Creature (19)
Sorcery (6)
Instant (15)
Sideboard
Instant (11)
Artifact (2)
Sorcery (2)
With all the rubbish I publish on this site that ends up being barely functional, mostly experimental in nature, you may well wonder what type of deck I actually use with when I sit down to play in a formal setting. I don’t play competitively, but rather in venues that most closely align with the label ‘kitchen table competitive’. I shuffle with the intent to win—but in a friendly, not-necessarily-cutthroat way.
I play 60 card formats exclusively; mostly Modern, Legacy and Pauper. Here’s my go-to Pauper deck for when I don’t already know who or what I’m going up against.
The land types and counts here, like pretty much everything else in the deck, are semi stable but not set in stone. I consistently tend to run more than due to all the cheap interaction, but things may change.
Right now I’ve found success running Soured Springs as my dual land. I’ve tried the life gain Jwar Isle Refuge/Dismal Backwater approach, but it isn’t as helpful as the cumulative life loss of the former. I’d like to be able to run more utility lands, like maybe Witch's Cottage or something along those lines, but we can only afford so many ‘this land enters play tapped’ cards.
It’s a peculiar assortment of bodies, something of a rogues gallery, but the idea is to shore up weaknesses and double down on strengths while we wait to punch big damage through. Entries here are more than just vanilla creatures with no rules text; each card does something to help us move forward.
•Faerie Seer
and Augur of Bolas help us plan ahead, locating and/or acquiring possible answers. The faerie will die if you look at it funny but has some built in evasion in the form of flying, while the Merman makes for a decent enough early game blocker.
•Spellstutter Sprite makes for some rather effective surprise control.
•Ninja of the Deep Hours opens up a nice one-two draw/punch combo, and when played off an attacking Spellstutter Sprite or Faerie Seer which an opponent might not even bother blocking, it makes for repeatable countermagic or scry power.
•Gurmag Angler is our big boy, our fatty fatty Boom-ba-latty. Our graveyard will soon be loaded with cheaply cast spells, so getting him into play is a non-issue.
Pauper is a deceptively brutal format where everyone is out to kill you.
The no frills explanation? Countermagic, disruption and searching/sifting/sorting/stacking the deck in our favor is what will keep us afloat early to mid-game.
•Brainstorm and Preordain enable us to set up future plays.
•As far as countermagic is concerned, we run some staples and some oddball choices. Every once in awhile I’ll do a reset and go with the net deck aggregate control options, but I always end up retooling my choices to end up with something similar to what’s here now. Counterspell is a mainstay for obvious reasons, and Snap pulls its weigh more often than not and is great at disrupting tempo.
•Cast Down in Pauper MtG is essentially Power Word Kill in D&D. Most Legendary creatures in Pauper are doody, and nobody plays them except people like me who build think tank off the rails experimentation decks. In actual play this is essentially a fire-and-forget-it kill spell.
•Duress because sadly Thoughtseize isn’t Pauper legal. Preemptively removing a nasty Enchantment, Artifact, Instant or Sorcery before it becomes problematic is an ideal scenario.
•Control the early game. Preemptively remove threats while still in-hand, counter them as they’re being cast or destroy them after they enter play.
•Sift through your library with spells like Brainstorm and Augur of Bolas, replenishing your countermagic and acquiring viable threats of your own.
•Plop down a Gurmag Angler or two for cheap, courtesy of all the quickfire utility spells sitting in your graveyard, then attack for big damage.
Any sideboard worth its salt is all about anticipating the unlikely but still probable. I took the ‘go wide’ approach and tried to adequately cover as much as I reasonably could.
•When you play , running Hydroblast is a given. Fun fact: water puts out fire.
•Spell Pierce for when a playset of Counterspell just isn’t enough.
•Relic of Progenitus in lieu of Tormod's Crypt for the draw power, and we run one or the other as a safeguard against Reanimator of course.
•Chainer's Edict to bypass any roadblocks like Indestructible and so forth.
•Echoing Decay and Echoing Truth occupy the same type of role, different ways to handle specific headaches.
This is my daily driver, and I’m fairly set with the general working parts. I’m not looking to radically alter anything or give it a redesign. I probably won’t be accepting any suggestions unless they’re identical in function yet strictly better upgrades to what I have here. That is a possibility, as I’ve not been following the game for quite a few expansions now and I’m not really sure what new deck tech there might be.
”A wise king sifts out the wicked And drives the threshing wheel over them.”
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Casual
90% Competitive
Revision 1 See all
(1 week ago)
| +1 | Cast Down | main |
| +2 | Echoing Truth | side |
| +1 | Gurmag Angler | main |
| -2 | Island | main |
| Top Ranked |
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| Date added | 1 week |
| Last updated | 4 days |
| Legality | This deck is Pauper legal. |
| Cards | 60 |
| Avg. CMC | 2.23 |
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