Back again friends. This time will not be talking about the cat food deck. I played with it a few times and felt way out of my league. It was not clear to me what I was supposed to be doing. Will come back to it when I’m older.
Now to a more simple deck for idiots: colourless tron*. This was a deck that recently had a spike in popularity. It has been around in some form or other for a while, and there’s a similar green version too, but someone tightened it up and won some tournament with it. Since then, all the pauper youtubers have made a video with it, and I was not the only person in my area who picked it up. I got it because it seemed really fun and powerful, and also because I already had all the mildly expensive cards (urza lands, expedition map) and the rest of the deck is all zero value bulk cards you can pick up for nothing. So it was definitely the cheapest deck I’ve built so far. (Ok confession: I did also buy 4 relic of progenitus, which I could really have done without, and those 4 cards cost more than the whole rest of the deck did. I justified it to myself as a birthday present and also they’re colourless sideboard staples so I’ll be able to get a lot of use out of them. It really is more than I should ever spend on a fucking piece of paper though).
*have mentioned this in like every post but again, refers to assembling the urza lands, like the cartoon robot voltron
So you of course play 4x each urza land, and I’m playing 4 expedition map and 3 world map to improve my chances of getting those lands. On top of that you’ve got 4 candy trail and 4 lembas to dig even deeper and eat some food to not die.
So the urza lands are usually used to build like a super-powered rainbow control deck that can play over any other deck, but in this deck you literally just play the top end colourless cards that no other deck would be bothered to play. These are mostly super strong creatures so let’s get into those.
Boulderbranch Golem combines much needed lifegain with a card that actually does something unlike most lifegain cards.
Pinnacle Kill-Ship can destroy almost any creature your opponent would be playing. The station mechanic isn’t so bad. You just play it one turn, get the 10 damage, then next turn play another 7/7 creature and tap it while it’s summoning sick to get the ship online.
Wretched gryff is the worst of the bunch but you want a flyer that can deal with sneaky snacker and delver of secrets, and drawing a card when cast is way better than when entering the battlefield cause it means you still get it even if the gryff is counterspelled.
Maelstrom Colossus has the very fun cascade effect, which when cast makes you reveal cards from the top of your deck until you reveal a non-land with a cheaper mana cost, then you play that for free. Colossus being an 8 mana creature means it can cast any of your numerous 7 mana creatures for free. The gamble here is that you are also running all the cheap artifacts to improve your chances of getting the urza lands assembled in the first 3-4 turns. So the unlucky case is you just get one of those which isn’t worth much. A good thing you can do is play candy trail before you play the colossus, scry 2 and hopefully put a big guy on top.
Drownyard Lurker is kind of in the flex slot. A lot of people play ulamog’s crusher which is pretty disgusting but 8 mana is one whole land more than 7 mana and more 7 mana creatures means more chance of getting a jackpot with maelstrom colossus. 7/7 vigilance also helps to attack and station the kill ship on the same turn, and idk the eldrazi token might come up i guess. At first I had iron giant and blitz automaton instead but i think 7 power is way better than 6 in this deck because of the kill ship.
Our last 7-drop is Scour From Existence, which is a really cool card because it clearly represents the hard upper limit for a removal spell in magic’s like internal design bible. Instant, exile, permanent: all the best keywords with basically zero downside except the absurd casting cost. Targetting is not always what you wanna be doing, so you can maybe argue a card like Extract A Confession has certain advantages over it, but generally speaking this is as good as it gets. Of course most of the time it’s just a Cast Down that costs way more (even if you think of 7 mana as 3 lands tapped, which it is in this deck, that’s a lot worse than 2), but it can hit absolutely any card the opponent controls.
As for the non-urza lands, I’m running 2 crystal grotto (for more scry), 2 haunted fengraf which is another fun gambly card that turns your maps into creature reanimators, one mountain and one molten tributary.
So, what coloured spells am I playing? For red I’ve got 2 breath weapon to help against wide boards like elves, and then 2 Oliphaunt to double as big monster and an extra way to find the mountain or tributary if I need them.
The only blue spell I have is 2 rush of knowledge, which is a card of one’s dreams, as one opponent put it. It’s pretty ridiculous but the deck does tend to run out of steam so this is a way to replenish your hand with a single card so bountifully that you guarantee you won’t need to again. The question is is it the most efficient thing to do from a deckbuilding perspective and how reliable is it in an actual game. I have yet to have enough information to really say but it sure does feel good when you play it. But that can be kind of a trick with these super high reward cards: you can overvalue them. There isn’t a good colourless draw card though, sadly. Another thing against it is it doesn’t necessarily work well with Maelstrom Colossus’ cascade effect. The card played with cascade resolves before the colossus hits the field, so if you have no other big creature then cascading into rush of knowledge might only draw one or two cards if you have a map or lembas sitting on the board, or zero cards if you’re really unlucky.
Okay so the main curve of your game is this. Mulligan aggressively until you have a hand that guarantees you to assemble the urza lands. So, ideally one of each land but that’s extremely unlikely. More reasonable is two lands and a map, or one and two maps (plus a non-urza land). I’d like to find a calculation on how likely this actually is, and there are heaps of hypergeometric calculator sites that mtg players use but I haven’t found one that can give me the likelihood of any possible combination of cards in an opening hand that can assemble tron. Of course you do have the candy trail and lembas there as safety nets in case you just cannot get that good hand, but it really is dangerous to keep a hand without guaranteed tron. You’re already spending 3-4 turns doing nothing but setting up lands. You do not want it to go any longer and you can very easily die without having done anything.
Once you have the urza lands ready you are now in a middle period where you can play one of your 7-cost cards per turn, and maybe a little candy trail or something as well. So you hope you have at least a couple options to choose from, and that your opponent’s doesn’t just counter them. Even at this stage, though, you can overwhelm a lot of decks or at least take back the momentum after they spent 3 turns playing the game and you just played lands. During these turns you’re either developing your secondary lands to play breath weapon or get creatures back from the graveyard, or just trying to get to 14 mana so you can play 2 cards per turn lol. Once you hit that threshold, your opponent has to really be doing something threatening to keep up with you.
In the sideboard I have:
2 Zuko’s exile, which is cheaper than scour from existence but cannot hit lands, and does give your opponent a clue token which is basically a free card once you’re in the midgame. But if you need more removal spells this is the best option.
2 more Breath weapon and 3 end the festivities, again because wide boards are scary.
1 campfire to keep up the pace against aggressive decks, to give you something to spend your leftover mana on and to maybe recycle your graveyard if the game goes long.
1 Whispersilk cloak, which I haven’t actually played yet but idk seems useful.
1 Kaervek’s Torch which is an alternate win condition against super grindy decks. Also haven’t used this yet due to a lack of sideboarding confidence.
1 Staunch Throneguard against any deck that probably can’t attack you.
And 4 relic of progenitus, because it seems like the most useful graveyard hate card for this deck. You are only using the graveyard for Haunted Fengraf, and for that card you only really want one creature in there so you don’t mind exiling your own graveyard. And the 1 exile per turn can help against decks like Mono Blue Terror and stuff.
So I’ll go over some of the games I played.
Rally red: This is a popular and powerful red deck that relies less on burn damage and more on low cost creatures that can do enough damage to kill you in the first few turns. I played 2 matches against this deck, going 1-2 in one and 2-1 in the other. I found that if they don’t get an absolute god hand and I can get tron up, I can probably recover the lost life while weakening their position (boulderbranch golem really is a huge card). But I think statistically speaking, they are more likely to have a great hand than I am.
Caw Gates: This deck uses the gate lands, the king of which is Basilisk Gate, which is an incredible card that lets you pump your creatures every single turn and just power through whatever. Most people play blue white, with lifelink creatures like sacred cat, and the card the deck gets its name from, squadron hawk. This card is really good when combined with brainstorm cause you can play the hawk, search for the other 3, cast brainstorm, put two hawks back on top, then cast another hawk and just draw those two hawks right off the top of your deck. Anyway I had a pretty rough time against this deck even though I was able to exile their basilisk gates with scour from existence. I just never got their board clear enough to have an opening to kill them, and we both have lifegain so the games went long. First match we went 1-1 and then the guy just gave me the win for some reason. I think he didn’t want to draw because it messes with your seed in a swiss round tournament or something? I have no idea. In the other game I went 1-2, and had a moment where I double blocked his pumped creature with Wretched Gryff and Oliphaunt, and then he played prismatic strands, declaring red. This meant the Oliphaunt did no damage, his creature didn’t die and both of mine died. It didn’t occur to me you could use the card that way and I was really impressed! It is way better than the green fog spells like Moment’s Peace. I think this matchup is pretty rough because the white sideboard cards are all good against this deck. Dust to dust can hit most of your creatures plus your maps, for example. I think next time I play against this deck I’ll try out kaervek’s torch.
Elves I played against once and it’s not a deck I’m very familiar with so I made a lot of mistakes. The way this deck works in pauper is you play like a handful of forests and a bunch of “mana dorks” which is cards like Llanowar elves, then you have the good elves which are priest of titania, timberwatch elf, quirion ranger, wellwisher. You get 1 billion mana from priest of titania, untap it with quirion ranger, turn that into 2 billion mana, then you play nyxborn hydra on something and win. This is how my opponent beat me at least. I lost game 1, and game 2 sided out scour from existence for more board wipes, but soon realised this was a big mistake. I had breath weapon and did play it, but I waited for her to play all her cards so I could kill the most guys, which meant she just got all the mana on the stack, let her guys die, then slammed a 23 power hydra. The only answer to that my deck has is scour from existence. I asked her after the match when I should have played the breath weapon and she said in her upkeep so she can’t use the mana. But yeah she was clearly really experienced with the deck, and went on to place first, undefeated, in the 6 round tournament we were playing in.
Jund Wildfire was another rough matchup because like caw gates it can grind me out, but on top of that they can cast cleansing wildfire on my tron lands, rather than their indestructible lands which is usually their plan A. This left me struggling to reassemble tron mid-game. I also don’t even get a replacement land after the first one cause I only run one basic land in the whole deck. I did think at this moment the green version of the deck would perform much better in this matchup since it can side in Tamiyo’s Safekeeping. I did notice in this match that drownyard lurker has cycling! I got to use it while I was trying to dig through the deck for more urza lands. It did not save me lol.
Mono blue terror. I’m sure I’ve explained this deck before but basically it’s a blue deck full of counterspells and cantrips* that mill you, so you get a threshold of instants and sorceries in the graveyard that let you play Tolarian Terror and Cryptic Serpent for like nothing. It’s very fast, very reactive, and the snakes are enough to kill most decks easily. It has been one of the best, most popular pauper decks ever since tolarian terror came out. I actually have a decent matchup against it I think, because all my guys can kill the snakes. After sideboards the early game can be rough because they have annul and steel sabotage to counter my maps. But this didn’t actually hinder me in this match. We were on game 3, opponent was tapped out, so I played Rush of knowledge. He cried in despair and went more defensive on his turn. Then on my turn I untapped my lands, stared at them for a second, and said wait a second I don’t have blue mana. I was tired and overeager to play the card that draws 7 cards, and he probably just trusted me cause he didn’t know the deck at all. I conceded at that point cause you can’t really take that back. It was a shame cause I’d like to have known if I could beat terror or not.
*jargon that means a cheap card that draws 1 more card
Blue black faeries: it was my first time playing against this. They were very aware of my points of vulnerability, and diligently countered all my maps with spellstutter sprite. I had no game at all. Would love to know how to play this matchup.
Anyway sorry for huge post. This deck is fun and not terrible! Maybe it’ll be the one I can settle into for a while cause next few months are gonna be really tight money-wise and I should have already stopped spending money on stupid cardboard.
