through the operations more quickly. That does not take away from the reality that these kinds of moments exist and can wreck havoc on a tournament’s timeline and participants enjoyment (beyond the agony of defeat).
What about the deck’s performance? It is merely above the curve. Over Tarkir Dragonstorm season High Tide had an Adjusted Meta Score Above Replacement of 0.48 – about half a win better than an average Top 32 deck in that span. It’s mean finish was just outside the Top 16 and it had two wins in nine Top 8 appearances. But there’s another stat I measure that I don’t break out often – Expected Top 8% against Actual Top 8%. Given a deck’s average Swiss performance we can estimate how often the deck should make the Top 8. In Tarkir Dragonstorm season High Tide should have made the Top 8 in 23.85% of its Top 32 appearances, or 9.06 times. While the strategy didn’t meet the fractional mark, it played true to form.
In Magic X FINAL FANTASY the deck made the Top 8 ten times with two victories. It had an AMSAR of 0.45 (in line with Dragonstorm) but this time averaged a finish in the Top 16. It had an expected Top 8% of 31.25%, or ten appearances. Once again, High Tide merely performed to its mean. It isn’t until Edge of Eternities that we see the deck bump itself to another level. In the most recently completed season the strategy ended up with an AMASR of 0.43 and again, had an average finish just outside the Top 16. However it had 19 Top 8 finishes and two wins. Given its overall performance High Tide should have ended with a Top 8 conversion rate of 24.48% – around 15 trips to the elimination rounds. It over-performed in this metric to the tune of 7.19%, earning around four additional chances to play more Magic.
Now those numbers might seem gaudy, and they are in isolation. However if we look at two of the more popular and successful decks in the format, we see another story. Blue Terror had around a dozen Top 8s above expectation during Edge of Eternities season; Jund Wildfire had around eight more opportunities to win the trophy. Yes, High Tide has been good, but when taken in the context of the metagame that has been where the deck tops out. Even in the current season (three weeks in) it has the third best AMSAR of 0.62 (behind Blue Terror and Aristocrats) and us currently performing about two Top 8s above expectation.
On the numbers, the deck does not appear to be an issue. That being said there are things these statistics do not tell us. They do not tell us how many people opt out of the deck due to clock considerations nor how successful the deck is in tabletop play. They do not tell us how many rounds go to time or past (active player finish your turn and then there are five additional turns does not come with a hard cap on minutes). We do not know how many people have zoned out, miserable that they couldn’t grab a bite to eat because there was an iota of a chance they could pull out a win if and only if the opponent couldn’t find the key card.
I don’t have an answer for you today, but I want to know what you think: what do you think should happen to High Tide?
10. Rakdos Madness (Not Ranked)
9. Rally Red (-3)
8. Faeries (+1)
7. Madness Burn (-2)
6. Dimir Faeries (NR)
5. Grixis Affinity (-1)
4. Jund Wildfire (-3)
3. High Tide (+5)
2. Aristocrats (+1)
1. Blue Terror
I want to take a moment to thank all my Patrons. I am going to do my level best to keep providing you with the kind of content that brought you here in the first place. If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sign up for my Patreon starting at just $1.
Can’t make a commitment to Patreon? I have a Ko-Fi where you can make a one time contribution.
I want to take a moment to thank all my Patrons. I am going to do my level best to keep providing you with the kind of content that brought you here in the first place. If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sign up for my Patreon starting at just $1.
Can’t make a commitment to Patreon? I have a Ko-Fi where you can make a one time contribution.
Want to learn more about the metrics I use in tracking the metagame? You can find an explainer here.
Two weeks into the Spider-Man/Through the Omenpaths season and things are starting to take shape. Of course the shape of the format bears more than a passing resemblance to the end of Edge of Eternities, which in turn looked awfully similar to the final days of FINAL FANTASY. Considering Pauper is a non-rotating format with a massive card pool this phenomena isn’t that much of an outlier, but it still warrants some discussion.
Like many other non-rotating formats, Pauper has been at the whim of sets that have bypassed standard. The Modern Horizons trio have had an outsized influence on the makeup of the metagame and the basic land cyclers from The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth continue to hold manabases together with duct tape and a dream. These sets were printed directly into Modern, which means they could have a higher power level. It would make sense that these cards would have a wider impact. Universes Beyond – the sets that take place outside the Magic multiverse were supposed to skip Standard which in turn gave a faint glimmer of hope that Pauper could experience some more regular churn.
Pauper is almost always in a tenuous balance between a stable and a stagnant metagame. Once a card file becomes fully integrated into the format, things settle until the next release. Occasionally a Standard level release would inject life into an archetype or bring something entirely new to the table, but more often than not such shifts came with sets designed with larger formats in mind. Universes Beyond, initially, was a boon in that it promised regular infusions of stronger options. Regardless of the realm which the cards came from, the hope was for game play that could would be novel more often.
But now Universes Beyond passes through Standard. And there are more Standard legal releases than ever. While this means more potential options to shake up Pauper that is not the likely outcome. Pauper is more likely to get additional role players than cards that spawn new archetypes or change the nature of existing decks. As a result things are largely going to feel the same from cycle to cycle, even if there is new art for a given effect.
It feels like, these days, if you are critiquing some element of the 2026 release schedule you’re not really speaking to the Magic audience. The folks I feel most for are people who enjoy and engage with Standard as their format is set to develop at a pace that has not yet been seen. For me, I just wish we had more time with each set and world. Iterating on mechanical themes gave chance for one or two to slip through and while we still see cross set synergy, things don’t often fit together nearly as well.
As for the Pauper of today, Blue Terror remains a terror. It was far and away the best performing deck on the weekend. Jund Wildfire, despite a pair of Top 8 finishes, actually performed worse than the average Top 32 deck with an Adjusted Meta Score Above Replacement of -0.27. Don’t worry – other format staples such as High Tide (-0.34) also found themselves in the red. I never place too much stock in a single week, especially in a cycle when not much has changed. If anything I would be working towards trying to have a good matchup against Blue Terror and figuring out the rest from there. I would also be keen on having a strong defensive game considering the rise in both Aristocrats and Madness Burn over the past week.
10. Spy Walls
9. Faeries (Not Ranked)
8. High Tide (-5)
7. Elves (-3)
6. Rally Red
5. Madness Burn (+4)
4. Grixis Affinity (+1)
3. Aristocrats (+4)
2. Jund Wildfire (-1)
1. Blue Terror (+1)
I want to take a moment to thank all my Patrons. I am going to do my level best to keep providing you with the kind of content that brought you here in the first place. If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sign up for my Patreon starting at just $1.
Can’t make a commitment to Patreon? I have a Ko-Fi where you can make a one time contribution.
I want to take a moment to thank all my Patrons. I am going to do my level best to keep providing you with the kind of content that brought you here in the first place. If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sign up for my Patreon starting at just $1.
Can’t make a commitment to Patreon? I have a Ko-Fi where you can make a one time contribution.
Want to learn more about the metrics I use in tracking the metagame? You can find an explainer here.
Technically we have entered a new Pauper cycle. The release of Spider-Man/Through the Omenpaths has added a number of cards to the format. None of these have had a massive impact at the time of writing and as a result the top of the format looks largely unchanged from where it was just a week ago.
Stability is not a foreign concept in Pauper, but one has to go back several years to find a time when a year would go by without a high power release injecting new life into the format. This year this phenomena was replace with the trial unban of High Tide which shook things up. While Tarkir Dragonstorm, FINAL FANTASY, and Edge of Eternities brought new cards to the table, none of these had the impact of a single Modern Horizons set. Would the current crop of Spy Combo decks exist without Sagu Wildling? Probably not. Would Pauper have any resemblance to the current format if Sneak Snacker had never been printed? Highly unlikely.
Back to the topic at hand. Pauper is stable to some and stagnant to others. Whether the status quo will remain long term remains to be seen. Instead the current moment asks for innovation on current lists to try and find the small edges which can lead more wins.
The big three remain the same – Jund Wildfire, Blue Terror, and High Tide. While not dissimilar from the antiquated Aggro-Combo-Control triumvirate the current dynamic has a midrange deck and an aggro-control archetype. This amounts to splitting hairs as these three have been well known entities for months at this point and have already started to adapt and adjust to each other. Even beneath the surface things are largely the same, with various aggressive red decks trying to find their footing around a field of Dread Return combo, Elves, and Faeries.
And herein resides the rub. Things are stable, but without an infusion of sufficiently powerful cards the texture of the format is not likely to change dramatically in the immediate future. Now would be a perfect time to try and hone one’s skills with a particular deck in an effort to gain expertise. Beyond that, just about everything I wrote about last week here remains true. If anything there’s a chance for Darval/Spider-Man to make waves but they are best suited to winning white midrange mirrors, which do not seem to be a popular matchup these days. We’ll just have to see if anything evolves in the coming weeks or if we can expect more of the same.
10. Spy Walls (-3)
9. Madness Burn (-4)
8. Gruul Ponza (Not Ranked)
7. Aristocrats (+1)
6. Rally Red (NR)
5. Grixis Affinity (+1)
4. Elves (+5)
3. High Tide (-1)
2. Blue Terror (-1)
1. Jund Wildfire (+2)
I want to take a moment to thank all my Patrons. I am going to do my level best to keep providing you with the kind of content that brought you here in the first place. If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sign up for my Patreon starting at just $1.
Can’t make a commitment to Patreon? I have a Ko-Fi where you can make a one time contribution.
I want to take a moment to thank all my Patrons. I am going to do my level best to keep providing you with the kind of content that brought you here in the first place. If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sign up for my Patreon starting at just $1.
Can’t make a commitment to Patreon? I have a Ko-Fi where you can make a one time contribution.
If you are reading this then you either regularly follow my work or you were brought here by a teaser I wrote. Regardless, welcome to my corner of the internet. This piece will serve as a way to organize my thoughts about the September 27 announcement of the 2026 Magic: The Gathering release schedule. The sheer volume of product: seven Standard legal releases, including four from the Universes Beyond line, is a lot. Couple this with some Secret Lairs that make no sense to me (and apparently many others) and there was a lot of discourse floating around the pockets of the internet I inhabit. So what’s a writer to do but write, so here I go. I’m not going to try and extrapolate my feelings to the wider audience here – this is how I feel. If any of that resonates with you then I’m grateful to have helped given workd to your emotions.
I found Magic in grade school. I was already a voracious reader of fantasy novels by the time I saw the cards and the idea of being part of a story drew me to the game. Part of this, I’m sure, was power fantasy. I was (and am) short and was not athletically inclined until college. The idea of being a powerful wizard summoning monsters to do battle on my behalf was enticing. As my friends started to drift away I dug deeper, scouring the internet and reading magazines (remember those?) to find places to play. That led me to Neutral Ground – my first Local Game Store – and a community I returned to through graduate school.
Time and time again Magic served as an escape. When I was struggling with my assistantship supervisor in my Master’s Program, there was Magic to give me a sense of comfort. When my first job kept me in the suburbs I was able to find another game store for Friday Night Magic and Prerelease events. Returning to Brooklyn for my second job led me to yet another store and a new community. Throughout these points in my life I was writing – whether for articles or forum posts – I was engaged with other people about the game. Time and time again what kept me engaged with Magic was not just the experience of sitting down and shuffling cardboard or clicking my screen but rather the opportunity to share those moments with other people.
In the fallout from yesterday’s announcement I have seen some decry to loss of the game’s soul. That somehow this shift away from original settings somehow lessens the totality. On some level I agree. I was (and still am) enamored with the worlds of Magic and while I did enjoy comic books as a kid I never found the same thrill in the Marvel Universe. Even though I devoured fantasy novels I never completed reading The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I fell in love with Magic because of Magic and though I wish we spent more time with those original worlds I still enjoy every visit.
Over time I came to realize the soul of the game was not these worlds or the characters, but the people. The gorgeous and full settings pulled me in but it was the draw of connection that kept me coming back. If it were not for the community I would have lost interest long ago. They say it truly is about the gathering but the game is nothing without the people.
There’s been a lot of discussion over the years about the emotional reaction and resonance of Magic. The idea that at some point there is going to be something distinctly For You. These are the things that you hold dear; that you love. It follows that there are going to be somethings that are not for you. Maybe these are things you despise but I would argue that the worst thing one can feel towards Magic is indifference. If I love a set and hate the next, I can look at the upcoming one for something else I love. It can keep me engaged. What happens if that hate is replaced with nothing – a middle of the scale emotion? If there are too many sets where I am completely indifferent then perhaps I look for that community elsewhere.
A Magic set used to be a rarer thing. There was more time to sit with and digest a world. They were surgical and had to hit as many player types as possible. Now Magic releases seem to never stop with the goal being “like what you like”. I am not sure if this is better or worse in aggregate. I find cards I enjoy everywhere and some sets that definitely resonate with me. I cannot speak for everyone but then again my relationship with the game has changed. I may be indifferent to entire settings but there is always at least a card or ten that pique my interest and make me smile.
The world is uncertain. Speaking nothing about the state of global affairs and the current state of my country of residence, things that I once believed to be stable no longer appear that way. And that is scary. I am also a parent and nothing prepares you for the challenges of raising a human who is constantly changing. Personally, surgery and chronic illness have altered the course of my life. But Magic has been a constant.
Magic has become a touchstone for me. A way to find a piece of calm in the chaos of existence. Yet Magic has continued to change, albeit in different ways. The game today is not the same as the only I played on the school yard black top as a ten year old. Part of me misses that, but I think what I miss more is the stability that Magic represented. A world for three sets, then two, then one. Worlds I didn’t know being introduced to me over the course of three acts before being condensed into snapshots, and then some of them replaced with worlds that I did know and yet felt entirely alien. Magic is still a constant in my life but the motion sickness pill it provided doesn’t hit the same way.
Part of who I am is defined by Magic. I have written about the game for over a decade. I have worked with Wizards of the Coast in some capacity for several years, whether through coverage or the Pauper Format Panel. There are people I have met along they way who are not nearly as engaged but they still feel a strong affinity towards Magic. They are not people who play but rather they are Magic players. Developing an identity is not an easy thing to do and having part of who you believe to be changed by external forces can be jarring. Yet for much of the time the thing that brought the community together was Magic.
What happens when someone finds this community through other means? Whether it’s Doctor Who or Spider-Man or the next entry in Universes Beyond, are they any less of a Magic player? A driving force behind the production of cards for years has been acquisition – getting new players into the game. I have seen first hand people brought in by Universes Beyond become Magic players. Is their experience any less valid?
I am a die hard Mets fan and while, as I write this, they are not making the postseason they are still a team set up for success. I have been a fan of the Mets for almost 30 years, through many lean times. I have seen their home stadium empty and full. Fans who engage during the boom times sometimes get chastised as “jumping on the bandwagon”. and maybe they fall off. But when they stick around and engage more deeply with the fandom, then the highs and lows they experience are not that different from my own.
I can’t speak for everyone but I remember feeling like I was an outsider for playing Magic. I have to imagine others felt the same way. Now that the game is popular I don’t want to make others feel unwelcome because of how they found their way to this space. The soul of the game is the people.
I cannot write about this moment without acknowledging that currently, for worse, we live in a capitalist system. Profit drives so much of what is served to the world on a daily basis and that is something that leaves me, personally, feeling uneasy. But this is the system in which we currently operate, and that means that for some the line must always go up. This is not new to Magic and one could argue has been part of the game since it was impossible to find packs of Alpha. The difference is that today it is much more in our face and we are constantly bombarded with the siren song of spending. Can there still be art to the game? Has art always existed under capitalism? I want to say yes but I can fully understand and appreciate folks who disagree. Even me writing these words is, in a sense, done so with the intent to generate views: a non-monetary commodity.
Magic is bigger than it has ever been. Players, like me, have other things that pull at their attention. I don’t buy as much product as I used to and instead I target my purchases for maximum enjoyment. I want to visit conventions and engage there, as I am sure many others do. I play Commander at my local game store and at the homes of my friends. I am not rushing out to buy boxes. But there are people who do that and I would argue that as more people age into my bracket that the game needs people who are eager to grow their collection by leaps and bounds not to make sure that the line goes up but rather to make sure there is a line at all.
I don’t know. It hurts me to see people in my community unhappy. I hope people are able to find the joy and the soul again, in whatever way they so choose.
I want to take a moment to thank all my Patrons. I am going to do my level best to keep providing you with the kind of content that brought you here in the first place. If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sign up for my Patreon starting at just $1.
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NerdtotheCore
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