Instant (14)
Sorcery (12)
Creature (13)
Land (21)
Sideboard
Sorcery (6)
Artifact (3)
Maybeboard
Creature (6)
Is throwing away your cards just madness? No! THIS! IS! A JOKE FROM 2006!
But seriously, Sparta! is a burn deck based around a bunch of Madness cards. I absolutely adored the Madness mechanic in SOI-Standard so when my friend bugged me to get into Pauper, I thought this might be a fun way to do it. I realize that this isn't going to be especially competetive but I'd still like to steal a few matches off people here and there.
But enough preamble. Onto the cards!
Spartans! Prepare for glory!
Let's start with the discard outlets. Every Madness deck needs ways to pitch cards and our favorites are Faithless Looting and Olivia's Dragoon.
Faithless Looting is just a good all-around card for efficient hand-sculpting but it's sheer card advantage for us since we're casting our spells as we discard them. We actually don't usually want to fire off Looting on Turn 1 as we'd prefer to have extra mana to Madness what we pitch, but we can if we kept a sketchy hand. Flashing back Faithless Looting is also a nice way to help us power through our opponent's late game, though we really need the game to go really late before we're happy paying 2R for our discard.
Olivia's Dragoon is even better in some ways as it allows us to Madness cards on-demand, at instant speed, and for no additional mana cost. This is really important because the less mana we spend on discarding, the more cards we can Madness out. Plus it's just a nice evasive beater. Discarding an excess land to jump over our opponent's ground blockers for 2 more damage is a totally reasonable play. We can even give the Dragoon flying on our opponent's turn to block a Delver of Secrets
in a pinch.
We also get to run Insolent Neonate, which is just a great card. It can usually chip in for a few points of damage during the early game, then we can cash it in to get our card back for no mana once our opponent manages to get a couple blockers down. Neonate is really important for keeping our cards churning.
Finally, Lightning Axe is a great removal spell for this deck that doubles as a great discard outlet. It's fine if we have to discard a card for no value as sometimes we just really need to kill something right now but when we can kill a Mnemonic Wall for one mana in response to a Ghostly Flicker and Madness out a Fiery Temper to kill the Mulldrifter as well? Perfection.
The world will know that even a god-king can bleed.
I've had the most success with this deck when it focuses on burning out our opponents, and the main way we do that is with Fiery Temper, Alms of the Vein, Lightning Bolt, and Bump in the Night. That's right: 16 cards that can dome our opponent for 3 damage each, three of which can be flashed back, giving us a hypothetical 60 points of burn damage. Oy!
Fiery Temper is basically just a Lightning Bolt with extra steps but when those steps involve virtual card advantage, we're happy to do the dance. It's even sometimes ok doing its impression of Open Fire if we're flooding out. 3 damage is 3 damage, after all.
Alms of the Vein is the spell we most want to Madness out. One mana to Lava Spike our opponent and Healing Salve ourself is a great deal, pushing efficient damage through against Control decks while bolstering us against Aggro decks. It's not as great at three mana but eh, it can still end games even then.
Obviously we're also running Lightning Bolt. It doesn't have any discard synergies, but who cares? It's Bolt!
Bump in the Night is probably the worse of these spells but it's still really important for pushing through the last few packets of damage if the game goes long and we don't feel too bad about discarding it in a pinch.
We also have a single copy of Flame Jab for when the game goes really long. It's extremely inefficient but if we're flooding out, we could do worse than pitch lands for 1 damage each.
They say we Spartans descended from Hercules himself.
We may be a Burn deck but we also want some creature haymakers mixed in.
Gurmag Angler is our beefiest beater. You know him, you love him, he's the zombie fish you just can't quit. We fill our graveyard very efficiently but we don't actually care too much about the contents of that graveyard so two copies of Angler are well within our Delve budget. We might even be able to go up to three copies but that starts to become riskier against bounce- or removal-heavy decks.
Grave Scrabbler doesn't have much bulk himself but a 2/2 isn't nothing and he can get us back something we've traded off or had to pitch earlier in the game when we Madness him out. He's part of why we can get away with running only 2 Anglers.
I'm also running one copy of Twins of Maurer Estate. I gotta admit, this is more of a nostalgia inclusion than anything else as a 3/5 for 2B isn't really that amazing on its own but I have very fond memories of this card so I didn't want to cut it entirely. I also don't want to drop too low in either creatures or Madness cards and I like Twins more than, say, Bloodmad Vampire, which just dramatically underperformed in testing.
Give them nothing! But take from them everything!
We've already touched on most of our removal suite earlier: Lightning Bolt and Fiery Temper can kill a dork in a pinch while Lighting Axe can handle almost anything else in the format while helping us discard, but we also have two copies of Dark Withering for extra Doom Bladeing Madness-ing and two copies of Terminate in the main for when we absolutely, positively need to kill something dead. I didn't want to have to rely entirely on Red-based removal when we have access to Black's Destroy effects. We take our time more than tradition Burn decks do so it behooves us to pack a bit more kill power.
Come back with your shield, or on it.
Our land situation is a little more interesting than it might first appear. We're running the usual Bloodfell Caves and basic Swamps and Mountains, but our second tapland is Rakdos Carnarium. Carnarium helps us keep the land count down, converting a two-land hand into an effective three-lander. It also lets us pick up lands later in the game as discard fodder or to replay, if we need a bit more lifegain from Bloodfell Caves to stay alive. That said, we're only running 3 copies of Carnarium since we don't want to draw multiples in the early turns. Since that puts us at 7 taplands, I figured we have room for a single copy of Bojuka Bog as a silver bullet against graveyard decks. We have enough card draw that we should be able to get to it somewhat reliably and we can even drop it multiple times in a game thanks to Carnarium.
There's a case to be made that we should be running Ash Barrens as well but considering we have such high colored mana requirements, I'd sooner just run more dual lands. Plus this saves us $8.
Then we will fight in the shade.
Finally, we come to the sideboard.
Duress and Pyroblast come in for Control matchups, Electrickery is good against tokens decks and unflipped Delver of Secrets
, Nihil Spellbomb is more graveyard hate, Molten Rain is for Tron, and Thorn of the Black Rose helps us against slower, grindier decks that want to sit back and out-value us without attacking much. Pretty straightforward stuff. I'm not entirely sure how necessary Molten Rain is, to be honest, as we can already kill most of Tron's threats. I'd also like to fit in some copies of Smash to Smithereens to help shore up our Affinity game and a Chainer's Edict or two for Bogles, but I can't think of what else to cut.
Tonight, we dine in Hell!
And that's the deck. I hope you liked it. I'm pretty new to Pauper so I'm ravenous for any advice or suggestions you might have. Am I forgetting some obvious cards? Is there an important Pauper staple I skipped over? Does the sideboard bear any resemblance to what I need? Should I chuck the whole deck into the wood chipper and just play another Izzet Delver list? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Suggestions
Updates Add
Comments
Attention! Complete Comment Tutorial! This annoying message will go away once you do!
Important! Formatting tips — Comment Tutorial — markdown syntax
Please login to comment
| Date added | 5 years |
| Last updated | 5 years |
| Legality | This deck is Pauper legal. |
| Cards | 60 |
| Avg. CMC | 2.38 |
| Tokens | Monarch Emblem |
| Folders | Pauper, pauper |
| Votes | |
| Ignored suggestions | |
| Shared with | |
| Views |