It's been a while since we started a new MtG so let's talk about Pauper. Pauper is a format where you can only play cards that were printed as commons. Despite this pauper decks are not as cheap as you'd hope but regardless it's still the least expensive format. It also remains to a degree an "open format" it's flown under the radar for a while and there may still some amazing deck out the waited for a brewer to find it.
You can cover a lot more bases than you'd expect with commons but the one thing they never print at common is duals that don't come into play tapped. This means aggro decks generally have to by monocolor while midrange and control can afford two colors or three if they're willing to push it.
So let's talk about Pauper decks
Mono-Green Stompy
These decks hearken back to the old Señor Stompy decks. It plays a bunch of cheap creatures and pump spells and has a mana curve that's practically flat. It has the classic issue of the mono green deck where doesn't have reach for if the game goes late, but if they stumble they're gonna get run over.
If your into aggro but not so into green there are other options, Mono-Red aggro with Foundry Street Denizin, Burn, Affinity, or even Mono-White Heroic. If you're into grindy midrange well then there's.
Boros-Metalcraft
Prophetic Prism's turn the drawbacks of cards like Glint Hawk or Kor Skyfisher into advantages by letting you pick them up and play them again. Combine that with the extra cards you draw by being anointed by Palace Sentinels you should eventually bury your opponent in card advantage.
If instead you long for the days of onslaught/theros standard there's still a competitive mono-black midrange control deck though it seems to be on the outs. If you'd like to go even durdlier the is of course tron
Tron
We all know what's going on here, play tron lands make a asslode of mana and go over the top of whatever they're doing. Generally the game ends by Crusher beats or one big Rolling Thunder or occasionally by ten hits from a Mulldrifter.
Personally I find the Blue/Black control lists more interesting. Many of them have started to run Striped Riverwinder alongside exume to give the option to steal games by reanimating a hexproof beater on turn 2. Of course if you really want to steal games what you want is a combo deck. Sadly combo has proven a little too good in pauper and the once might storm a flicker decks have seen the ban list for power level reasons. A few still remain of course including
Tireless Tribe
Tireless tribe can pump it's own toughness and Inside Out turns that toughness into power to end the game potentially as early as turn two. Of course even with blue card filtering and countermagic the combo is still worryingly fragile and hard to assemble.
Of course if you really want to win you'd probally want to go with the most powerful and popular deck in the format.
Delver
Delver a top deck in every format with the cantrips to support it and Pauper has all the cantrips. It has aggressive lines of play where it sticks the early delver and rides it to victory as well the lines where it sits behind countermagic. It has a lot of cool synergies like Ninja being able to pick up a Spellstutter Sprite so you can use it again. While there are mono-blue versions of delver more popular are the ones the splash red for Lightning Bolt and Skred, the fact that you play Ash Barrens and Evolving Wilds even has the upside of making Brainstorm and Ponder better by letting shuffle away unwanted cards.
[MTG] the Prince and the Pauper
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I wish I had more to say, because I really like the idea of Pauper, but I'm not into it and have nothing to reflect upon personally.
But I was thinking that Pauper would be an excellent format to get into so that I could assemble a bunch of moderately priced decks that were all documented as being on similar footing, and then maybe even slip a couple other archetypes into the pool by putting desirable rares and uncommons in second-rate decks to bring them up to the baseline. Maybe you have some recommendations for what would make a fun curated meta?
But I was thinking that Pauper would be an excellent format to get into so that I could assemble a bunch of moderately priced decks that were all documented as being on similar footing, and then maybe even slip a couple other archetypes into the pool by putting desirable rares and uncommons in second-rate decks to bring them up to the baseline. Maybe you have some recommendations for what would make a fun curated meta?
This signature is here just so you don't otherwise mistake the last sentence of my post for one.
This site has a lot of the main pauper decks out there:
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/pauper#paper
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/pauper#paper
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Pauper is a format that revolves around ordering cards online. Commons powerful enough for the format get printed in most sets and all-star commons even get reprinted from time to time (Duress and Opt are commons in Standard right now). But in general it's very likely that a deck with 36 spells is going to have 9 spells from 9 sets. You might get lucky diving through the commons box at a local game store and find some high value commons - but you probably (read: almost certainly) aren't going to find a whole deck that way.
A lot of the cards aren't expensive, because they were at one point printed as commons and a lot of the cards are not used in any other format because they are strictly worse than Uncommons or Rares from the same time period. But actually getting a deck involves pretty much buying one. No one you know or meet is going to have an Ancestral Mask or an Armadillo Cloak in their trade binder. So a Pauper Deck is normally going to set you back around fifty dollars, plus whatever you have to pay for shipping. The list price is somewhat more than that, but you will be able to get some of the more recent commons by diving into local commons boxes or just asking for them off of people opening packs.
-Username17
A lot of the cards aren't expensive, because they were at one point printed as commons and a lot of the cards are not used in any other format because they are strictly worse than Uncommons or Rares from the same time period. But actually getting a deck involves pretty much buying one. No one you know or meet is going to have an Ancestral Mask or an Armadillo Cloak in their trade binder. So a Pauper Deck is normally going to set you back around fifty dollars, plus whatever you have to pay for shipping. The list price is somewhat more than that, but you will be able to get some of the more recent commons by diving into local commons boxes or just asking for them off of people opening packs.
-Username17
If you wanted to be cute you could assemble a meta of Mono-White heroic, Mono-Blue Delver, Mono-Black Control, Mono-Red Burn, and Mono-Green Stompy. That would reflect a decent spread of archetypes. If you wanted to represent the existing meta you probably want to swap mono-black for Boros Metalcraft and Heroic for Tron.Eikre wrote:But I was thinking that Pauper would be an excellent format to get into so that I could assemble a bunch of moderately priced decks that were all documented as being on similar footing, and then maybe even slip a couple other archetypes into the pool by putting desirable rares and uncommons in second-rate decks to bring them up to the baseline. Maybe you have some recommendations for what would make a fun curated meta?