Roy Tang

I am aware of the existence of Pauper as a format in MTG, but I never paid too much attention to it before. A couple of weeks ago, a friend pointed out that I might enjoy playing the recent Jeskai Nuneca decks that had become popular recently. I checked out a sample decklist, and you bet I jumped at the chance to play Mulldrifters again lol.

We set about to gather the cards. Since we almost never sell cards, even draft chaff, we had most of the cards available already. The only exception was red elemental blasts/pyroblasts for the sideboard and some extra Archaemancers which we ended up getting from a shop. We also didn’t have Ash Barrens (apparently a pauper staple), and didn’t want to bother looking, so I made do with extra common fetches.

I took the pauper deck to my first event today, completely blind to what the meta was lol. I figured I’d just enjoy the event and see how the deck plays and what the meta is like. Here’s the deck I ran:

I wasn’t sure what to expect, since it was pauper I expected it to play a bit more like a limited format compared to Standard or Modern. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. The format is diverse with a lot of different decks and most of the matchups are highly interactive. I wish I could say I placed well too, but after a couple of good matches, I folded to some misplays. Here’s the match record:

• R1 2-0 vs MonoU Faeries/Delver
• R2 2-0 vs RG Madness
• R3 1-2 vs U/B
• R4 0-2 vs Boros
• R5 0-2 vs MonoU Faeries/Delver

I made one misplay in R3 when I agreed with my opponent’s assessment that both my spellstutters would die after he disfigured them both. We later agreed that one of them should have survived and two of this spells should have been countered. I also made a mistake when I allowed my R5 opponent to Snap his own Spellstutter to counter my Preordain when I had a Standard Bearer on the board. This is a result of not playing this card since Apocalypse! Lol. A few other minor mistakes in sequencing in the other games, but nothing too major. And I needed better sideboard plans, since I almost never knew what to pull out.

Moving forward, I might play a bit more of this format, at least it provides a fun and cheap alternative to Modern for paper Magic!