Work in Progress.
I always wanted to brew a LD deck since the Revised days. Aside of Tiny Leaders (an intriguinf spin-off idea, presumably with a Jund general), Pauper seems the ideal format to try it.
After pondering Rakdos for the usual suspects (Stone Rain and Direct Damage), I was tempted by all-black Land Destruction spells (there are 4 of them just at under 3-CMC, with more over 4-CMC)...
Rakdos (alongside Izzet) in Pauper has trouble when dealing with enchantments, like in Pauper Boggles, so green seems to help (a million enchantment hate spells, at all CMCs and most of them common, coupled if necessary with artifact hate or land hate).
Just laying land destruction spells and direct damage in Rakdos colors does not seem that impressive (and it could barely survive against my own Boros Heroic Pauper deck, especially if I Side in some white protection, including land protection auras...), so why not try to include green as a feature, not a splash, and benefit from green? humoungous creatures, mana accelerants (critical for a LD deck), lifegaining effects...
Any LD deck needs a lot of mana:
There is a singleton Golgari Signet to help mana fixing and providing extra mana at the cheapest cost available in Pauper (a 2-CMC artifact).
There are 4
Nest Invader
s to provide early bear fodder AND extra blockers AND mana generators.
Obviously, just because we run black, we have Dark Ritual. A turn 1 LD spell is so much efficient...
The late-game plan:
With no Common Nether Void or similar, nor
Drop of Honey
or similar, nor
Black Vise
or similar, there are no effective locks easily available... so:
15 LD spells to kill as many lands as possible
Drop
Blastoderm
when the opponent is mana-deprived, not a death sentence in itself, as it only hits thrice, but unearth it with
Cadaver Imp
and drop it again.
Hooting Mandrills
is also surprisingly fast, and it gets trample to go over the opponent weenie blockers
Undergrowth Scavenger to use opponent's discarded creatures and our own killed in action creatures...
Vault Skirge
and Drain Life to recover life
Crypt Rats as the universal balancer: kill everything and restart again if things do not look good...
Deadly Recluse
against any buffed creature: nothing better than two-by-oning Boggles with a single pesky 2-drop with deathtouch, just watch out for first strike...
Cadaver Imp
to bring back any useful creature...
Improving it
Obviously, 4x
Sinkhole
can replace any of the other 3-CMC LD spells, but it would not be really "pauper"...
My main concern is making the deck fast enough to contend with archetypical Pauper competitive decks (which are known to be pretty fast) and other Pauper decks I have played / played against which can also go lethal pretty fast and against which you are defenceless in many games before Sideboarding...
