Eggs in Pauper?
After the printing of Drafna's Restoration at common on MTGO I couldn't help but try my hand at brewing an eggs deck in pauper. After a little testing I decided I did not like the Reckless Fireweaver/Disciple of the Vault + artifact lands style of decks. Your win conditions die to almost every piece of removal in the format and do little to help you stabilize if you can't outright kill the opponent. In addition, you become heavily reliant on Etherium Sculptor to "go off" with a large Drafna's egg chain. Without the Sculptor it is too easy to run out of mana before the chain is complete. Artifact lands also make you just as susceptible to affinity hate as affinity (Gorilla Shaman) while being an objectively less powerful deck.
Instead of pinging the opponent to death, my win condition of choice is Golem Foundry. This has a few strong advantages over Reckless Fireweaver, Disciple of the Vault, and Firebrand Archer. For one, it isn't a creature, which makes it very hard to most decks in the format to interact with once it hits the table pre-sideboard. Secondly, it is a win condition that actively helps you stabilize. Unlike damage to the face, golems can block! Finally, it is colorless, which makes it easy on the mana and, more importantly, means you can hit it off Ancient Stirrings. This means we can run less "useless" win conditions and more eggs/cantrips to keep the egg chain going.
But wait! What about Etherium Sculptor? It doesn't matter if your win conditions are resilient if your main enabler is still a weak creature. Even worse, you can't grab it off Ancient Stirrings! Doesn't this still make the deck fragile and inconsistent? Fear not friend, for the Tron lands have come to the rescue. I've replaced the fragile artifact lands with these pauper powerhouses. If you can hit tron, which is pretty easy when most of your deck is cantrips, you have enough mana to execute very long Drafna's egg chains, even without Etherium Sculptor. In fact, Tron is so effective I've dropped Etherium Sculptor down to three copies. I've found that Sculptor is largely useless in multiples and if your opponent is playing enough interaction to kill the first one, they'll have enough to kill the second or third as it is the only creature in the deck. Back-up copies simply won't be able to overcome their removal. With the number of cantrips the deck runs hitting I've found three Sculptors to be enough to hit one consistently without "Sculptor-flooding"
Speaking of lands, this deck also runs two cycling lands: Remote Isle and Slippery Karst. This deck wants to minimize dead-end, egg-chain killing draws as much as possible, and these cycling lands work towards that end in two ways. First and most obviously, it gives you a second chance to hit another egg if you top-deck it late in the game. Secondly, it turns Expedition Map into an egg (albeit a very expensive one, but don't worry, we have tron!) as you can fetch Remote Isle with the Expedition Map and then cycle it. If you've already cycled both lands they become the most important target to put back on the bottom with Conjurer's Bauble in order to keep your top-decked Expedition Maps relevant. The deck also runs a single Unknown Shores to act as a Expedtion Map fetchable five-color land in case you're hurting on colored mana.
Though Golem Foundry is the win condition and Etherium Sculptor and Tron lands are the enablers, what really holds this deck together is Ancient Stirrings. Early in the game it helps you establish tron or find your Foundry. If drawn late in the game it helps you find another egg to keep the chain going. It also allows us to run fewer "useless" lands that get in the way of egg chains. It is common for this deck to keep hands with one tron land + Chromatic Star/Sphere + Ancient Stirrings. A big problem with this deck is that it is looking for different things at different points in the game, and Ancient Stirrings helps find what you need when you need it.
Despite my best efforts, there are still a large number of "dead" non-egg cards in this deck that can kill a chain. This is where Faithless Looting comes in. In many scenarios it is essentially a red Thoughtcast with flashback, and that is not an exaggeration. It is vital to remember they are in your deck to take full advantage of them. If you already have tron do not play a land for turn until you absolutely need the mana. Sandbagging lands and extra Sculptors is really important. I only run three copies because you really only want/need to draw one at a time and an opening hand with two of them is a little too much card disadvantage in the early game when everything, including your lands, are important.
Even though its printing being the inspiration for the deck you may have noticed I am running exactly zero copies of Drafna's Restoration. Original decklists had the full four, but I realized there are too many situations where they are quite bad. Early in the game they are the worst card in your deck as they do literally nothing. In the middle of the game they can still be quite bad if you did not draw enough eggs to make a sizable Drafna's Restoration chain. Going down a card to return two eggs to the top of your library when you only have a single Golem Foundry out is less than ideal. However, they are such a powerhouse in the late game and do so much to push the deck over the top and close out a game that I believe two is the correct number. But even then they could be awful topdecks and chain-killers if you didn't have a spare egg lying around to draw a card after casting it, and that becomes an egg you didn't add to the chain. Instead, I looked toward Frantic Salvage for this type of effect. The casting cost does sting a little, but with tron it is something I can stomach to avoid a dead topdeck, especially since it is a card I only want to cast in the lategame. In addition, it is much better at returning destroyed Golem Foundries. With Drafna's Restoration you'd have to wait a turn to get your Golem Foundry back and then another turn to actually start the egg chain. A tron deck will gladly trade three extra mana for an additional turn of action.
This deck's mid-game is strong and it consistently makes 7+ golems on turns 5 and 6. The deck does however have two problems, both with conflicting solutions. The first problem is that 7 golems on turn 5 is, surprisingly, often not enough to close out games. So we need to make sure that the deck doesn't simply peter-out after turn 6 and is capable of making golems turn after turn, burying the opponent in virtual card advantage. With my efforts to remove as many dead cards a possible and help from Faithless Looting and Thoughtcast I believe I have solved this problem. The second problem is, well, more problematic. The deck can be too slow and get overrun by quick aggro decks before it can establish a sufficient board presence to stabilize (and god help us if they have an evasive threat). The obvious solution is to run more cheap interaction. A playset of Galvanic Blasts would definitely help. The problem is every piece of interaction is another egg chain killer, which weakens the late game plan of overwhelming the opponent with golems. Even cards like Pyrite spellbomb or Aether Spellbomb are less than ideal because if you wish to use them to interact with the opponent you have to forego drawing a card and thus kill the egg-chain.
At the moment my solution to this conundrum is Alchemist's Vial. It is the only artifact that both draws a card and interacts with the opponent to slow them down. In addition, it tends to be a little "stickier" than most of the other artifacts in this deck, which helps cast Thoughtcast. It also has a colorless activation, which is nice in a deck whose limiting resource is often colored mana rather than total mana. Some preliminary testing has proven they work quite well at keeping you alive and, surprisingly, at killing your opponent. You end up racing with this deck a lot more than I expected and being able to remove two blockers so you can swing in for lethal is something that comes up surprisingly frequently.
Now for some newer technology I'm testing. Often times this deck is simply a turn or two too slow, even with the Alchemist's Vials and a few copies of Pyrite Spellbomb. In fact, I've been pretty disappointed with Pyrite Spellbomb in this deck. It is either a bad egg or an even worse removal spell. It's flexible, but it does both jobs poorly enough that I don't really like it. It is either too clunky or too low impact, and sometimes it's both. It doesn't buy enough time against the faster decks and can actually slow you down due to how inefficient it is. If you're going to sacrifice Pyrite Spellbomb to destroy a creature, you need to do it earlier rather than later in order to prevent as much damage as possible. Instead I've found you'd almost always rather be playing one mana eggs early on to draw into the lands or foundries you need or use the colored mana on an Ancient Stirrings or Faithless Looting to help set up. The early use of colored mana is especially damning as in this deck colored mana, especially in the early game, is often a non-renewable resource that you can only get off of sacrificing Chromatic Stars or Chromatic Spheres. Having to choose between Pyrite Spellbomb and Ancient Stirrings with only a single one-time use colored source is not a place I want to be. Sacrificing those early turn resources on blowing up creatures can set you back a whole turn, and sometimes even more, which negates the purpose of using Pyrite Spellbomb in the first place.
In its place I'm testing out two copies Moment's Peace. I'll admit, this looks like a very strange card to play in an all-in eggs deck, but it does have some unique advantages over more conventional interaction. As I mentioned earlier, this deck is often a turn or two too slow, dying right before it can alpha strike with 8+ golem and close out the game. Moment's Peace buys you two whole extra turns to build up your golem army. In addition, it's a card you want to cast late, not early, so it's a piece of "interaction" that doesn't consume vital early-game resources. The flashback has bonus synergy with Faithless Looting as well. I'm still testing it out and it may be a bad idea, but I have high hopes given how well Alchemist's Vials have worked as a one-creature fog effect.
As for the sideboard, the plan is to reduce our reliance on Golem Foundry as a win condition and play a little bit more like a conventional tron deck. The opponent is bound to bring in artifact hate and if they destroy the first Foundry it can often take too long to find a second to rebuild if you don't have a back-up plan.
The deck is still in relatively early stages of development and needs a lot more testing. Ideally I'd like to put in one more land and one more Expedition Map in order to help guarantee I hit my early land drops. Not sure what to take out though. Maybe the Moment's Peace if they don't work out. The only problem then is I probably don't have enough interaction. Hmmm....
Regardless, the deck is a blast to play and can have some really crazy turns. So far my record is 25 golems by turn 5. There are some big hurdles the deck needs to overcome, but I do believe there might be something here.
Everything here is a work in progress, and I'd gladly welcome suggestions.
