I would definitely take some advice from Miffy or anyone else! I’m thinking I want to do a blue and white merfolk standard deck, cuz I currently don’t have any standard decks. I don’t know anything about how merfolk are supposed to be played, I just have some of their cards and like their art a lot.
3 Likes
There have not been enough Hippos in the history of MTG to make a deck.
3 Likes
Ok, I took all the random Lorwyn Eclipsed cards I got from packs and was able to make a functional blue and white merfolk deck out of it! All the changeling cards in ECL really help fill out a type based deck. It’s not perfect, but I just played with it and had a good time. Next time I’m at the game store I’m gonna go through their singles and find some of the ECL merfolk I don’t have yet to sub in.
Building a deck was much more fun than I expected! It actually did help to already have a small trove of random cards from one set that I could pull from. It was a nice way to get started with this sort of thing because it constrained my options to just what I had on hand, rather than the infinite possibility space I could have pulled from if I were buying singles online.
6 Likes
Hi friends. Been a while. Will quickly go over developments in my pauper life.
I continue to play the colourless tron - now with some green edition - and continue to be unsure whether it’s better than the no green edition. This has kinda become my “main deck” so to speak. If I don’t know what to play I’ll play this. The main issue I’m having at a local level is there is one regular player who almost always plays gates, and another who sometimes does, and this is a matchup I’ve really struggled with. We have a weirdly similar gameplan with a different texture, but I find it really hard to get over the line against them. And the two players are definitely more skilled than me, so I lose a lot! Especially the main gates guy has been playing the new card shattered acolyte, which has a strong “threat of activation” against the majority of cards in my deck. This shuts me out of so many plays! I shall persist though.
Anyway the new deck I’ve been playing recently is poison storm, which is pretty simple. You put a poison counter on the enemy, and then you cast spells that say “proliferate” on them, which means add an additional counter to any counters that are on the board anywhere. (crucial information: if a player has 10 poison counters on them, they lose the game.) It is basically an efficiency test: can you draw enough cards and apply enough counters before your opponent wins the game by playing magic the gathering. You get to make use of the depletion lands, which are lands that come with two counters on them, and when you tap them you remove a counter to add two mana of the land’s colour. So with proliferate you get to keep these around forever (mostly) which is kinda broken! You then also use pentad prism in a similar to filter mana and (if you have multiple prisms) go mana positive with your cheaper spells. The deck has a surprising amount of game to it, and it is less autopilot than I initially expected, but it does at times feel like playing solitaire with someone on the other end of the table watching you. Anyway I quite like it! And it is a pretty unpopular deck, so it definitely feels like it hasn’t been perfected yet. I’m currently running the new card Embrace the Paradox, which has felt pretty alright, but this slot (card that draws a lot of cards) has a lot of different options. Traditionally people have played Lorien Revealed or Deep Analysis, but I’m curious about trying something like compulsive research or focus the mind as well.
Then I just yesterday went back to the cat food pestilence deck, this time with a more traditional decklist than whatever jank I had before. I understood the deck much better this time, though it really is difficult to play. The time pressure is real, you can’t waste time if you wanna win. I went 0-3 but I felt like I learned a lot. I went against affinity twice and the big way I lost was this: I would grind it out until I had a pestilence and a billion mana, and then I’d blast it for however much their biggest creature was every turn, while tapping campfires and stuff. Both players would hold onto every copy of galvanic blast in their hand until I got my own life total down to 12 or 8 or whatever, then in response to my pestilence activation would blast me. So next time I’m gonna keep weather the storms sitting in my hand and play it in response to their galvanic blast lol. Hopefully that works! Also need to know when to let go of a campfire to shuffle essential cards back into my deck, especially the precious 3 copies of pestilence, cause if I run out of those I straight up have no way to win because the version I’m playing right now has no troll of khazad-dum, basically just cause I wanna see if I can win without it. I have noted though that its toughness is one higher than the highest in the affinity deck (myr enforcer’s 4), so I could keep it alive through a pestilence activation and then punch them with it. Worth thinking about when I do decide to change the list. Tomorrow I shall play the same list though, cause I still feel like I have a lot to learn first.
4 Likes
Major developments in pauper, my friends. Bonder’s Ornament was unbanned last week, so now apparently everybody wants to play it and slow grindy decks are on the rise. Personally, it doesn’t even seem that good. Like I don’t think I’d put it in my colourless tron deck. If I spend 7 mana to draw one card, I’ll die man! The card has gone like x10 in price (aka it costs a few bucks), so I ain’t buying it anyway. Presumably it will go down again after people get bored of it. Anyway it is fun to see this kind of banlist-based destabilisation. It is the first banlist change since I’ve started playing. Right before I started they did a trial-unban of High Tide, which immediately spawned an apparently intolerably boring combo deck, so they rebanned it.
On a local level it hasn’t changed anything yet. Both nights I’ve gone to since the unban everybody was just playing their regular stuff. Maybe tonight though! I’m playing poison storm with a new package of 1x Merchant Scroll and 2x Teach by Example, which some guy has been doing well with on mtgo lately. I love the artwork for merchant scroll. Of course the best kind of card artwork is hand holding a gem, but second to that is object with mystical aura.
2 Likes
No bonder’s ornament at locals yesterday.
I went 2-1 with poison storm, which means I earned back the money I spent on merchant scroll, with which I bought, at long last, one copy of pyroblast. Maybe in like 6 more months I will have 8 like everyone else. This is one of those horrible brain patterns where you can feel like you aren’t spending money, but really, you are.
Round 3, which I lost, was against mono red madness. I made a crucial mistake casting experimental augury too early when I should have waited till next turn. They pyroblasted it, which meant my depletion land counters didn’t proliferate which put me in a terrible mana position the next turn where I had to sacrifice one of my lands to do a blind draw, didn’t draw anything good, and from there was just dead. I should have made sure I had an answer to pyroblast, or just enough mana that I wouldn’t fall into that dangerzone threshold.
Anyway one of the local people printed me two issues of teachings for teachings, which is a pauper fanzine. Wow, how nice!!! You can read all the issues for free online but I’m excited to read mine on the train!
4 Likes
Havent been playing magic due to finances, but did get to play pauper cube for the second time at a friend’s house today. I won!!! Wow. My first time winning anything in this game.
Here is my deck
4 Likes
Ok gonna make a couple posts.
Last week there was a big upheaval in pauper because a new card from the marvel set, Hawkeye’s Bow, created a two card infinite damage combo.
If you equip this card to an old elf, Seeker of Skybreak, you can tap and untap it forever and do 1 damage each time.
This ran rampant and won most of the tournaments for the week. People were pretty mad about it. On Saturday, before cube, I played a couple games with my friend, dimir terror vs the Naya Gates deck with the bow combo in it. It definitely did feel like if you get the combo it’s like lol I win. Not much joy in it. But also it is pretty weak to removal and countermagic idk. Anyway they banned the elf this morning, so no need to ever think about it again I guess. Seeker of Skybreak does seem like it is only ever gonna be an enabler of deleterious combos that are too easy and cheap, so idk seems fine to ban it to me.
4 Likes
I still have all these words I haven’t shared about Magic yet BUT miffy has convinced our local store to put a pauper night on their calendar next month!! And thanks to community donations we have completed about 6 meta decks* and we’re about halfway to having a cube…it’s wild! These boobs have no clue how valuable their commons are!! DON’T TELL THEM THOUGH, I’M GLAD THEY GAVE THEM TO US SO WE COULD TRICK THEM INTO PLAYING THE BEST FORMAT
*We proxied all the expensive stuff, no one gonna give away fuckin lotus petals or klark clan shamans even if they got 'em…
4 Likes
Yessss that is so sick. May the pauper scene blossom into something beautiful. 6 decks!!! That is incredible.
2 Likes
I’m currently building a dimir (blue black) control deck that uses Abjure to have more unconditional counterspells than any commonly used deck in pauper.
So, among countermagic in pauper, we of course have Counterspell, the first and best counter spell by which all others are measured.
I will of course be playing 4 of these in the deck. Then, other counterspells commonly played in pauper are all conditional in some way. Some popular ones are:
So Force Spike does nothing after the early game, Dispel is mostly good in a counterwar type situation, and Spellstutter Sprite is reliant on a good boardstate, and struggles to counter high mana cost cards.
But we also have Abjure.
This is a one mana unconditional counterspell! That’s amazing! But, of course, you need to sacrifice a blue permanent. Now, technically, if you can cast this card, you can also pay its cost, because the Island you tapped is a blue permanent. But obviously you’d rather not sacrifice a land. So I’m playing some blue junk generation too.
Cryogen Relic is a good card that sees a decent amount of play in blue decks. Hard Evidence is not a commonly played card, but it basically a blue version of Thraben Inspector, which is a very commonly played card (with the added benefit of being a sorcery, which will come up later). Omen of the Sea is the least played of these cards, but the way I look at it is this:
Preordain is one of the most popular blue draw cards, and is played in many pauper decks. If you have 4 counterspell and 4 preordain in your deck, that’s 12 total mana cost across 8 cards. If you have Abjure and Omen of the Sea in your deck, that’s also 12 total mana cost across the 8 cards, except Omen can be played at instant speed, and can be played when you have extra mana so that the counter spell can be played when you only have 1 mana up. In addition, the 12 mana from Counterspell and Preordain is all mandatorily blue, whereas 1 mana from Omen of the Seas can be played with a black mana, which is very helpful in a 2 colour deck.
So, by thinking of Omen of the Sea as an instant speed preordain that pays for half of a Counterspell as well, Abjure basically does become copies 5-8 of Counterspell.
I really want to see if this makes a big enough difference for a pauper control deck. 8 unconditional counters is a lot.
So I’m basically retooling my Dimir Terror deck with this package. I’m cutting the mill cards and the sneaky snacker stuff, and putting this in instead. For the creatures, I’m played 4x Murmuring Mystic instead of the snakes.
This card is a pretty common win condition among blue decks in pauper. You make a lot of birds and you kill with them. In this deck, the birds can also be sacrificed for Abjure (which will make a new bird anyway, going bird neutral!). In my current decklist, 30/60 of the cards are instants or sorceries. It is a shame that Cryogen Relic and Omen of the Sea won’t trigger Murmuring Mystic, but at least Hard Evidence will.
Also gonna squeeze in 2 Ghostly Flickers, just because I love the card.
The main targets will be Cryogen Relic (flickering it draws 2 cards!) and Omen of the Sea of course, but it can also flicker Murmuring Mystic to nullify a removal spell that targets it. Idk maybe it’s not worth it but I had the space so I put it in.
Anyway gonna play this deck next week. I’m really excited! I don’t expect it to actually be good because I’m an idiot and have surely gone about things totally incorrectly. But I think it has potential and I want to see how it goes.
Here is the full decklist.
3 Likes
This isn’t true, though? Lands are colourless due to having no coloured mana cost unless marked otherwise (see Dryad Arbor)
3 Likes
Correct, basic lands are colorless, although they do have a color identity, which only matters for EDH/Commander.
ETA: As evidence, you can do an Advanced Search on Scryfall for colorless cards that are lands, and it’s basically all lands, and yes, the basics are in there.
1 Like
Oh, thank you. That is very helpful. Now that I think about, that does seem like it’d be way too powerful and the card would probably see play in like Legacy and Vintage if it were true. So makes sense!
1 Like
Reference spotted
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vedder,Elihu-The_Questioner_of_the_Sphinx-_1836.gif
3 Likes
I started playing legacy
1 Like
I just discovered they’re actually doing the unthinkable and printing Worzel and Thomil cards. Well, I guess I have nothing left to look forward to from the MTG franchise forever now.
1 Like
Should write a big post at some point abt my magic life, but yesterday got a big box of free cards and it was mostly final fantasy. I sorted them and i have like 65% of a final fantasy cube. So im gonna print all the rares and make that
2 Likes
So I made the final fantasy cube and played it today. After consulting the internet I went for 3 of each common, 2 of each uncommon, 1 of each rare/mythic and bonus sheet card. The first go was super fun! There were 3 of us so we did it prerelease style: 6 packs each, with which we make a 40 card deck.
Here was mine.
so a kinda controlly thing with big late game cards. 8-10 removal spells depending how you count. I was able to win one game by flipping Ultimecia, which felt pretty disgusting (though I didn’t even get the extra turn… the big menace creature was enough lol) and another game by playing Omega. So I felt pretty good about how I built it! I also had Urza, Lord High Artificer off the bonus sheet but it was never more than 2 little creatures. The token it makes did grow thanks to the treasures off of Sidequest: Hunt the Mark though, which felt like a good interaction. I also got to flip that card one game which felt gross. It is really fun after nearly a year of inducting myself into magic by only playing pauper to finally cast some rares lol. These cards are fucked!
One friend was playing a green red ramp deck with Primeval Titan off the bonus sheet, and the other was playing red black with The Final Days, Queen Brahne and Summon: Primal Odin. I won against both tho hehe.
Really happy I put this together on a whim! Hope I can play it again soon, and get a bigger group together for a proper draft. Gonna ask the pauper regulars this week if they’re interested.
3 Likes