Anything But: A Request Fulfilled

Two articles I started an interesting look at Pauper through a look at some of the random, possibly old decks that I had managed to acquire throughout my time on Magic Online. During my look at a cool, tri-colored deck that focused on the recursion of single-costed artifacts I happened across a very cool deck. After that article went live, I had several requests to see if I could track the deck down. Well, I did, and we’re going to take a look at it this week after we get into our Competitive Corner!

Last time around we were looking at the metagame from a much broader perspective. We took a look at things from about a two-month window, but now we’re going to get back to our regular schedule as we focus in bi-weekly. Things are going to be interesting still for a month or so as we’re starting to see the integration of new cards from the release of Dragon’s Maze. No giant shake up just yet, but we have seen a least one deck manage to move up a tier as a result.

Daily Event Results 5/2 – 5/15

Quick note: Please be aware there is one missing day in this results list because there was some issue and the Daily Event results from 5/9 were not posted from any format. The top four decks seem to really be interchangeable at times. Last time around we had seen a strong showing from DelverBlue, but now FissurePost has shown dominance once again with a commanding lead. Stompy also stepped up big taking second in what seems to really be a hit or miss thing for the deck. Other former contenders such as IzzetPost have continued to fall. Moving up fast on the list is the new version of WeeFiend, now titled ClopsFiend. I don’t think anyone was surprised to see this as people in the community had been talking about it for awhile now. That aside I think the deck got mildly stronger, but high popularity of it will be more a result of shiny-new-toy syndrome as opposed to the deck’s power level. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Another interesting note is that FamiliarStorm continued its rise from last week and moved beyond rogue status and adding yet more Fissure decks to the meta.

This week our rogue list continues to increase! Let’s check it out…

1. MBC – 5
2. DimirTrinket – 5
3. Infect – 4
4. Boros Kitty – 4
5. MUC – 3
6. WeeFiend – 2
7. DimirPost – 2
8. MWA – 2
9. GreenPost – 2
10. Damn Rats – 2
11. Izzet Control – 1
12. MBLD – 1

There are quite a few new names on our list this time around, I am happy to say. It’s always nice to see the continued creativity of the Pauper community. The first I’ll just mention is Boros Kitty, which is going to be discussed in our deck spotlight this week. Beyond that we had a Mono-Black Land Destruction based deck (titled MBLD here), which was a cool take on a strategy we’ve seen already in green and red. We also had some old-timey flashbacks in GreenPost, Damn Rats, and even an Izzet Control variant. There were also a few individuals who wanted to hold onto the old WeeFiend deck despite the fact that I’m sure no one could argue that Nivix Cyclops is stronger than its Wee Dragonauts cousin.

Here are the undefeated standings…

This time around we see DelverBlue pulling ahead for the overall showings category, but FissurePost has gained in the number of 4-0s. Looking at percentages, FamiliarStorm takes the top slot, as it has gone undefeated in an average of 33% of its games and in second is FissurePost at 27% of its showings. I think this says a lot about your chances of getting 4-0 when running either Fissure variant. At the other end we have Elves and Hexproof going undefeated in only 10% of their showings, but these are small numbers to work with. What you haven’t seen just yet is the appearance of Boros Kitty and ClopsFiend, which are going to be quickly working their way up past our minimum requirement based on what we’ve seen from these two decks this past week. Not much else crazy going on in the list, although we did lose another deck as MWA failed to meet the average requirements and dropped off the list. This isn’t really surprising, as the deck has lost a lot of its hold on the metagame and has had slipping numbers the past few weeks.

As we get into the spotlight I have good news and bad news… The good news is I got a promotion! The bad news is that because of this I had a few extra tasks that had to be performed and did not have time to take care of the data for this week’s Daily Event spotlight. If it makes anyone feel better, I’ve already got the next week covered, so it is only a single-week hiatus. That being said we’re going to still be doing out deck spotlight!

Boros Kitty

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk about this deck. This deck was something that I think has seemingly evolved out of nowhere. Some regular readers might remember a time before the recent bans where there were a couple odd Boros decks that made showings, which I had referred to as Boros Artifacts or Boros Tokens or Boros Aggro. Now these decks had been mostly different, but in an odd combination of the three we can see where this type of deck might originate from.

Now I think, before I get into the deck itself, it is important that I explain how the name came to be. The first time I saw this particular deck was in a Daily Event as piloted by deluxeicoff, a regular in the competitive scene. As usual I was sitting at my computer and documenting the Daily Event postings and was unsure what I wanted to refer to this deck as, so the obvious answer was to ask the man himself. The answer I got was “Boros Kitty”… now if you’re anything like me, I looked at that and immediately was unsure of where the name came to be. The answer to that particular question was quite simple as well… the deck had been built by turbokitty, another household name in the competitive Pauper community. And thus Boros Kitty was born! The deck has a lot of great interactions and is a little hard to explain without showing you the list, so here’s what I’m running…

I’ve been playing so much of this deck because it’s got so much fun stuff going on. There is a crazy draw engine in the deck based upon the bounce of Glint Hawk and Kor Skyfisher and your draw artifacts in the form of Prophetic Prism, Ichor Wellspring, and Elsewhere Flask. At the same time you have options for recurring life gain in the form of Kabira Crossroads and really fast aggro due to the low casting costs. Keep going from there and you get a lot of fun interactions with Sanctum Gargoyle and Remember the Fallen. All the recurring cards and draw work to create incredible amounts of card advantage. This deck is a deck that will probably never be the number-one deck, but there is a good reason for it. Consider some of the top decks that take little decision-making input in comparison to a deck like this. With this deck you’ll be sitting almost every turn with a slew of different options and have to decide on the best possible use. You could spend a lot of time talking about all the interactions in this deck, but I’m going to just insist that you try it. I haven’t had this much fun with a deck in a while.

As I talked about earlier, two articles ago I had started a new concept for my casual Pauper articles. This new series within a series, called Into the Archives, had a really great response, so first off expect to see that quite a bit more. In addition to the positive response from readers about this new concept, there was also a bit of a murmur from a few people who were curious about a deck I played against.

In the first game I played with the week’s deck against a player named pedrogordalina, and his deck had me quite honestly dumbfounded. Every now and then I like to throw a live game in if I have time for it, and I think if you listen to me trying to talk through the game, I was quite confused as to not only what I was playing against, but what the best way was to attack it. Part of the problem was the Cogs deck I was playing didn’t have an effective answer for regenerating creatures or flashback cards, but more importantly the deck was something new and creative. I actually quite enjoy that feeling. While it may be a little frustrating during play, when I go back and look at the replay and see what was going on, I definitely get a smile on my face.

The game started off pretty odd and the card choices spoke to a number of different decks. The deck played with Prophetic Prism, which had me automatically assuming that I was facing some version of 8-post. However, the deck was also running Nightscape Familiar and Goblin Electromancer, which are usually associated with various storm decks for their ability to reduce costs. What seemed even weirder was the fact that these things all fell within a three color shell. Three colors in general is something that Pauper usually tends to avoid because of the inability to really get a solid color balance.

So I was off on a task. Since recording the game I had played many games, and the quality on the video wasn’t good enough for me to be able to read my opponent’s screen name. This meant that I now had to dig through the long list of games that managed to be saved within the client, and if you’ve ever attempted to do this yourself, you’ll understand how tedious it is. I had to click through every game and watch replays until I found it, all the while knowing that there was a good chance that the replay may not have saved in the first place and that I was wasting my time. Finally I was able to find the game and got the name. After a brief time I was able to get in contact with Pedro, and here’s what I found out about the deck.

Pedro, the man behind the deck, is newer to not only the Pauper format, but to Magic Online in general. Hearing this alone, I was excited to see that a player who was new to Magic Online would be enticed by a format I’ve come to know and love myself. One of the most important things about this format (and this is easily echoed by all of the Pauper writing community) is getting new players to experience the fact that playing commons doesn’t mean playing a worse version of the game. What Pedro told me was that he had learned that Pauper gave him the chance to “build cheap and fun decks” while learning more about the format. Like many players in Pauper, the price point has been something that limits what he could play. In a specific example, I’ve talked quite a bit about the use of Devour Flesh instead of Diabolic Edict. While the flesh can be used to create advantage against burn, there is no advantage to playing it when money isn’t a factor. This isn’t reality, though, and Diabolic Edict (for those who may not know) is almost 3 tickets each. So knowing these limitations, let’s take a look at what Pedro’s list looks like.

There is a lot of interesting card choices in this deck so I’m going to do my best to discuss what I learned about them as I played through the deck…

At its core this deck is a teachings deck. If you remember back to my in-depth discussion of UB Teachings Control, the basic concept behind a teachings deck is to use Mystical Teachings alongside a variety of instant spells so that you’d be well-prepared for almost any match. This deck basically manages to do this, but has a side focus on the interaction between Nightscape Familiar and Goblin Electromancer to reduce not only casting costs, but flashback costs as well. In most cases if you want to re-use a spell with flashback a second time, there is going to be a payment attached to that, which is going to be harder to pay than the original cost. Sometimes this means a high converted mana cost or sometimes it means having to pay a color of mana different than the card.

With these spell reduction creatures in play, you must take a second to consider the rest of the creature base. At sixteen creatures, the deck is a little bit heavy in comparison to what we tend to see of a more typical Mystical Teachings deck. Despite this the deck tends to run in a similar mana to the FamiliarStorm deck, where you use other spells to control the board-state and then are forced to try and win the game off of a number of 1-power creatures that can attack through undisturbed. This means that you need to be aware that the heavy damage of the deck is going to be the Mulldrifters at 2 power and a flipped Delver of Secrets. Not much to say about these choices as obviously the Mulldrifter provides the draw desired by this type of control deck (especially when paired with the Ghostly Flickers), but we’ll get into the Delver of Secrets issue as we take a look at this spell package.

I’ve talked about the different types of control that you can use in Magic numerous times, but the important thing to remember about Teachings Control is that it usually is going to focus on countermagic and creature kill. In the typical version, the creature kill comes in the form of a number of black spells, but this version has a stronger focus on red for its creature destruction needs. While the options are a bit underpowered (coming in at 2 damage or less), what you’re actually doing is trading power for card advantage. For example, we use Staggershock, which works as a simple Shock spell, but with the advantage of rebounding for a second use. This actually becomes quite important to the deck as it can kind of balance out the fact that it is a bit short on control magic. You might even consider a lot of the deck as a double-edged sword. There are several card choices that are beneficial to cancel one issue, but others still exist. The fact that the instant count is low works against Mystical Teachings, and you have to consider that the deck has a significant number of creatures as well as a full set of Prophetic Prisms, which all work against the odds of flipping Delver of Secrets. At the same time you are balancing the fact that there are a smaller number of non-creature spells by taking advantage of different card advantage strategies.

When it comes to lands/mana the deck looks pretty interesting. It’s hard for decks in Pauper to be successful with three colors because of the dedication it needs to make that work. We’ve gotten some great new choices for trying to make it easier in the gates, but it can still be troublesome. This deck stays away from those and instead looks to Prophetic Prisms and Shimmering Grottos to color fix. I think this is great because three-color decks usually want a significant number of gates, but so many would slow the deck down since they all enter the battlefield tapped. I’m not sure it has to be said, but always remember that when you’re looking to switch colors, you should use Prophetic Prism before Shimmering Grotto because when you use Shimmering Grotto to change color you’re actually forfeiting an additional mana to do so since you’re losing out on the opportunity to tap that Shimmering Grotto for a colorless mana. This concept is called opportunity cost, the cost of a forgone alternative.

If you’d rather listen me talk about the deck feel free to watch the video below…

I don’t spend a lot of time in that video discussing alternatives and frankly I don’t want to do too much here either because the deck is great and it works for its operator. I don’t like the idea of “deck doctoring” because it starts with the assumption that what the person is doing is wrong, which isn’t always the case. I do, however, like to at least offer a few thoughts that I have. Maybe it comes from my business background. Anyone who has spent any time in the corporate world has probably been beaten over the head with the concept of “brainstorming”. This is the idea that you simply can allow everyone to feed input and that collaborative effort yields a better result than if one individual were to come up with a concept. So I like to offer thoughts, not to say that it’s the right way, but to open discussion and find solutions to problems that a deck may have. The best way to start? Playing the deck yourself and seeing how it runs as well as how the cards interact with one another.

There were a few things that really stuck out to me in these games. As I had already anticipated, it could be a bit difficult to actually get the Delver of Secrets to flip since three quarters of the deck are non-instant spells. In a lot of cases this cannot be helped outside of simply replacing the Delver of Secrets all together, but there is at least one opportunity that sticks out with Ponder. While Ponder is a nice card for draw, it is not only a sorcery, but also a singleton to the deck. If you’re really determined on more draw, perhaps the move to Brainstorm would be more beneficial since it is instant-speed. That being said, it’s not necessarily something I would want to tutor up with a Mystical Teachings. Other consideration could be made in slight reductions of other areas such as dropping Prophetic Prism to three or reducing familiars, but all of those fit pretty well as is.

The next thing I would jump on (assuming there was no price restriction) would be the switching of Devour Flesh to Diabolic Edict, but I won’t waste time continuing that talk. I’d also consider reducing the number of Ghostly Flickers. If you take FissureStorm decks for an example, they tend to abuse the combo between flicker and the wall quite often, but they have a balance. In SimicFissurePost you often see a deck running a single wall and a single flicker, using it just as an added bonus instead of a major focus. In contrast to that you can see BlueFissurePost using somewhere around three copies of each since it relies a bit heavier on the combo. To run a single wall and then three copies of Ghostly Flicker seems a bit lopsided. There are nice uses to Ghostly Flicker beyond the combo thanks to the draw on Mulldrifter and Prophetic Prism, but if you want to focus that much on it then perhaps at least drop it to two copies.

The next thing I pondered over was the use of Electrickery. This is a great card without doubt, but it was much stronger in the era of Empty the Warrens. We tend to stick along the lines of an aggro-heavy meta these days so it’s important to have options, but should that single spell be an Echoing Decay instead? Consider the pros and cons of the two cards. Electrickery is only doing one damage, but it hits every creature your opponent controls when the overload cost is paid and is not targeted. In contrast Echoing Decay is able to kill more creatures since it does -2 toughness, but the spell is targeted and can only kill four creatures on its best day.

From here I think the rest of it comes down to personal playing preferences. Take, for example, Power Sink, which can be a great way to lock out your opponent’s mana, but arguments can be made for the use of Condescend or Prohibit instead. Same thing can be said for the use of Mana Leak. As we always discuss, the power of Mana Leak continues to diminish as the game progresses and your opponent gets more lands onto the battlefield. I think the countermagic in the deck does have to have a focus on the colorless mana in its cost because when you’re running three colors, finding two blue mana to throw out a Counterspell can be quite difficult to do. While playing Dragon’s Maze release events, I started to wonder if maybe this would be the right place to try out Mindstatic since the oppressive 4-mana casting cost would be reduced by the familiar abilities. It would act as two Mana Leaks in one that only needs one of the two blue mana to cast.

I think ultimately this is the list I’d be playing around with…

There are probably still some questionable areas, but that’s the way that the game goes!

Well there you go guys hope you enjoyed. Next week we’ll jump back and take a look at the competitive Pauper scene, so my competitive readers need not worry! Until then feel free to leave your comments below and follow me on Twitter @MTGOJustSin for additional discussion!