Welcome to the second edition of Pauper Chronicles – this week, we’ll be looking at what you need to do to start playing Standard Pauper, and we’ll be looking at a few lists that use some run-of-the-mill commons to do some pretty amazing things.

Chase Commons?

This may come as a surprise to you, but not all commons are created equal. I know, it’s a shock. Take a deep breath. Count to ten. It’s the truth. Not all commons are good. Take Zephyr Spirit for instance. It’s the butt of a continual joke in my playgroup – it’s a terrible card. Cards like Logic Knot, Compulsive Research, and Ravenous Rats blow it out of the water. It’s this mentality that brings me to my first point this week– you cannot just throw 36 common cards in a deck with 24 lands and play Pauper Magic. That’s not how the game works. While Pauper is a “casual” type of format, it certainly can be quite competitive. If you don’t build a good deck, know how to play that deck, and if you aren’t prepared for the metagame, you’ll get tromped just as easily as if you had brought that same deck to Friday Night Magic.

With that in mind, there are some commons that seem to be on everyone’s list. These commons are the ones that show up consistently in decklists. What are these commons? Well, actually, that depends. The chase commons depend on the format, depend on the metagame, and depend on what kind of deck you are looking to build. It’s a little more complicated than saying, “buy these now, you need them for every deck.”

So, instead of making lists and arguing why you should go out and buy 4 of each of them for your next Pauper tournament, let’s do something a little more practical. Let’s look at a decklist that uses some good cards.

White and Green
Dominating the Standard Format (Maybe?)

This first deck takes advantage of some of the most powerful green and white cards in Standard right now. Let’s take a look.

This is a pretty simple concept to wrap your mind around. Make. Lots. Of. Tokens. Once you can do that, you’ve pretty much got it down. Llanowar Elves accelerates your early mana, while Veteran Armorer keeps your tokens out of burn range from something like Subterranean Shambler or Rain of Embers. Essence Warden gives you a nice life buffer to work with while you build up your forces to come in for a giant attack off of Kjeldoran War Cry, or Marshalling Cry.

Judging how good a common can be is a relatively simple matter if you look at commons in lists. For instance, Llanowar Elves is a pretty good card – we know that because professional players have been using the common in Pro Tours forever. That’s not a hard thing to see or realize.

What may be harder to recognize is something like how amazing Pallid Mycoderm is in this deck. With Mycoderm along with your saproling producing cards, you can easily turn your 10 1/1 saproling tokens into 7 4/4s – Mycoderm’s ability is amazing in numbers. Another card that can be overlooked is Essence Warden. When you are making multiple tokens a turn, you create a significant life barrier between you and your untimely death, even with a dedicated opposing offense. Essence Warden and Pallid Mycoderm are somewhat unlike other cards in this deck, because they are not very good outside of the Saproling creating environment. However, if these two cards operate inside this type of environment, they can really shine.

One card that really is catching a lot of attention is Sprout Swarm, a card that has deadly possibilities in the right situations. This deck creates a lot of creature tokens; that’s a fact. With Convoke and Buyback, this creature producer, can, if the board is right, create an overwhelming hoard of Saprolings at the ends of your opponent’s turns, just by tapping down all your guys. Sprout Swarm is an automatic choice for this deck, and perhaps others down the line as Lorwyn becomes Standard legal.

My final point on the Spore Cry deck, before we move on, is that while it is a powerhouse deck, its strength is based on small, and on numbers. Cards like Martyr of Ashes and Rain of Embers can break this deck and all of its advantages. Spore Cry has won many PDC (Pauper Deck Challenge) tournaments on Magic Online in the past few weeks, but it cannot truly dominate the format. With a surge in Saproling weenie decks, decks that run control elements like Martyr of Ashes will become more popular again, and the metagame will unavoidably change.

Looking at Limited Magic for Pauper Commons

This may come as a shock to some people, and could possibly be Pauper heresy, but in my mind, the best way to judge Pauper commons is to play some Limited Magic. It is no secret that there are a few choice commons that are first picked in any booster draft format. These commons are supposedly the best cards in the pack, and Pro Magic players will attest to the power of cards like Errant Ephemeron in Time Spiral draft.

Limited Magic is an excellent place to look at the power and usefulness of common cards because Limited Magic is the only Sanctioned Magic where commons are played the most, and where they consist of the majority of a player’s deck. When a player is forced to use commons, then that player must tune their mindset to the good and bad of the common cards that are in the format, or in their Sealed pool. A player must judge the commons in their card pools, and make decisions about what cards are good, what cards are playable, and what cards aren’t. Making decisions, and using cards that you normally would not use, is a great way to test how powerful those cards are.

Power is key here – every Pauper player must get as much power as he or she can from the limits of the cardpool they are given. Whether this power comes from card advantage from creatures like Aurochs Herd or if it’s something more simple like Ravenous Rats, or if it’s the token producing power of Selesnya Evangel, powerful commons are needed to win the game. But how do you decide which commons are powerful?

The answer is simple and at the same time complex– by going out on a limb, and playing those cards.

With Future Sight just recently released online and in the real paper world, there are some who are still hesitant about their choices in draft and in Pauper. They aren’t sure if a card is good or not. In order to truly understand whether or not a card is good, you have to analyze it, and then play it. If it works for you, then that’s good, and if it does what it is supposed to do for you, then you may want to continue to use it. If it doesn’t work out the way it should, or if it’s simply under par, then you should move on to new cards, until you can find the right cards for the deck you’re building.

As an example, if I were to say that Gathan Raiders was a great card for Limited because of its Morph ability, you might be a skeptic. You lose card advantage to flip over a creature that only gets a boost of +1/+1, and if you’re lucky, then maybe +3/+3. And you may be right. Gathan Raiders may not be that powerful in Limited. But it might be. And if you have never played it, how can you be sure? You think you know that it’s bad, but you aren’t sure because you’ve never played it.

To perhaps prove my point just a little about how Gathan Raiders is a good card, throw this little bit of knowledge into the mix – in Constructed Magic, it is so much easier to design a deck to take advantage of your disadvantages than it is in Limited. In Pauper, the card you discard by Gathan Raiders could be a Gorgon Recluse. Or it could be a Grim Harvest. It could be a Dark Withering, or a Call to the Netherworld. With Gathan Raiders as a large, powerful finisher for a Black and Red Madness deck, I expect to see more of him in the weeks to come.

Back on Track – Time Spiral Block Constructed

While I don’t have an exact sideboard nailed down, and the main deck could use some more tuning, I expect to be running this, or something like it in the next few weeks of UPDC, a Pauper tournament series that runs Sunday afternoons at 2PM Eastern time. The runner of the tournaments, a user who calls himself Polyjak, has decided to throw a loop in the normal UPDC schedule and run 4 Time Spiral Block tournaments instead of regular Standard tournaments.

This deck can be down and dirty if you can get the right lands – The turn 3 Gorgon Recluse off of a Lightning Axe is almost priceless. This deck aims to use powerful discard effects and ample amounts of creature removal to garner advantage, then use the Hellbent effects of Gathan Raiders, or the Shadow of Trespasser il-Vec to overpower your opponent.

Madness is great because it allows you to pay for expensive spells on the cheap. With 10 madness cards in the deck, and with 16 madness enablers floating around, you are going to be able to use your madness to your advantage. Fiery Temper would really even this deck out, but unfortunately, it’s a Timeshifted card in Time Spiral, so it counts as a rare card. That’s not very fun, but that’s what keeps people from playing Call of the Herd in Pauper.

Now that we’ve gotten my thoughts on the format out of the way, let’s take a look at some of the card choices from a deck that was played in the first round of Time Spiral (TSP) Block Constructed, and take a closer look at what Time Spiral has to offer.

Black in Block – The Mystical Teachings Engine

An almost exact opposite to the Saprolings deck I showed you earlier in this article, this “mono Black” deck controls the game with hordes of creature removal. Standard Pauper is a creature defined format, more so than Classic Pauper, and TSP Block Pauper is no different. Players are going to try to resolve creature spells (most notably, Sliver hordes), and this deck is going to knock them down each time. If it can’t have an answer to the problem right at the turn when the opposing creature was played, it’s got Mystical Teachings to go find something. Tendrils of Corruption is a nice card because of the high Swamp count, and because it deals very nicely with Slivers and other Weenies well, and it keeps your life total high.

The interesting thing about this deck is that it splashes Blue in order to get the powerful effects of Mystical Teachings and Foresee, two amazing Blue commons in TSP Block, and has a one singular Mountain to pay the Flashback of Strangling Soot. Terramorphic Expanse helps make this deck a reality, with all the color fetching you need to do for Mystical Teachings and Strangling Soot.

Speaking of this deck’s splash colors, Foresee is a card I expect to see a lot of play in the next few years. Koutarou Ootsuka, a Japanese M:tG Pro player has said the card is equal to Fact or Fiction, and while that may be a bit of an overstatement, it is a truly amazing common. It allows you to dig four down, and if you still can’t find what you’re looking for, gives you access to cards five and six. Not bad, if you ask me!

Ichor Slick is another card I really like, because of its versatility. Although it is much more costly when compared to the amazing Last Gasp in Ravnica: City of Guilds, Ichor Slick offers the ability to garner card advantage if you cycle it, and then use its Madness cost to kill a creature. The great thing about the 6 mana Ichor Slick is that it’s an instant, where the 3 mana Ichor Slick is a Sorcery. It’s a card that’s okay in the early game, but amazing in the late game.

I’m not so sure about how good Mystical Teachings is in this deck, especially when some of your best removal is Sorcery speed, but I can’t argue with the results thus far. The other problem I have with the list is the almost utter lack of creatures. There are some decent creature spells for black, Gorgon Recluse most notably missing from the list. I think the list can be improved, but short of moving into a second color, the options for change for this list seem stretched.

Well, that’s all I have this week. Pauper is a very diverse format, but it’s no cakewalk, and you definitely won’t be playing a Grizzly Bears anytime soon. You’ve got to work to understand the commons in the format you’re playing, and you’ve got to be able to decide whether or not a card is good. Next time, we’ll look into Classic Pauper, and do a little fishing around in Time Spiral for the commons that make the cut. If everyone is playing Slivers, what colors should you be playing?

And remember, the next time you open a pack and just speed past the commons, stop and look a little closer. An amazing format is right there staring you in the face.

~Death_By_Beebles~

Death_By_Beebles is a relatively normal guy. When he’s not working on a new Raiding the Dollar Bins deck, or thinking about what to play for next week’s 3CB tournament, he’s spending his time writing, reading, and playing Pauper Magic.
If you’ve got questions, comments, or suggestions, send them on over to deathbybeebles@yahoo.com.

PS: Go out and buy 4x Terramorphic Expanse if you don’t have them. They’re awesome.

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Articles Spotlights from 2007:
Lorwyn Theme Week Intro & Schedule of Events
Blink And Bounce: Timing is Key
Going Blind: XCB Metagaming - A Prolonged Conclusion.
The Science of Magic: Genetic Engineering, Part Two.
Shifting Lineaments: Casual Metagaming (Pt. 2).
The Dungeon Of Malefict: Pure Evil!
Land Week Introduction & Schedule.
Combofusion: Legends Timeshifted.
One Card to Rule Them All: Coastal Piracy
Irrational Love: Chimeras. The Lego's of Magic.