For those of you who don’t already know me, I’ve been on the Magic scene for quite a long time now, and I’ve played every format from Vintage to Block constructed. In the last year or so I have been playing and testing the Pauper format extensively. It’s not what you would call a competitive format in cardboard magic, but if you play on Magic online you know that there is allot of profit to be made in this format. I have been posting videos on Youtube for the last 6 months and have had a lot of success over time with a large variety of decks. The Daily Pauper events have become my bread and butter so to speak, and my format of choice online.

Many people that I have encountered over the years playing Magic have asked me what I thought was the best way to start playing on Magic Online. I learned the hard way that drafting and selling the rares I would open and maybe making a few packs here and there was costly and had a low return on my investment. I soon learned of a format that had been rising in popularity called “Pauper”. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s a constructed format that is purely based on using cards that have been released as a common (For more information about the rules and ban list please check this out ).

Although the quality of cards is not as potentially strong as other constructed formats, the Metagame has grown and changed many times over its lifespan. If you look at a card like “[card]Delver of Secrets[/card]” in a vacuum, it really doesn’t seem all too exciting but once you add [card]Brainstorm[/card], [card]Ponder[/card] and [card]Preordain[/card] with a couple of other instants and sorceries you are looking at a 3/2 with flying on t2 tapped and attacking quite often. Just because it’s called Pauper it doesn’t mean that the quality and interaction of cards in the format are poor.

Here is a Decklist that Alexander Hayne came up with off the top of his head after a long day of Magic. We stayed up way past our bed times hanging out with our gracious host Luke that put us up for a couple of days while in Toronto for a PTQ.

[deck title=Mono U Pauper Delver]
4 Spellstutter Sprite
4 Delver of Secrets
4 Phantasmal Bear
4 Cloud of Faeries
3 Ninja of the Deep Hours
1 Pestermite
4 Ponder
4 Preordain
4 Brainstorm
4 Counterspell
3 Vapor Snag
3 Daze
18 Island
[/deck]

I won’t go into too much detail about the sideboard because to be honest it wasn’t really that important. But the main deck seemed interesting enough to try out in the Tournament Practice room for a few giggles.

After playing the first few games seriously and crushing our opponents, we decided to “Troll” people as much as possible and still somehow managed to win games by making the worst play almost every turn. From cycling our [card]Cloud of Faeries[/card] to not untapping our lands purposely with its CIP trigger, we were still winning. This either shows us one of two things. One, the deck is absolutely ridiculously good or we were playing against suboptimal players and decks.

For curiosity’s sake I decided to take this brew for a test drive in a few 2 player que’s to decide for myself. Hey, if I can win with this deck then its not just the pilot and maybe the deck is just that good ?

After a ten match session I won seven matches with a variety of decks from mirror with similar builds to storm combo and a few blue red 8 post decks. My three losses were all to the same deck. The mirror was by far the worst matchup and I always found myself behind. This may be because of my lack of practice with the deck or Main deck Card selection. In any case, I hate losing mirror matches so I decided to make a few changes to the brew and focus on my weak points without giving up too much on my early game pressure.

Here is the new list I will continue to test with.

[deck title=Mono U Pauper Delver V.2.0]
4 Spellstutter Sprite
4 Delver of Secrets
4 Phantasmal Bear
4 Cloud of Faeries
3 Ninja of the Deep Hours
4 Ponder
4 Preordain
4 Brainstorm
4 Counterspell
4 Piracy Charm
3 Daze
18 Island
[/deck]

Not a Huge change I know, but I think that the versatility of [card]Piracy Charm[/card] will not only handle the threats from opposing players but will sometimes help you get in for more damage and maybe let you discard someone’s drawstep. Only Testing will tell, but I feel more comfortable knowing that I have more options. The card choices made by Mr. Hayne for his original deck were made based on preference and not on what is currently played in the meta. Although these card choices were mostly made on a whim, they are all great and the list is so tight that making cuts becomes extremely difficult. All of the cards in this deck are designed to do one thing, be as efficient as possible and interact with each other and generate advantage over time while maintaining an aggressive curve.

Let’s move on to a sideboard. After our first few matches I noticed a trend, you win the matches where you play a delver on turn one and manage to protect via counterspells or apply enough pressure with other beatsticks. The games we lost were obviously polar opposites, when I was forced into a control position I lost every game. The Idea I had was if My opponents wanted to one for one me then I would board out counters that would make me want to keep mana untapped every turn to protect my guys. Instead let’s try something that punishes them for killing my delver.[card]Stitched Drake[/card] seemed like a logical answer and its also quite hard for red decks to kill.

Speaking of red decks, [card]Hydroblast[/card] is a common, and any format where [card]Lightning Bolt[/card] is legal there will always be a red deck. So, that seems like a no brainer. How about Storm? Well, there isn’t much we can do about [card]Grapeshot[/card] but [card]Empty the Warrens[/card]’ tokens can get hosed by a nice little catch all card like [card]Echoing truth[/card]. Although I did not play against Affinity in the 10 Matches prior to review it is still a contender in the format, one to not be forgotten. The Best Card I can think about is [card]Steel Sabotage[/card], it answers any relevant spell they play and gets resolved artifacts later in the game too.

[deck title=Side Board]
4 Stitched Drake
4 Echoing Truth
4 Hydroblast
3 Steel Sabotage
[/deck]

This is the list I will be playing for a while, hopefully I’ll be able to come up with a few tweaks and maybe even some technology in the near future. I’m looking forward to the format with the new additions from Dark Ascension. [card]Faithless Looting[/card] seems like it will have quite an impact on the format making storm decks more consistent, which is a scary thought. [card]Thought Scour[/card] is a card that I have been anxious about trying out in a earlier reanimator deck that became almost unplayable after the banning of Frantic search. It may just be the missing link.

I look forward to writing articles mainly about the pauper format but also touching on other format’s and tournaments I play in. I will be recording videos of Tournament play in the upcoming weeks and including them in future articles. My plan is to get people motivated about a format that doesn’t require you to put down Hundreds of dollars on your credit card to play constructed on magic online.

Keep an eye out for my next article, I’m definitely going to try and make that reanimator deck work.

Till Next time,
GL HF
Thank you for reading my first article, I really look forward to your feedback and questions.

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