So, I'm a sucker for underused color combinations. Where is the Golgari swarm in the Pauper metagame? With all the 2/2 creatures running around,
Consume Strength
is an easy 2-for-1. Throw in a Madness backbone and a little zombie synergy with
Strength of Night
, and I think we have a pretty solid deck.
Wild Mongrel is already seeing play in certain Stompy variants. You don't see
Arrogant Wurm
and
Basking Rootwalla
so much, despite their tried and true power from the old U/G Madness decks that swept the pro tour during Madness's first rollout. Since we're going B/G, there is some tech available that the U/G Madness decks didn't have. Dark Withering is awful without discard support, but with it, it's a 1-mana Doom Blade with upside. Putrid Imp doesn't hit as hard as
Carnophage
turn 1, but it comes down earlier than Wild Mongrel. Olivia's Dragoon isn't quite as good, but it can kill a Delver of Secrets
on its own, and it brings us to a comfortable 10 discard outlets. Golgari Rot Farm is just a little extra insurance for color fixing and bringing cards to discard back to our hand.
With all that discard, it's pretty easy to fill the graveyard. This isn't an Angler Delver deck, so we're not trying to cast Gurmag Angler for 1 mana, but it's a pretty easy to get it down to 3 or 4 mana, especially with a full set of Evolving Wilds, which is still great value.
Shambling Shell
helps to get it there, as well as providing targets for
Grave Scrabbler
. Rancor is great value, in general, but attached to
Shambling Shell
, you effectively have a 5-1 trampler for 4 with recursion, which is hard to stop. Finally,
Putrid Leech
is just good value. It's a
Grizzly Bears
with Mutagenic Growth-on-command attached.
The sideboard is to cover the metagame and our weaknesses. Ancient Grudge can be cast from the graveyard for a single green mana, making it a great fit for a Madness deck trying to outvalue Affinity, the number one deck right now by a long shot. As for the red hard casting cost, a single Mountain can be fetched with Evolving Wilds, effectively giving us 5 red sources for 1 sideboard spot. Blightwidow is for Delver and Kuldotha Boros/Jeskai. Duress is for any spell-heavy deck we can't outvalue with
Consume Strength
.
Golgari Brownscale
is protection from burn decks.
Psychotic Haze
is for taking down Elves, Goblins, etc. Ghoulcaller's Chant is a hedge against decks built to outgrind us like Mono-Black Control, and we certainly have enough zombies to make it work well.
