Looking at Lists: Gruul Madness and Mutant Zombies

We’re barely a month into this and I’m already breaking my rules.

I can’t help it; there were two incredibly sweet decklists that went 5-0 in the Pauper League this week. Let’s get right to them.

I have a soft spot for Zombies as a deck While I’m not a huge fan of the aggressive builds with Carnophage, I see the merit when you’re also including Village Rites. But that’s not what excites me with this list. Instead it’s the inclusion of Cavern Whisperer. First off, it comes in and eats a card in your opponent’s hand. Second, if you put it on a Carrion Feeder you have a 4/4 with all those +1/+1 counters and menace. Sign me up yesterday. This deck scratches an itch for me and I cannot wait to give it a shot.

Gruul Madness is a deck with a long history in Pauper. It has some results in the Italian Paupergeddon series but hasn’t done much on MTGO. Part of this is that Affinity does Madness better than Madness does Madness. If you’re trying to cheat in 4/4s, Myr Enforcer and Carapace Forger are cheaper than Reckless Wurm. There are a few elements I really like about this list. First, it biases towards red. Previous versions of this list went for green to try and turn on Werebear and Arrogant Wurm. Going red gives you a chance to apply pressure with Kird Ape which, as a 2/3, is very good against the creatures in the format. I also love the inclusion of Savage Swipe in this deck as it gives yet another way to clear out the board to crunch in for damage. Swipe also gets to play tricks with Wild Mongrel (pumping after the fight) or Gathan Raiders (unmorphing after the fight). All in all, a fun list that I can’t wait to try out.

Which of these is your favorites? Which list are you excited to test in the league?

July 25-26 Pauper Weekend in Review

Another weekend, another two Challenges. The metagame continues to take shape in the wake of the Expedition Map and Mystic Sanctuary bans. A significant portion of the community believes that these bans did noting to hinder Tron and in some ways, made the deck better. We are only four Challenges deep, so let’s take a look.

July 25 Challenge
July 26 Challenge

I’m going to revisit some of the terminology I use when examining data. First is Win+ – this is a score assigned for wins above an X-3 record. An X-2 record in a Pauper Challenge is worth a Win+ of 1, X-1 is 2, and X-0 is 3. This provides a way to measure successful archetypes (those that finish int he Top 32) against each other. The closer a Win+ is to an archetype’s volume, the more likely it is to have finished in the Top 16 than outside of it.

Look at Saturday it’s hard to argue Tron had a great day. The Win+:Volume ratio is exactly 1 and Tron placed 4 decks in the Top 8 (granted across two different iterations of the deck). Stompy, by comparison, also achieved a ratio of 1 in 5 appearances (two in the Top 8). Which deck did better? That’s subjective, but you can make a case for either, mostly based upon the fact that if you look exclusively at Flicker Tron it has a ratio under one. Still, Tron being Tron, it’s fair to give it the nod.

To be clear, this event caused a heated discussion in the Pauper Discord I manage. The presence of four Tron decks in the Top 8 reignited the call for bans, claiming that banning Expedition Map had not done enough to weaken Tron. The conceit of the argument is that the Tron mana engine itself is broken in Pauper and the ability to do multiple things every turn will keep it head and shoulders above the rest of the format.

On Sunday there were no copies of Tron in the Top 8.

So does that mean everything is fine?

Of course not, but one event doesn’t mean everything is broken either.

Tron is going to have a spotlight on it for as long as it remains legal in Pauper. It is incredibly powerful and acts as a hard limit for many other strategies in the format. But we simply do not have enough information to make an informed decision at this juncture.

Here is a look at the top performing archetypes out of the four post-ban challenges. This looks at every deck with at least 2% metagame volume (~3 appearances) or a Top 8. While Flicker Tron and Stompy are leading in the Win+ race and Top 8 race, they aren’t lapping the field. If you fold both Tron variants into one it looks like the best deck, but not by a lot. Let’s look at similar data from Ikoria season.

Again, the cut off is a Top 8 or 2% total volume (13 appearances). The difference in numbers here is staggering, especially at the top of the metagame. Interesting note: Stompy has maintained the same Win+:Volume ratio.

So what does this all mean? Basically that I do not have enough data to an informed decision. While Tron may have access to turn three Tron more often thanks to Crop Rotation it also has that Tron more susceptible to counter magic. Tron has also adjusted faster than other decks because it had to do so. It may be true that Tron is still a problem and time will bear that out if it’s true, but the possibility still exists that the format is in a much better place.

Center Stage: Pollenbright Druid

How much is a card worth? It all depends on how you’re trying to win the game. Pollenbright Druid begs the question: can this 1/1 be worth more than a card?

A 1/1 Elf is sometimes a card, but this suite of abilities doesn’t lend Pollenbright Druid to Elves. A 2/2 is sometimes a card, but Pollenbright Druid doesn’t rise to the occasion for Stompy. Can a 1/1 that Proliferates be worth a card?

Maybe.

There are a ton of cards that incidentally use +1/+1 counters in Pauper. Going back to Stompy, Skarrgan Pit-Skulk and Hunger of the Howlpack both use these counters. There aren’t enough other creatures in traditional Stompy to make use of Pollenbright Druid, but perhaps there are enough options in Pauper to make this 1/1 worth more than a card. Here’s a short list that comes to mind:

And this isn’t even getting into River Heralds Boon if we touch a Merfolk subtheme. But the real card of note here is Pridemalkin. Before, putting counters on creatures was fine but now those creatures can get trample. There might be enough here for an approximation of a Hardened Scales deck, especially if you’re looking to load up a Vault Skirge.

So why do this instead of Stompy? Stompy leans hard on Rancor to punch through extra damage but a deck with Pollenbright Druid and Pridemalkin can go over the top with multiple threats. And if you’re willing to dip into white, Travel Preparations is a heck of a Magic card.

So how many cards is Pollenbright Druid worth? In the right context, it’s worth well more than one would think.

Looking at Lists: Izzet Wizardry

Two players I respect a great deal – Brian Coval and Luis Scott-Vargas – have referred to Goblin Wizardry as the Pauper Monastery Mentor. It makes some sense as Wizardry puts two potentially massive threats on to the board at instant speed. Wizardry also has synergies with broken blue cards and Pauper is jam-packed with those. On Saturday two players too Izzet Wizardry into the Challenge and they had decent results (27th and 32nd place).

There’s a lot to like about this deck. It runs four copies of Accumulated Knowledge and Frantic Inventory to draw gobs of cards. Outside of Augur of Bolas and Preordain you can operate at instant speed. It has a long game plan with Devious Cover-Up and gets to use Brainstorm with the Pauper fetch mana base.

What I don’t like is how soft you are in the early game. Fire//Ice is a good card but I’d rather Forked Bolt as it costs half as much. I also do not like Exclude maindeck right now as it almost always trades down in mana. I would also want a second copy of Devious Cover-Up as a backup win condition, looping the two to repopulate the deck with power spells. Finally, I would look at running some number of Izzet Boilerworks. Being able to generate two mana from a single land is powerful in control matchups. That being said, I am excited to try my hand with Goblin Wizardry.

July 18-19 Pauper Weekend in Review

There are no Winners in Pauper

The weekend of July 18th and 19th showcased the first Pauper Challenges since Expedition Map and Mystic Sanctuary were banned. It’s far too soon to make sweeping declarations of the state of Pauper, but initial impressions seem to indicate the format is trending in a healthy direction.

July 18th and 19th Challenges

Stompy was a well positioned deck in Week One – it’s easier to adjust to new metagames by being aggressive – but both Tron decks and “Delver” decks failed to take a significant dip. Some felt that the addition of Preordain to Tron would provide a boost to the deck, but that did not pan out in the first weekend.

You wouldn’t have known any of this if you were browsing Twitter on Sunday evening. Instead you’d likely have seen another instance of someone in the Pauper community being accused of manipulating Magic Online to leverage a win. And again discussion of the Pauper community and its reputation.

And again I started to think about why Pauper has this reputation. What is it about the online community that it can be so off-putting to a decent chunk of the Magic playing world?

In Magic Online Pauper there is nothing but winning and losing.

In Magic Online Pauper there is the anonymity of the internet.

These two together help to create a toxic environment where the relatively small gains of victory are so outsized that they propagate a community where winning is valued over almost everything else. Placing well in Challenges or getting a list published in the league results are the highest possible achievement for the vast majority of players in this community as they are the way to notoriety. No one knows who you really are, so what does it matter if you spam trade requests or float mana needlessly to make your opponent spend time to click “OK”?

If you’re reading this you probably play a decent amount of Pauper: how many names of Pauper players do you know? How many handles?

I understand the desire to remain anonymous in these times and respect people’s choices to do so. The nature of the anonymous internet, however, creates incentives where the “you” online is not the same entity as the “you” in the physical world.

Magic Online Pauper has created a place where the victory matters and there are no consequences. If we want Pauper to be a place where people feel welcome, there have to be consequences for this behavior. The community has to hold people accountable.

When winning is the only thing that matters there are no winners. Let’s remember that there’s a person on the other side of the match. Let’s think about what is going through their head if this is their first experience with Pauper.

Let’s make it so they want to come back.


Center Stage: Tin-Street Hooligan

I want to start exploring cards that have potential (or are just neat) but have yet to find a good home in Pauper. Today I want to talk about Tin-Street Hooligan.

When I first started playing Pauper (back when it was a player run format 15 years ago), Tin-Street Hooligan was an incredibly important card upon release. Affinity was a powerhouse. It lacked significant checks like Ancient Grudge and Gorilla Shaman, both of which had yet to be released. Instead, decks relied on slower options like Nantuko Vigilante, Overload, or Echoing Ruin to try and contain the machine. When Tin-Street Hooligan came along, everything changed. Gruul decks now had access to an on curve two-drop that could set their opponent’s board development back.

As Pauper saw its card pool grow, the format got faster. Running a two-color aggressive strategy stopped being a popular option as these decks took too long to develop their board. Taking turns off to set up mana meant a good two-color two drop like Hooligan was no longer a viable option.

So why am I bringing this card up today? Pauper has fantastic artifact removal already and the mana, while better than before, still has trouble supporting two-color aggro. The answer is Burning-Tree Emissary. In base red decks, Burning-Tree Emissary can produce the green mana needed to resolve a “kicked” Tin-Street Hooligan. Red Deck Wins, the second best Emissary deck, already wants red two drops and this one has decent upside against artifact lands at the very least. But Tin-Street can also hit Frogmite and Myr Enforcer, as well as Prophetic Prism and Bonder’s Ornament.

I am not saying that Tin-Street Hooligan is a game breaking card – far from it – but the barrier for it to see play is about as low as it has ever been. It might be time to break some stuff.

Looking at Lists: New Tron

I want to try some new things with this here blog. My plan is to look at a decklist that catches my interest once a week. The deck can be from either Challenge or the League results. Today’s deck is from the 5-0 deck dump.

I wanted to talk about Oscar_Franco’s deck for a few reasons. First up, this is not anything new. If you adjust the mana base and cut Crop Rotation/Preordain for Expedition Map you get the same old Flicker Tron deck that had been at the top of Pauper for months. Trading Map for Preordain makes the deck less likely to know it will have Tron in its opening hand but gives Tron ample opportunity to dig towards the correct pieces. This is aided by Prophetic Prism (still really good!) and Bonder’s Ornament (a card that left Matt Nass dumbstruck).

Is this version of Tron slower than previous iterations? Yes, by about a turn. While it is capable of getting a powerful draw on par with the Expedition Map versions, the new models take more time, on average. I have had the chance to play against similar builds with an aggressive Goblin deck and came within one misplay of winning the match (I missed my chance to Fireblast a Stonehorn Dignitary with Ephemerate on the stack). That being said, Tron is still very powerful and will remain a check on the format’s long game.

That brings me to my second point. When the bans were announced, many Pauper players felt that taking Expedition Map away from Tron was not enough. Rather it would just force the deck to run cards that are better in the mid-to-late game (like Preordain), trading early game consistency for more late game power. On top of that, the ban did nothing to break up some of the more repetitive elements of playing against Tron – namely rebuying Stonehorn Dignitary.

I talk more about my views of the ban here but the general consensus is that banning Map is a half measure. Rather than taking out the problematic elements of the deck (whether that is the Tron mana engine itself or Stonehorn Dignitary or the various Blink elements), the ban was designed to give the rest of the format in-game time to win. The question remains whether or not this goes far enough. While my early results indicate that this is the case, I want to see if this is borne out over the coming weeks.

July 11th and 12th Pauper Weekend in Review

The two Pauper Challenges this weekend took place under a dangling sword. A Banned List update was announced for July 13th and the prevailing wisdom was that some part of the Tron deck was going to be excised from the format and that Mystic Sanctuary was a goner.

The announcement came and went. Expedition Map and Mystic Sanctuary are banned. The decks they propped up aren’t going anywhere but I doubt they will remain the same. Tron decks will need to rework their configuration to allow for the inclusion of Ancient Stirrings, Crop Rotation, Impulse, or Preordain, as well as run enough of the proper lands to ensure they can cast the cards in question. Mystic Sanctuary decks lose their potent end game, but these decks have been put on the chopping block time and time again (they are Delver decks, after all) and have never fully gone away.

This weekend’s challenges tell us a story parallel to the one that unfolded on Monday. It told us what to expect, outside of Tron, in the coming weeks.

July 11th Pauper Challenge
July 12th Pauper Challenge

The next result of the ban is that at best, Tron gets one turn slower. At worst, it has the same fundamental turn as before. The aggressive decks in the format – Affinity, Red Deck Wins, Stompy – all get a small bump. Stompy is likely to benefit most from the extra time but only if Tron moves towards blue. Biasing towards green could make it easier to run additional copies of Moment’s Peace and put additional pressure on cards like Ram Through.

One deck getting a boost is WonderWalls. While highly redundant, the deck is somewhat vulnerable to countermagic. As people shift away from Delver strategies (and their ilk), it is likely there will be fewer copies of Counterspell in the format. Since Tron hasn’t taken that large of a hit and WonderWalls is solid against Tron, the defender based combo deck could be a big early winner.

The other big winner is Tron. Mystic Sanctuary decks were important in helping to keep Tron in check. It appears that the bans were designed to give aggro more of a puncher’s chance, in turn boosting midrange strategies as a viable check on aggro. The test will be how much slower Tron is without map. Early hyperbole indicated that this was barely a hit on Tron and considering the options available to the deck, it is easy to believe the deck remains unscathed.

So that’s where we are: the format’s next several months hinge on whether or not the in-game time bought by removing Expedition Map matters enough to give beatdown decks the chance to beat Tron before the game ends.

July 4th and 5th Pauper Weekend in Review

I was all set to write about the most recent Challenges, and I suppose I’ll say a few words about them. But the real story is this announcement:

Yeah. Big news. We’ll get to it in a bit.

July 4th saw Slivers take down the challenge. It beat Boros Monarch and Burn on its way to the finals where it allegedly split with Affinity. The Top 8 featured four Tron decks packing an Ephemerate package.

The next day saw zero Tron decks in the Top 8. Instead, Stompy placed two decks in the Top 8 and won the July 5th Challenge.

Okay, back to the announcement at hand. We know a ban is forthcoming and we also know that both Tron decks (featuring Flicker engines) and Mystic Sanctuary decks (usually in a Delver shell) have been at the top of the format for quite some time. Unlike rotating formats, the only way to create a sea change in Pauper is to engage in some sort of ban. This is because the inertia of existing cards is great and extremely hard to overcome. Both Flicker Tron and Mystic Sanctuary decks create an end game that is incredibly hard to disrupt. Tron is the main offender here.

These days Tron decks can race to their endgame as early as turn four. Stonehorn Dignitary and Ephemerate buys plenty of time and once a Mnemonic Wall comes down it becomes almost impossible to disrupt. If Tron has a backup Ghostly Flicker or Ephemerate in its pocket, even the world’s best safe cracker won’t be able to pick the lock. Tron is also able to run the right answer for any situation due to the nature of its mana engine. Bonder’s Ornamenbt – a card that should be a fringe player in long game decks – has become the centerpiece of Tron thanks to how easy it is to generate the mana needed to draw a card.

Mystic Sanctuary decks are problematic in that they can use either Tragic Lesson or Deprive to create looped game states in the latter stages of a battle. At the same time these cards are constrained by mana in a way Tron is not. That being said, having to play against Forbid and Whispers of the Muse is fairly miserable so it is possible these decks become a target.

Here’s the problem: the Pauper metagame is balanced on a knife point. While Tron is the best deck right now if you pull it entirely something will fill that vacuum. At the same point if you leave Tron alone it will be increasingly hard for something to come along and take it down. If I was going to do anything, I would start by taking a look at the UrzaTron.

That won’t solve Pauper’s problems. Tron is at the apex in part because it is best at blunting the assault of Burning-Tree Emissary aggro decks and going over the top of Monarch strategies. It may be correct to take the lock pieces out of Tron, hitting Ephemerate, Ghostly Flicker, and the likely replacement of Displace.

On balance, I think both UrzaTron and Ephemerate need to go. As long as Tron remains in the format it is going to be able to run any card it wants, regardless of cost. When three lands cast nearly everything in the format regardless of actual mana cost it becomes problematic. At the same time I would take out Ephemerate as it is far too efficient at what it does and invalidates potential counter play.

What about Mystic Sanctuary? I think you need to take a look at the land itself as it creates problems similar to those created by Ephemerate and Mnemonic Wall. Even if it feels like Mystic Sanctuary is second fiddle to Tron the card has been similarly dominant over the past 51 challenges: Tron/Ephemerate decks have 99 Top 8 appearances in 408 Top 8s – around 24.26%; Mystic Sanctuary decks have 103 Top 8 appearances – 25.25%. Tron is more monolithic which helps to explain why it looms larger but make n0 mistake: Mystic Sanctuary is a major player.

If I were to also be proactive, I would take a look at what this means for both the Monarch and Burning-Tree Emissary. Monarch was a problematic mechanic before the advent of Ephemerate and I don’t think enough has changed to make that any less of the case. Similarly, Burning-Tree Emissary aggressive strategies have access to draws that are hard to contain without a reliable turn three sweeper. That being said, I don’t expect these cards to go next Monday.

I don’t have all the data – Wizards does. I anticipate they’ll take a look at the information they have and do what they think will be best for the format moving forward.