1. Interesting article.

    I’m not experienced with that deck, but I don’t think drawing first is the best option.

  2. Veon, that may very well be true. I was viewing this as a typical control deck, but that choice me be wrong.

  3. How much did it end up costing to create the deck? I think you should have gone with something your more familiar with. You mentioned your an aggro player so you should have picked an aggro deck cause it can be difficult to learn how to play something totally different form what your use to.

  4. Nice article !

    I noticed you did some 2-Player Pauper Queues, but I could not manage to find them in the Play/Tournament section of MODO, could anyone tell me where I should look for them ?

    Thanks :)

  5. Jashin, you can find them at “Constructed 8 player”: Menu -> Play -> Tournaments -> 8 Player Constructed.

  6. Thanks a lot Veon ! Don’t know why I never went there when looking for these queues..Maybe because they’re supposed to be 2-players ones ! This is sort of weird to put there, but anyways..thanks again.

    Have a nice day !

  7. I just got into pauper online myself. Although I find myself losing to your deck more often than not and it seems to be most of what I play against I really enjoyed this article. Can’t wait for you to try something different so I can read without rooting against you in your matches lol.

  8. Neros: You are likely correct that I should have gone aggro 1st. The reason I went this way for my 1st article was a way to cement my commitment to the plan. By picking the most expensive deck, I forced myself to dive in feet first. this is basically self psychology :)

    All in all, I think this deck cost me around 45 tix. I bought the complete 4X Planshift commons set on ebay for $19.00 to get the familiars (which are around 2.70 each on MODO). My 45 tix estimate includes this purchase.

  9. I should also note that I do play all kinds of decks, and know “how” to play them. I just prefer aggro in general.

  10. MaJellin: :) I agree, people really seem to hate this deck. Not having played against it really, I’m not yet in that camp, but I can see why it might get incredibly frustrating.

  12. MaJellin: Thanks. Yeah, I have been there. It is a bit onerous to navigate, but the decklists are very useful.

  13. I noticed at one point to chose to draw. This deck (and every popular pauper deck in the current meta) wants to play first.

  15. Could you maybe make videos with commentary on the next article? Ive been looking for videos of people playing this deck and found a few but they dont have voice overs

  16. Great series concept, I think this makes a lot of sense for those new to pauper.

    After you have some experience with the match-up, GW cloak is a lot closer than you make it seem, since the only relevant creature is the Ledgewalker, and if you’re comboing you have plenty of 1/1 fliers to block it, even if it has rancor (as they can’t really attack into a cloud), since you can just bounce the cloaks. This of course requires that you keep an appropriate hand, but that’s part of the learning process of playing a combo deck. The biggest flaw of the deck is that the combo, while very powerful, doesn’t actually win the game on the spot and, depending on what they have, they might still be in it if you too many storm enablers. Also, it’s very complicated to play well against the field and requires a good understanding of the metagame to know which hands are keepable, which doesn’t make it newbie friendly.

    If you’re interested in getting playtest partners who won’t accused you of cheating/play awkward decks, feel free to contact myself (Brussky on MTGO) or any of the regulars on the PDC forums, I’m sure a lot of people would jump at the chance to play pauper.

  17. weefunkster: I am not equipped, nor do I have the time, to make videos for this series. Thanks for your interest though!

    Mark: Thanks for the info on the GW matchup. I agree that this whole experiment will have difficulty with “learning” the deck and the matchups very well. But that is part of the experience, right? I appreciate the offer of playtesting, and I may take you up on that (and I’ll check out PDC further). I kind of want to go in a little cold though, since that is what I am trying to represent…. I think. What do you guys think? Should I discuss and research the matchups more? Or go in cold and see what happens?

  18. Firstly, I really like the idea of this series. Internet Pauper writing has been a little stagnant of late, nice to see a new, regular feature with a fresh perspective.

    General tips:
    -If notes + time are giving you problems, have you tried playing and then note-taking from your replays?
    -The 2-man Queues are terrible EV at the moment as the price of M11 packs is so low. If you can manage the time committment Daily Events are much better (bonus: QPs!)
    - Drop by the pdcmagic Classic forums at http://forums.pdcmagic.com/viewforum.php?f=6. We’re a friendly bunch (mostly) and there’s some good metagame information and general deck information.

    Deck tips:
    -This is quite a hard deck to pick up for your first foray into the format, though it is IMO one of the top two decks atm, the other being Affinity. It requires quite a lot of practice, which as you noticed can be quite hard to get as a lot of people in Tournament Practice dislike playing against the deck.
    -The deck is combo, but plays quite differently against different opponents. Sometimes you’re going to want to go for it on turn 3-4, other times you’re going to want to attrition them with draw spells every turn, other times you’re going to want to save up for one big turn, etc.