Anything But: A ‘Month’ in Review

Every so often when writing about a format that has a vintage card pool, as Pauper does, it becomes difficult to decide what you want to talk about. I’ve heard from many of my fellow writers in the community who have run into an issue with having covered the majority of the serious decks in the format and now have to start at the beginning. They will sit back and look forward to the little anomalies that show up from time to time and give them additional information to discuss. We currently find ourselves at a bit of a crossroads when it comes to things to discuss in Pauper… a time where there is almost TOO MUCH to discuss. As I sit here writing this, we’ve just recently seen the information regarding an update to the Pauper BnR list, and by the time you get to read this, we will be well into the release of a new set. If you’re a regular reader of any number of websites, you’ve already been flooded with more opinions on BnR and Gatecrash than you ever really cared to read.

For my regular readers you’re more than familiar with how my approach to all of this is, but if anyone reading this is unaware, this will not be one of those articles. I always tend to stay away from discussing the release of a new set because I know that as a player, I get tired of seeing week after week of different people all saying the same things about a set and the cards within. I’m not saying that there isn’t some good ideas out there, of course there is, but after one or two of those ideas comes out everyone decides that they are going to discuss the same idea and pretend like they didn’t know that other author X had already mentioned it. Instead I prefer to take a look at the sets in action. If you’re looking for information from me with regards to Gatecrash you’ll have to wait for several weeks. I think it is more helpful to see what people are doing with the cards and how they have impacted Pauper instead of looking into my crystal ball and trying to make predictions, which I’ve more often than not been mistaken about. Is this meant to put anyone down who does this? Not at all. I just think it is important to let you guys know upfront what you can expect from me this week despite the many things I could be talking about.

This week I’m here to discuss the Pauper metagame. During my articles I provide people within the community an opportunity to see what has been going on in the past week of Pauper in order to put together a decent picture of what they can expect in the upcoming week. The information can give you great insight into what deck might be a good option for combatting the popular options and possibly what sideboard alterations to make. This time around I thought we’d do something special and take a more detailed look at what the Pauper meta looks like on a large scale. In order to do this properly, in my opinion, it seems unavoidable to ignore the recent updates on the Banned and Restricted list. However, it is important to understand that this is not where you can find my opinions on the subject of whether or not these were the correct moves. If you’re looking for that I recommend checking out another Pauper author. I am a man on a mission and that mission is to take a straight look at what the metagame offers Pauper players and see what information we can obtain from that.

Again, I just want to make these things clear before we get into things this week as it’s not that I don’t care, but instead that there are already much more detailed reports by others whom I think have already done a good job of offering insight to these situations. So we’re going to focus on the meta and business will go on as usual here on Anything But. Before we get into the large picture we need to finish things off with our fourth competitive corner…

I think my timing with things was pretty great. Long before the announcement of an update to the BnR for Pauper, I had planned on putting together this look at a month in review. Where my article lands is in a great spot to get a final summary of how things looked leading up to the change. While this particular week’s meta report might seem like a waste of space due to the fact that some of these decks will be no more the information becomes important to round out our four weeks for our look at the meta on a larger scale.

Daily Event Results 1/17 – 1/30

At this point in time would be where I’d normally start into a rather lengthy discussion over the splitting of TPPS and UR Storm and how it has resulted in the “Storm” deck falling out of being a regular in the top three. However, with the recent over the top ban of both Empty the Warrens and Grapeshot we will no longer see Storm at all so why should I waste either of our time discussing it? DelverBlue has, for the fourth time in a row, ended up at the top of our list as the deck with the most showings. The one bright point here would be the fact that the difference between DelverBlue and our second place deck, Stompy, was only six as opposed to the massive difference we saw last time around. It has been a little while since we saw Stompy so far up on the list, but I do wonder if this will become a regular occurrence. IzzetPost and Infect were close at Stompy’s heels as well with 54 and 51 showings respectively.

One of the things you might notice about this list is that it seems to contain fewer decks than usual. If you remember back when we had access to the Daily Event information for all events I had kept a selection of decks that showed under a certain number and left them as rogues. When the number of showings was reduced I decided to remove this limiting number all together since there were fewer decks. With the recent jump in Pauper’s popularity I started wondering a few weeks ago whether or not this was still the correct decision. After looking at how the table lines up and how many individual decks there are I have decided to put this system back into place. I think there is a good chance that the recent changes to the format will open up room for new deck creations to show in Daily Events and that could create a messy list. So what I have done is gone back to the original concept and set a line where decks with less than seven showings will be separated into our rogue list. If you’re looking for a discussion about rogue decks in Pauper I’m going to recommend checking out this episode of the Pauper’s Cage podcast where my fellow Pauper writer here on MTGO Academy, Jason Moore aka BambooBrush, and I discuss that very subject. So here are the rogue decks for the week…

1. Teachings Control – 6
2. WeeFiend – 5
3. Burn – 4
4. FissureStorm – 3
5. EnchantAggro – 3
6. UB Control – 3
7. AzTrinket – 2
8. SimicPost – 1
9. Stinkweed Zombies – 1
10. IzzetControl – 1

This time around there was only one new comer from our typical list which was a UW deck that works in a similar way to the DimirTrinket deck although with a bit less control available to it obviously since it journeys into white for things like Squadron Hawk and Deft Duelist. I did find it interesting to see SimicPost fall so far. We were just talking about the deck not that long ago and how great it was that the Temporal Fissure storm could be worked into an 8-post shell. I was happy to see that Teachings Control was starting to make a showing once again. For those who aren’t familiar, when I am referring to Teachings Control I am referring to the regular showings of the UB variants that pack a toolbox of creature kill and countermagic alongside a set of Mystical Teachings to find the card you need when you need it. This deck, which was popular last in August, has been in hibernation for the most part recently until a player who goes by alesclandre has been running it to a regular showing.

Well after a week where we missed out on our Daily Event Spotlight we’re back and this time with a bit less hassle. I’ll take this opportunity to thank Taoh who showed me a new way to track this that was able to save me a little bit of time and with the amount of time this actually takes, every minute shaved off is helpful. I’ve also gotten a bit of a helping hand now that FoW hunting season has ended. While it does seem that Pauper is still going to maintain a bit of a higher population it will be nowhere near the events with well over 100 players. So let’s check out this week’s event, shall we?

Fast Stats!
Daily Event: 4940459
Number of Players: 61
Deck Types Represented: 18
Packs Won: 128

This is about where event size should stay for awhile now that things have calmed down a bit. As you notice it is a bit smaller than the massive events we’ve seen in FoW season, but at the same time it’s a great size with slightly more than we had been seeing. This event had 61 players who showed up with 18 different deck types. The most played deck was DelverBlue with eight players who ran it. The event also featured such decks as Teachings, which we hadn’t seen much of in the past weeks, as well as Boros Landfall, which is quite a blast from the past. Here’s the breakdown for the decks in this event…

DelverBlue – 8
IzzetPost – 7
Infect – 7
MUC – 6
TPPS – 4
DimirPost – 4
Affinity – 4
MBC – 4
MWA – 4
Stompy – 3
UR Storm – 2
Goblins – 2
Teachings – 1
FissureStorm – 1
Hexproof – 1
EnchantStorm – 1
Boros Landfall – 1
MonoBlack Aggro – 1

The breakdown was actually pretty well-rounded for the number of players and we saw a great split between deck choices. At the end of the second round we had 14 players who were eliminated thanks to a 0-2 start, however four of these players would continue to play despite being already eliminated. After the third round another 13 players who reached the unfortunate point of two losses. This week our condolences go out to Maxmaka, Mixir19, and Cirosasa who started strong at 2-0 and yet lost out the rest of the rounds to miss out on that 3-1 minimum. Here’s how the deck matches looked…

(In case some of the abbreviations don’t make sense, please feel free to ask in comments below for clarification, working on getting the format down so all the text fits and is easy to read.)

The deck with the best record this week was TPPS, which managed to win 71.43% of its games thanks to an amazing 5-0 record against Infect (talk about a favorable matchup). Not so far behind that was Stompy and UR Storm with a 62.5% win ratio, IzzetPost which won 59% of its games, and DimirPost which pulled in a 58% win rate. As always things are always a bit fuzzy at the other end of the scale where we have Hexproof, which won 0% of its games as it was only run by one player who went 0-2 before dropping. In the more popular decks, we had Infect sitting at a 33% win rate, which isn’t surprising again as it had that 0-5 record against TPPS.

This time our undefeated showings were provided by Stompy, TPPS, IzzetPost, and DelverBlue. Also ending in the money was 14 other players who managed to bring about a 3-1 record for a combined total of 128 packs won.

Normally this is where we’d jump into a deck spotlight and recap video. However, since we’re trying to get right into things and there will be plenty to talk about in the numbers from this past month we’re going to just get right into it.

Before we get into too many details here, I would like to start out by noting that I use the term “month” loosely here. If some of you are as particular as I am, you may sit there reading my articles and grind your teeth as I refer to each one as a week. If we actually take a look at a calendar and use our brains for a minute we’ll see that actually my articles show up bi-weekly (and this time, there has been a bit more of a delay than that). Each Competitive Corner covers two weeks of Daily Events as a result. I refer to it often as weekly just simply because of when I get time to write these. For me it may just be a week away and it’s just easier to consider each article to be a week.

Take that into account when we talk about a “month” in review. A month’s time based on that assessment is four articles worth of Competitive Corners, but in real time this is two months worth of Daily Events. Additionally there is a bit of a blip in that radar as well. If you remember last week’s article we had a Competitive Corner, but did not have a Daily Event Spotlight. So some of this information that is going to be coming from details granted to us by those Daily Event Spotlights will be eight weeks worth, but some of the general data based off of the totals granted by the Competitive Corner will be ten weeks. Does that make sense? Hopefully it does.

I think the most logical place to start here is by taking a look at how the Pauper metagame broke down as a whole over this past month…

What you may notice about this list is that there are many decks missing. In the same way that I cut down the list for this week’s Competitive Corner we’re also going to be cutting down this chart to eliminate rogue decks. In this case I eliminated any deck that had a showing over these past few weeks that was under 15. There are some missing labels at the end here, which includes EnchantStorm, WeeFiend, BluePost, UB Control, Burn, and SimicPost. All of these decks ended up being less than 2% on this pie chart and therefore I left off the labels in order to keep things clear.

Another thing that you may notice is these yellow squares at the beginning of our chart. If you remember back over the past few weeks we made a few changes to our chart with regards to Storm and MUC. The first was a split of Storm between TPPS and UR Storm. While I disagreed with the change there was enough pressure from the community that I decided to make the split anyway. As such this information isn’t quite missing, but was not split just yet so I cannot in good conscience try and guess at what the split was. In a similar way we decided a week or so later that it was important to split BluePost off of MUC and therefore there are a few that can be split off there as well.

On a whole I’d say we’ve had a pretty commanding presence established by DelverBlue. The deck has regained its former glory as it has now been the most played deck in the format for ten weeks in a row. As you can see on the table there it comes in at almost 100 showings more than the second place deck, IzzetPost. The biggest showing was during last week’s look where it showed in triple digits. For as long as this series has been running I’ve talked about the big three decks. This included DelverBlue, IzzetPost, and Storm in no particular order. Since the splitting of Storm into two parts it has dropped significantly, but when you add the totals back together it comes in at 284 showings. This would push things down and put it in second place behind DelverBlue and recreate the big three. Here’s the list of the remaining rogue decks that didn’t make it onto our list…

Interestingly enough we had only two of these decks even close to double digits; Elves and Teachings. Elves is perhaps the more interesting of the two. Originally we had seen Elves show up in a form that was focused on using a variety of mana creatures alongside a very heavy land destruction package including things like Thermokarst and Mwonvuli Acid-Moss. This is probably a list that could make a comeback with the way the new metagame is going to start shaping out, since 8-post decks are going to have a significant impact. The newer versions of this deck have been a bit more creature-based and looked to use a more traditional Elves strategy by creating a swarm of Elves that your opponent has to deal with. By continuously playing Elves, you’re forcing your opponent to be much more cautious with his/her creature kill spells in order to find the right target, a hard thing to do when there are so many threats on the board. Let’s take a look at what the most recent versions of this deck look like…

There were some great additions to this deck that helped to solidify the creature strategy as opposed to the former land destruction strategy. The most important of which is going to be Spidersilk Armor that allows you to add a bit more defense to your 1 toughness Elves as well as now allowing you to block DelverBlue’s many fliers. The one thing people might be surprised about is how well a mono-green deck like this can draw cards. Elvish Visionary and Multani’s Acolyte are great cantrips, but newer lists have also brought in Gitaxian Probe as well to help thin things out. Another great way for the deck to thin itself out is the use of Land Grant, which allows Elves players to get away with only running 10 Forests. As much card draw as this deck has there is even another version that can draw more. Another variant of Elves runs a small blue splash (sometimes only running a single Island and Birchlore Rangers as their blue mana sources) in order to run draw cards such as Vivisection and more importantly Distant Melody. When you get to the mid-to-late game, with a pile of Elves on the board thanks to Lys Alana Huntmaster, Distant Melody can easily refill your hand and more.

The only other deck we see here in double digits is a favorite of mine, Teachings Control. Now I have heard some people say, “Well, IzzetPost runs Mystical Teachings, doesn’t that make it Teachings Control?” Well, sure you can think that way, but to call it so would be to not really classify that deck based upon its core strategy, which is the use of the 8-post. Whenever you see me talking about Teachings Control I’m going to be discussing the UB variant. It’s a strategy that has been around since the card was first released in Time Spiral where you run a toolbox of instant speed spells in small numbers in order to have answers for “everything” and then use a full set of Mystical Teachings in order to find them when you need them. In Pauper we don’t have access to any of the powerful tutor spells that run rampant in other eternal formats, but Mystical Teachings is all we need. Let’s take a look at what a typical Teachings deck looks like…

I think that there is a lot of great potential for Teachings Control to become the top control deck in the format post-ban. The love affair between blue and black has always been well known as you get access to the best of countermagic and creature kill. If you decided to go a route more based on land destruction you would also find that black does a good job of making up for blue’s gap in that area with things like Choking Sands and Rancid Earth (though be careful of this pitfall as land destruction does not come in at instant speed). Perhaps one of my favorite things about Teachings Control is that it is open for a significant amount of customization based upon personal preferences. When you’re putting together your spell selection its perfectly okay to select spells as one-offs and two-offs thanks to the tutor ability of Mystical Teachings.

The rest of or list is rounded out by some really interesting creations. The Stinkweed Zombies deck is a list that is basically mono-black aggro, with a non-creature spell base that is basically Cry of Contrition. This deck managed to have a significant impact because it had some nice matches against decks like DelverBlue and Storm because it was able to do significant amounts of hand disruption. The deck will probably drop off in showings because of the meta change, but this should be expected with many rogues. We also saw Dimir and Azorius Trinket decks, which used Trinket Mage as its own tutor for finding additional control options. We also saw the occasional appearance of old favorites such as Boros Landfall, Tortured Reanimator, and GreenPost.

The last one I want to mention is SimicDefenders. If you remember a few weeks back as part of our deck spotlight, I had discussed this deck. It used blue and green defender creatures that had abilities based on the concept of “defender matters”, where the ability got stronger for each additional defender creature you had. This was a great idea, but this deck only showed up once in Daily Events. There is plenty of potential for a deck like this to be a creative new combo option, but it will never be as solid as Storm used to be. Now at this point I think it’s only fair to warn you that this is going to get a bit ranty for a second, so if you want to avoid that flee free to skip down a bit. With this article being pushed back a bit as I volunteered for the schedule adjustment, I’ve gotten the opportunity to take a small look at where the meta is going so far. As others will be the first to tell you, we’re really early in this new era for Pauper, so you cannot really make solid assumptions as to whether or not this is how things are going to be from here out, however I’ve noticed a harmful trend here. If we take a look at this list of rogue decks we can clearly see there were several opportunities where people decided to sit down and homebrew something that they thought could compete in the meta. In this list we see 18 different rogue decks and Pauper is known to easily average a decent number of rogue decks on a weekly basis. It has always been a highlight to the format where people could come up with creative ideas and be successful. Simic Defenders is a perfect example of how someone took a solid idea and found a way to make it work. With this first look at what we have in the new era of Pauper, there is a significant lack in that creativity. Since the new meta has not yet be rounded out or discovered everyone is simply relying upon playing what they already know works and this has led to a terribly stale meta. Throughout the community people are complaining about what things are turning out to be and the only way this is going to change is through some creative action. If you don’t want this to be our meta then be proactive and make changes, stop running these decks and come up with interesting ways to counter what we see. The meta is what we make of it, and we can shape it into something better through a bit of work and creativity in deckbuilding, and even win some dailies in the process.

I guess while we’re on the subject, let’s take a look at something people are probably wondering… how much of the meta did Storm and Infect take up?

By taking a total of the decks from these past weeks and comparing that to the totals from Storm and Infect we see that these decks were taking up about 25% of the metagame.

On their own we can see that Storm did hold the large piece of the pie, however it needs to at least be considered that this entails both TPPS and UR Storm. This again only includes the two decks that were specifically targeted by the banning of Grapeshot, Empty the Warrens, and Invigorate. When seeing this type of breakdown you would probably be hard-pressed to argue against the banning of these cards. The argument is that the banning of Invigorate doesn’t completely kill Infect, but banning both Grapeshot and Empty the Warrens means they have completely killed that deck. When earlier bannings were made to both Affinity and Fissure Storm, they chose to remove cards that allowed both decks to live on, but no longer be so overpowered in comparison to the rest of the format. This was the same thing done with Infect; however the decision was made at some point to completely kill off non-Fissure storm decks. It’s an interesting choice when Infect was almost just as plentiful and yet was allowed to live on, but what I’m more concerned about is what happens when we round things out and add in the rest of our top three decks…

Well, isn’t that interesting? These four decks accounted for more than 50% of the Pauper metagame. The most oppressive of these was actually DelverBlue and even IzzetPost showed up more than Infect. So why weren’t these two targeted? The only conclusion I can come to is that the decision was made that issuing bans that would affect these two decks would decrease the numbers of DelverBlue or IzzetPost. I can’t necessarily argue with that type of thinking either, at least in part, because we have seen DelverBlue drop off. However, the decrease in DelverBlue is probably a direct result of the fact that IzzetPost has increased and that isn’t a great matchup.

At the very least, I do have to admit one thing. For the year or so that I’ve been actively tracking the Pauper metagame I’ve always been an advocate of the fact that this was a healthy format. Forever I’ve complained about how other formats had two to three main decks that everyone played and it was never any different. Well, I don’t think we’re near as bad as some Standard metagames that I’ve seen, but for four decks to account for over half the metagame is not as healthy as I thought. Perhaps the reason it always looked so good is the fact that after these four decks, there were a number of different decks that made up that 47%. The drop off from that top tier was pretty significant and we would easily see 10 or more decks in addition to these four on a weekly basis. With that kind of variance it’s easy to say that the format was healthy and you actually have options to run whatever you wanted and you do, but as long as you could successfully pilot the deck into beating these four. Unfortunately I think in these early stages of the new meta, we’re seeing something that looks more like this…

While 8-post and Fissure do both break down into different variants, this is what we’re starting to see in the new meta. The label for “Both” is actually the accounting for SimicPost decks, which use the 8-post manabase to fund their Temporal Fissure storm. We’re slowly approaching a point in time where we have basically two deck types accounting for half the meta and I really don’t think that is where Wizards was going with this. Not to mention that the decks that have worked to fill the void are just as frustrating if not more so to play against. Bother Fissure and 8-post strategies are based on making it to the mid-to-late game. To play against something like that, invest that much time into a game, and then have all of your permanents bounced so that you basically have to start over is something that (at least to me) is more disheartening than losing a fast game to either Storm or Infect. Again I encourage people at this point to work hard and try new things. I think there is a lot of room where we don’t have to let this happen, we don’t have to let this be our new meta.

There are other factors that will of course have an impact on what our new upcoming meta will look like. One of the biggest suggested reasons for why a change was finally made to Pauper’s banned and restricted list after all this was due to an increase in the formats popularity. It makes sense; if more people are playing a format, it will get more attention from Wizards because it’s going to be making them money. In a similar way, if a format is getting so little attention that it’s no longer firing events, then it will also get attention because they’ll want to know why the format has died and what if anything can be done to bring it back. What I’m most interested in here is that newfound popularity the format has found. With the announcement of a new season where Force of Will was to be the promo reward for heavy play it was obvious that we would finally see a huge jump in the number of people showing up to events across the board. Pauper of course was also a popular option because the barrier to entry when it comes to deck cost is significantly lower than that of “newer” formats like Standard and Modern. Everyone wanted to get in on this as FoW stands out as often being the most expensive card online. If you want to play eternal formats like Classic and Legacy it seems to be almost a requirement to have a full set.

In Pauper we went from a format where events were ending with ten or fewer people winning prizes to events where we had ten people ending 4-0. I believe that prior to this new season the highest prize showing for a Pauper event had been just under 40. With this new season we finally saw things pushing upwards of 60 and even had Daily Events where we saw close to 130 players showing up. That’s great for the format because at the very least, it is opening things up to players who may not have attempted the format beforehand, and now that they had been introduced to it, they may decide to become a regular at these events. I don’t have exact numbers for full attendance at all the Daily Events that we’ve been tracking for meta data obviously, but what I do have is the number of people who had shown up and won prizes in each day’s events. I’m not really a math person, so I’m not going to attempt to break things down into percentages, but needless to say, you can probably assume that this number accounts maybe close to 25% of that event’s full attendance.

Can you see where the jump up was? In the aftermath, things are starting to balance out once again. You can see that after the season had ended obviously the popularity dropped down. Going into the season we were averaging 22 showings per event. During the event it jumped up to an average of 39 showings per event. Now that things are starting to cool off that has dropped back down to an average of 30 per event.

If we continue to follow out this trend line, then this is what we could see coming from our regular attendance. This is stretched to track an estimate over the next 50 events/days, but I’m sure that somewhere on the way the line would actually bottom out and we wouldn’t drop below a certain point, but hopefully it still works to help illustrate my point. While we have seen a decent increase in the number of players attending events this could very well drop off again now that the season is done, things have balanced out, and quite possibly maybe even due to the creation of this new meta.

If we focus in on the four Daily Events I covered in the Spotlight section of the Competitive Corner we can get another, broad look at full attendance.

As you can see here these three Daily Events were tracked leading into the season, during the season, and then at the end of the season. While this is by no means a solid picture because the events occurred at different times and at different points in a week, the chart still works to illustrate my point. I always find it interesting to see how attendance trends work out based on certain events. As I talked about earlier we see attendance drop and rise based upon big events in other formats, new set releases, and new seasons just to name a few things. My hope is that the added popularity caused by the season of FoW will keep things going for Pauper and, at the very least, bump our former average up a bit.

Now one of the most important things that I wanted to do for this week’s article was take a look at the match tables. Since I started the Spotlight section of our Competitive Corner I have been taking a look at a specific Daily Event each week and provided a table, which shows how each deck type matched up against its opponents. There are a few websites out there that do have match tables for players to look at, but I always read them and find that I don’t always agree. I may look at a particular matchup and think that it really is more one-sided than they say or that they favored the wrong person. When it comes down to it, I would just rather trust myself and the numbers I find. So I gathered these data from these events so that I could see what was actually happening and from there you guys can feel free to sit down and compare it to those provided to you from other sources and decide whether or not you want to trust those sources.

Just like anything else with gathering data and looking at statistics, it is important to take it all with a grain of salt. There are a number of variable factors that go into something like this. For example, one player may simply just be more experienced than another and deck type had little to do with the 0-2 loss. The player running a particular deck may have been not feeling so great and dropped after one win. With each deck showing up a different number of times, there are of course going to be arguments against what I’m going to provide you, but you always have to start somewhere, and I think this is a pretty good spot. This chart is too big for me to put into this article because I don’t want to be blowing out the size here or have all the text inside the chart crammed down to the point where it is unreadable. so to view it you’ll have to click the link below…

Daily Event Match Table

So what can we do with this kind of information? Well first off we have to now eliminate any data basically pertaining to the matches against Storm decks (since they no longer exist) and Infect decks (since the speed and success of those decks was taking into account the use of Invigorate, which it no longer has access too). More importantly we can start to focus down particular decks. We’re only a few days into the new meta, but it is important to be able to sit down and take a look at what is being offered so far. While you’ll have to wait until my next article to see what the first two weeks of the new format had to offer, I’ll tell you right now that you need to go into Daily Events being prepared to face some type of Temporal Fissure storm, Stompy, and 8-post decks (mostly Izzet/Dimir Post). So let’s take a look at what decks matched up well against these…

IzzetPost – Some of the better matches against IzzetPost were DelverBlue with a win percent of 62.5%. Perhaps the best match for IzzetPost was against MonoWhite Aggro, which lost 80% of its games in this match.

FissureStorm – Against FissureStorm, the deck with the most success, was also DelverBlue, which had a win ratio of 75%. Based on these numbers, what you don’t want to play against FissureStorm is MonoBlack Control, which lost 75% of its games in this match.

DimirPost – Good options against DimirPost ended up being Stompy at 66.7% and IzzetPost at 57.1%. The favorable matches for DimirPost were DelverBlue with 62.5% lost and MUC with 66.7%.

EnchantStorm – There aren’t a lot of numbers for EnchantStorm so take these results with a pinch of salt, as there were several where it went 1-0. These include MonoBlack Control, Stompy, FissureStorm, and Stinkweed Zombies. It also went 0-1 against the likes of WeeFiend and had an unfavorable match against IzzetPost as well.

The results for BluePost and SimicPost were similar to that of EnchantStorm. Because there was a lack of data to go off of for these matches, I’ll let the chart do the talking on that. Based on what we’ve seen so far with FissureStorm and IzzetPost being the most popular choices so far, this chart would suggest that DelverBlue would be a solid option, which I find quite interesting. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Well, I don’t think there is much else we can add from this point out. A few weeks ago when I had decided that I wanted to put this type of article together, I had ideas for showing graphs and data tracking the trends of different decks over the past few weeks. This type of information, however was made irrelevant thanks to the new update to the banned and restricted list. What good is it to know that more people are starting to play Storm when the deck is no more? In a similar way, there is little point in showing that something like DelverBlue was increasing because that could have been a result of an increase in another deck that is no longer part of this new meta. We move from here into a new era on the back of the release of a new set. The final thoughts I want to leave you with now are a look at the top five cards that actually did have an impact on Pauper from Return to Ravnica.

I don’t think it’s possible to have this discussion without talking about Ethereal Armor. In my last article I looked at Hexproof and how this card had a significant impact in turning a deck that was bordering unplayable into something that now stands a significant chance of becoming a Pauper regular. I still think this deck can only go uphill from here. As fast as this deck can be it is actually almost better-suited for a mid-game strategy. As time progresses you’re able to get more and more enchantments on the field and land a Aura Gnarlid or two as well. As a game goes on, if you’re left unchecked, then your creature base is only going to be bigger and harder to deal with. Many times we see cards in a new set that we think might actually have some significant impact, but the reality is that only one or two make the cut. This one was definitely at the top of that class.

I think in a close number two we have to take into consideration the impact of Frostburn Weird. In most of the prediction articles I read about Return to Ravnica I don’t think I saw this card landing on a single one, and if someone did see it well props to them because I was in the crowd that missed it too. Frostburn Weird ended up being a regular body in DelverBlue where it was a perfect fit as a cheap creature that was able to land big damage. I think maybe the red in the cost was what caused me to overlook this card, thinking that we’d have to see the emergence of a new Izzet strategy for it to work, but it really is right in DelverBlue’s wheelhouse, falling under the rich getting richer category.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to add this. Electrickery was put into third by me mainly for the fact that the card was a perfect answer to a deck that is no more. Any deck running red mana in the previous meta would include this card because it was just that good. No one could argue that this card didn’t have an impact, but with the elimination of Empty the Warrens from the format it really doesn’t have a place. The only way a card like this would make a comeback would be if we saw a new token strategy emerge or if something like Elves became more popular. In most creature decks that 1 toughness damage spell is out of reach for killing the most important things. I knew it had to be added here however simply because the fact that it still has a lot of potential to mass kill creatures, which is hard to come by in this format.

The Goblin Electromancer was another spell that becomes almost irrelevant with the banning of Storm. This deck mostly saw play due to the fact that there was a blue and red version of Storm that used this like Fissure Storm used familiars. It wasn’t as critical to the success of the storm as the familiars can be, but it was still a great way to provide a bit of an extra mana advantage for the deck. Even this saw minimal play, being delegated to filling in only for that specific version of storm, but there was an occasional rogue deck that worked basically as IzzetControl and used this little guy to help fund some of its best countermagic.

As I just mentioned earlier, each set is lucky to see two cards make regular play in Pauper as will any eternal format. For this particular card we’re stretching a bit, but there really isn’t anything else that saw competitive play that wasn’t a reprint. When it comes to the gates, these lands have little impact on what a deck does and instead just provide mana. They can be worked into any color combination and allow Pauper to have access to new dual mana sources. We’re only just seeing the beginning of what these have to offer, especially now that Gatecrash has finished off the collection. While these don’t have any literal impact in how a deck works, they have to be mentioned for they are officially changing how Pauper players look at mana sources from here on out. If we’re lucky we’ll see a little more gate-releated love through other commons as the block finishes up.

Now that we’re in the age of a new meta with a new set, here’s hoping that Gatecrash cards have just as much impact as Return to Ravnica did! I, along with many others in the community, am at that point where I’m unhappy with where things are, but I know deep down inside that it just needs time to determine whether or not this is how things are going to be from here out. We’ll have to of course continue to revisit this idea as we move forward with our Competitive Corner analysis and maybe revisit an article similar to this once it has (if it does) leveled out.

Well that’s it for me for this week, guys. I hope this information has been helpful and that you join me in wishing a fond farewell to non-Fissure Storm. Feel free to leave your own thoughts in the comments about what you think of the new meta and the updates to our banned and restricted list.

Until next time don’t forget to follow me on Twitter for the latest information on what I have going on! @MTGOJustSin