Creature (29)
Land (19)
Instant (6)
Sorcery (2)
Enchantment (4)
Sideboard
Enchantment (3)
Maybeboard
Creature (1)
I've been having a real problem trying to find a Pauper deck that suits me and I think I've finally zeroed in on the right idea: Golgari graveyard-centric Midrange. We're just going to fill our graveyard, play a preponderance of undercosted beaters, and out-swing our opponent. Sound good?
The only real problem is that Green and Black have a lot of great midrange cards so if you think you see a better option than what I've picked, please let me know! Ok, on to the deck.
Where's the Beef?
This deck is build primarily around its Delirium creatures so I'm going to start by talking about them or nothing else that follows will make sense.
Moldgraf Scavenger is our Pauper-legal Tarmogoyf. A 2-mana 3/4 is actually quite well-positioned in the meta as it can swing through most boards with impunity. Even as a 0/4, it blocks most Aggro creatures and dodges Lightning Bolt. Not too shabby.
Thraben Foulbloods isn't quite as good as Scavenger though it's at least more resilient to graveyard hate. Mostly it's here as curve-filler; we're a bit more slanted towards 2-drops than I'd like but Foulblood does a good job of holding down the 3-drop fort. In any case, it's an absolute beast once Delirium is turned on.
Backwoods Survivalists is our most expensive Delirium creature and I picked it mainly because it dodges Bolt once Delirium is active and because it can power through chump-blockers.
We're also running three other beaters so we can just overwhelm our opponents with threats. Nimble Mongoose starts us off low and becomes a very respectable threat pretty quickly. Putrid Leech is an absolute house and it keeps us swinging even when our opponents have the graveyard locked down. And finally, Rhizome Lurcher has been surprisingly powerful for me. Get even just three or four counters and it becomes a massive threat and this deck really doesn't have any trouble achieving that. Lategame, this thing can come down as a 12/12 or bigger. Try not to wait too long to cast it in Games 2 and 3, though, as our opponents often bring in graveyard hate.
Taste the Rainbow
But we also need to fill the graveyard, and we do that in a bunch of ways.
First we have Satyr Wayfinder, and this card is actually the secret sauce that ties everything else together. Between Wayfinder and the next card, we have a very easy time hitting our land drops so we get to run a very low number of lands, plus it can help us stay alive against aggro while counting as another creature in the yard.
I went with Grapple with the Past over Grisly Salvage mainly because Grapple can grab any creature or land from your graveyard whereas Salvage only lets you pick from the five it mills. We don't actually need our graveyard to be all that full so milling just three instead of five isn't that much of a cost. Grapple also lets us run most of our creatures as 3-ofs, giving us more options to choose from as the game goes along.
Obviously Stinkweed Imp is here. We don't have an easy way of getting it from our hand into the graveyard (this is a Midrange deck so we don't want to be discarding cards for minimal value) but it's actually not that bad on board, letting you block and kill anything from a flipped Delver of Secrets
to a Gurmag Angler. You can even swing with it in the air to soften up your opponent. Dredge with it once and you'll probably get Delirium and Threshold right there.
We're also running Shambling Shell as a backup Dredge creature but it has a lot of utility outside of that as well. The 3-power makes it a pretty good beater and blocker, adding counters to our other creatures is nice, and even just being able to add a Dredge creature to our graveyard makes it pretty useful as well.
And finally, Drown in Filth gives us a little more incidental milling while taking out big creatures in the lategame, plus it's a Sorcery for Delirium. To be honest, it's not spectacular, but the deck really needs as much incidental mill as possible so packaging that with a removal spell is actually pretty sweet. There's a case to be made for running Doom Blade or Executioner's Capsule in this slot but I really, really hate their non-black riders so I went with Drown in Filth. Plus it can kill Guardian of the Guildpact which otherwise blanks most of our creatures.
Snap! Crackle! Pop!
Speaking of removal, we have a few more options on top of Drown in Filth.
Dead Weight is just about the perfect 1-mana removal for us. It's efficient, effective, adds another card type for Delirium, and can even be used to neuter bigger creatures long-term. I sometimes miss the speed of Disfigure but most of the time we're ok with waiting until our turn to weight something down.
Nameless Inversion is a completely ridiculous card for this deck, adding not just one but two card types to our yard while killing most things that matter. Clearing creature types is a nice fringe benefit against tribal but the real secret is that many of our creatures have 4 Toughness (Putrid Leech, Moldgraf Scavenger, Backwoods Survivalists, and Rhizome Lurcher) so if we're willing to risk being blown out by a removal spell, we can target our own guys with this to either trade with an even bigger creature in a pinch or to push through three more points of damage. I've lethal'ed a bunch of people with Inversion when they made greedy blocks.
Eat Fresh
The lands are sneakily important to this deck.
Obviously Jungle Hollow is here but we use Evolving Wilds as our other "dual land" since it's an easy way to get a land into the graveyard; the only downside here is we're forced to run a bunch of basic Forests and Swamps to support it but it's worth it overall.
Then, we have five total copies of the artifact lands in our colors, Tree of Tales and Vault of Whispers, to sneak artifacts into the deck. We don't have any way of getting them into our graveyard if we draw them but that's ok. Just milling one or two incidentally over the course of the game is totally fine.
Finally, I slipped in one copy of Bojuka Bog to give us a low-cost edge against other graveyard-based decks in game 1; it's even great if we mill it since we can just pick it back up with Grapple with the Past to blow up their yard at our leisure. This one's not necessary, though, so feel free to replace it with another copy of Vault of Whispers if you want to save a buck.
It Gives You Wiiiings!
Ok, sideboard time.
Duress for Control, Gnaw to the Bone for Aggro, Nihil Spellbomb for graveyards, Seal of Primordium for Artifacts and Enchantments, and Shrivel for go-wide. Nothing too spicy here.
We do get a little spicy with our answer to Bogles and Gurmag Angler decks, though, with Warren Weirding. The text is a little weird but basically it's an Edict effect that can add two card types to our graveyard! Chainer's Edict is still probably better when you get right down to it but it also costs like $7 a copy right now in paper, whereas Weirding is $0.10.
Think Different
And that's the deck! I hope you liked it. Any suggestions would be appreciated, and thank you so much in advance.
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| Top Ranked |
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| Date added | 5 years |
| Last updated | 5 years |
| Legality | This deck is Pauper legal. |
| Cards | 60 |
| Avg. CMC | 2.34 |
| Tokens | Goblin Rogue 1/1 B |
| Folders | Do You Play Pauper?, decks i want, Peasant & Pauper, nice from others, Pauper, Pauper, Pauper, Hyper's Interesting Decks, pauper, Nifty Pauper Decks |
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