Hi everyone! As you know, Gatecrash spoiler season is well underway, and Pauper players are getting the short end of the spoiler stick! Now why is that? Because at the time of my authoring this article, we are once again left to sit on our hands as the flashier rares and mythics go up on display. This, of course, makes perfect sense from a business and marketing perspective (since it emphasizes and accentuates the cards that are actually going to turn a profit), so I’ll spare you any further whining. The truth is, Pauper players have it great when it comes to spoilers: there are only a handful of new cards we need to memorize, and purchasing them isn’t going to break the bank! With all that said, let’s talk about the upcoming set Gatecrash.
I feel that Gatecrash has a lot to live up to in terms of meeting the standards set by Return to Ravnica. Not only did Pauper receive its best red spell since Scars of Mirrodin by way of Elecktrickery, but it also saw hexproof decks get a viability boost via Ethereal Armor. Additionally, Frostburn Weird has seen occasional play in Mono-U Faeries lists (which is something I didn’t quite expect to happen). If that weren’t enough, Return to Ravnica brought us five out of the ten gates, though their usefulness is still debated at times. With these advances in mind, why don’t we take a look at what Gatecrash is brining to the poor man’s table?
Better Gate Than Never
Pauper has some additional color fixing on the way: the remaining five gates! These dual lands come into play tapped, but can be played on Turn 1 (as opposed to the Karoo lands) and grant access to one of two colors on a turn-by-turn basis (unlike Evolving Wilds and Terramorphic Expanse). So which guilds are getting gated this time? There’s Boros (red and white), Dimir (blue and black), Gruul (red and green), Orzhov (black and white) and Simic (blue and green). For me, it’s difficult to predict which of these will see the most play. Even if the Dimir and Simic Cloudpost player base grows in the near future, their lists will likely only feature one or two copies of these lands. Dimir decks without Cloudpost may opt to play a set of gates, and the same can be said for a deck that I’m going to talk about later…
What I find interesting is that a gate sub-theme has yet to be revealed at common. Where are this set’s equivalents of Gatecreeper Vine and Ogre Jailbreaker? Perhaps they have yet to be spoiled. Perhaps they simply do not exist. In the case of the former possibility, they’ll need to be more powerful than their predecessors to see any legitimate action in a Pauper Daily Event. Considering the set’s title, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a gate sub-theme show up in subsequent spoilers.
Excellence with Pestilence?
There is one unorthodox Pauper strategy that just might appreciate the benefits of playing gates. The name of that strategy? Orzhov Pestilence. This deck has important components in both black and white, so a Turn 1 Orzhov Guildgate essentially equates to the best opening around. Orzhov Pestilence is a controlling strategy that abuses its namesake board-sweeping enchantment by playing Wall of Hope and Guardian of the Guildpact. In other words, while opposing creature numbers and life totals decrease, ours remain stable. With very little enchantment hate showing up in Pauper sideboards, a Pestilence strategy only has counters and bounce spells to worry about. Here is a list I came up with to start from:
Orzhov Pestilence by Jason Moore
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While this is a rough draft of the deck, I have many ideas to explore from here. I think the biggest flaw currently might be that the list is too creature-centric. I think it goes without saying, but the fewer of our creatures that die to Pestilence, the better!
Augur of Skulls works as an early blocker versus aggro, and a disruptive element against control and combo. It can also regenerate through Pestilence activations. Aven Riftwatcher feels like a necessity in a deck with so many ways to harm itself. Dimir House Guard, while representing the wrong guild, makes a serviceable tutor for Pestilence or Guardian of the Guildpact. Those Guardians are one of the primary ways to finish an opponent (whether or not a Pestilence is on the table). Because the deck’s plan is to stall the game while drawing a bunch of cards to find Pestilence pieces, Phyrexian Rager ends up being a nice fit. At a whopping 6 mana, Twisted Abomination can act as a win condition that also regenerates through Pestilence pings, or can tutor swamps early to ensure that we have double black by Turn 4. Wall of Hope keeps us from dying to early dorks, or to our own deck.
Playing Dead Weight means we have an early removal spell that gets around instant speed pumps, and even kills Atog. It’s also in here because I envision a future version of the deck that incorporates Auramancer. Lastly, Sign in Blood is a great card draw option that isn’t severely hampered by our (predominantly black) mana base.
A glaring weakness with the deck so far is that it has few resources in the maindeck to overcome a dedicated combo or control deck. While MBC and MUC can probably be beaten, Cloudpost and Storm variants seem markedly formidable.
As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of card choices I am considering for this strategy. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on what I’ve got so far!
It’s time we move on to the currently spoiled nonland cards from Gatecrash.
The Tax Man
Let’s start with white, because why not?! The only white card that looks interesting (so far) is Syndic of Tithes. While I hope there are more cards in white to be excited about from here, Syndic of Tithes is quite a head-turner. It also introduces the extort mechanic, which is unique to the Orzhov guild, and very linear. For all intents and purposes, Syndic of Tithes is a Grizzly Bearswith extort. Peripherally, we can compare this card to Suture Priest, Disciple of the Vault and perhaps even non-Pauper cards like Blood Artist. The difference with Syndic is that we have an effect that’s relatively easy to trigger (because casting spells tends to happen a lot in this game), but more arduous to actualize (due to the mana requirement).
The most obvious preexisting deck we can attempt to put this card in is White Weenie. I say this for a few reasons: White Weenie is the premier Pauper deck associated with white, it wants to play Grizzly Bears, it wants to have reach versus control decks and it wants to have life gain versus other creature decks. Sounds like a good fit, right? I’m not so sure.
First and foremost, Syndic needs to be compared to the other 2-drops available: Loyal Cathar and Squadron Hawk. Believe me when I say that those 2-drops are awesome. I couldn’t justify replacing either one with Syndic, since they both provide card advantage and are more combat effective. Syndic is not going to be spending much time in the red zone (he’s a 2/2 we care about), so he’ll have to make up for that by extorting for a lot of damage. Can he do that? Maybe.
I also feel that Syndic is a better fit in White Weenie variants that do not play War Falcon. I say this because those lists play as few lands as possible and are hungry for knights and soldiers. Syndic is a cleric. He also oddly wants us to have extra lands available and a low curve.
There certainly are benefits to playing him. He gives white reach(!), and guaranteed damage no matter how much countermagic the opponent might have. Playing a Turn 2 Syndic should also give other creature decks headaches, but doesn’t Suture Priest do that already? Of course, a 2/2 body is more welcome than a 1/1, but I’m just not sure this guy will put up strong enough numbers in terms of damage dealt and life gained.
Below is a list I’ve drawn up. It might be a good starting point for testing Syndic:
White Tithes by Jason Moore
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In good hands, this list easily has what it takes to place in a Daily Event. The 3:1 ratio of Bodyguards to Travelers is because we want as many early drops as possible, but we don’t want multiple Bodyguards in our opening hand. Playing this many 1-drops not only helps the mana curve, but also works well with Syndic. I would play more if I had room!
The Bonesplitter count is reduced to three, since I needed the space, and I’m hoping that Syndic will make up for the loss of damage. In a mono-white deck with a respectable land count, Unmake is superior to Journey to Nowhere. Sometimes, however, you just want Journey because it comes down sooner. I’ve found the 3/2 split to be ideal. Prismatic Strands is still an occasional rock star, and will stay in the maindeck as long as Grapeshot remains the Storm win condition of choice.
For me, gauging the usefulness of Syndic (and extort in general) is pretty difficult without actually seeing it used in a game. First of all, how good is this effect in the early game? How good is it in the late game? We will usually be playing more spells early (so extort is triggered more often), but we have more mana late to actually pay for it. The problem is that white decks late in the game will probably be topdecking (and therefore only playing one spell per turn). On the flipside, having two or more on the table compounds the card’s swingy-ness. How often will that be a reality, though? All of these factors leave me perplexed. I’m leaning on the side of Syndic not being quite awesome enough, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he exceeds my expectations.
Do the Evolution
The evolve mechanic shows up by way of the Simic guild. This mechanic thrives in creature-dense builds with effective mana curves. When I first heard about evolve, I believed that a 1-drop creature would prove to be the most Pauper-viable. Lo and behold, Cloudfin Raptor was spoiled, and it appears to be the best evolve creature at common so far. The first question we should be asking is: how big (on average) does it need to grow to be worth playing? Obviously a 0/1 flier for U is not even a card. A 1/2 for the same price is not remotely playable either. A 2/3 flier for U on the other hand? That becomes downright impressive. It’s surprising how much of a difference a single +1/+1 counter can make!
Let’s not get too excited about the mutant bird just yet. While it does have the potential to grow, it’s not exactly a flying Champion of the Parish. Cloudfin Raptor relies on creature spells resolving, and those creatures need to be the right size. I don’t think this is too big of an issue, but I anticipate situations in which we’re stuck with a 1/2 flier that doesn’t really do much. It’s also important to note that topdecking this card later on is also extremely unfortunate.
Below is an idea of what can be done with Cloudfin Raptor:
Mono-Blue Aggro by Jason Moore
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I’m not positive that this creature composition will work optimally with Raptor, but I don’t think it’s too far off. The split between AEther Adept and Man-o’-war is merely to prevent Echoing Decay and Echoing Truth from having any value. Cloud of Faeries and Spellstutter Sprite are borrowed from Mono-Blue Faeries, as is Phantasmal Bear. Porcelain Legionnaire helps pump Raptor even further, but four copies is probably too many (since we have no way of producing white mana). As a singleton, Stitched Drake won’t cause too many problems if we can’t pay the additional cost. Ultimately, if we can’t cast Drake because none of our creatures are in the graveyard, that probably means we’re winning anyway.
Bonesplitter should be pretty good here with all the fliers available, though Counterspell might be better as something that doesn’t require UU (Turn Aside, maybe). The deck is very dependent on tempo, but there is a single Curse of Chains for particularly troublesome creatures. Overall, this seems like a cool idea to try, but I don’t know if it’s better than blue decks based around Delver of Secrets. Feel free to chip in with your thoughts!
Spoiled Rotten
Sadly, there just aren’t enough spoiled commons yet for me to build around further. I think the other mechanics might have potential (I’d really be interested in a cheap red creature with battalion), but what I’ve see so far will have more impact in limited than in constructed. However, don’t be surprised if I brew up some Boros or Gruul decks in the near future!
I think we should all thank Wizards for finally listening to the demands of the people, and printing this card: Shambleshark! Not because Pauper needed more cheap flash creatures, or a reason to play Simic colors, but because we’ve been yearning for years to get to play a fish crab! The two most beloved creature types in the game have gotten married, and it’s not a moment too soon. Fish crab!
End Step
I hope you’ve enjoyed my assessment of the currently spoiled Gatecrash cards. I also hope that we get some more gems in the near future. I’ve got some questions I’d love for you to respond to:
What cards and mechanics are you looking forward to most from Gatecrash?
Would you like me to do another review of the set once it’s fully spoiled?
What decks or topics would you like to see covered in the future?
Until next time, thanks for reading, and please comment!
You can find Jason
co-hosting the Pauper’s Cage podcast
on MTGO as BambooRush
on Twitter @dimecollectorsc
and on Youtube at youtube.com/dimecollectorsc
Just wanted to remind everyone that the full spoilers were not available at the time I wrote this article. Also, the last two decklists are not showing up properly on my browser (Safari) for some reason.
I love the evaluations. The old Pestilence deck was simply brutal against most of the meta. I disagree on the extort mechanic. I don’t believe it is fast enough to provide value to the deck. Castigate is far more effective in the deck, as is duress. But I haven’t played pauper in a while so the meta might have changed.
The raptors could potentially become a dominating force in the right control decks. I played a simic deck once which I had been told was named ‘Lower Level Blue.’ It had Coiling Oracle, Elvish Visionary and tons of counterspells. I usually killed with dorks like Spellstutter and the like. I would love to see a simic inspired pauper deck on here.
I have only found this site today, but already I am hooked. Thanks for this article.
systemic – Thanks for the input! I never said that extort would go into the Pestilence deck, however. I’m not seeing Cloudfin Raptor being a good fit within a control deck, since they don’t typically play a large number of creatures. Glad you’re liking the site, please continue to check out our content!
Decklists fixed now. I made an HTML typeo in there at some point when finalizing edits, but that’s now resolved. Sorry about that.
Frostburn weird seems better than porcelain legionnaire in mono u aggro imo. It makes the creature base less weak to electrickery and has 4 toughness to dodge disfigure, firebolt, echoing decay, etc. Also with so many one drops and fliers ninja of the deep hours seems like it deserves a spot.
Donzo – Good points! Frostburn Weird might be a better fit for the deck. I’m a little less enthusiastic about Ninja, what would you cut for him?
Good points about syndic of tithes. I was thinking of ways of getting him into the war falcon build though, because he seems good with 1/1′s. I agree that he isn’t that good early game because you can’t afford to sink mana into him, but mid game (right around when a cloudpost deck is stabilizing) it seems like top decking a 1/1 and dropping it with extort would be pretty good. You definitely don’t want multiples of him in hand, and you definitely only want him after you have 3 mana. Maybe he could be a 2-of? Maybe 1 copy of veteran armorer and 1 copy of leonin skyhunter could be taken out for it.
Also, I like him over suture preist in the post matchup because the opponent plays so few creatures that the preist’s ability is often not relevant, plus he has a 2/2 body.
Michael – Syndic does seem better than Priest in the Cloudpost matchup. I think having multiples of him would pay off later in the game though, no?
I’m impressed with the analysis so far, the evolve mechanic seems to be the one best suited for affecting pauper decks, extort less so. I think, as you said, it is too slow and mana dependant. You need card advantage AND enough mana to really abuse it, and and I’m not sure if there are any good draw-spells or similar for it to work. Otherwise it’s just a nice gimmick, but should lose all the same to storm/post.
If I understand evolve correctly, you need to have either power OR thoughness to boost the creature, so I don’t think you will be stuck with a 1/2 flier all too long, especially with Frostburn Weird in the deck
As for ninja, I don’t think it has a good spot in that deck, cause it does not fit with the overall theme the deck has.
off topic: Love your pauper drafts. Can I interest you in playing/posting a storm combination sometimes? I always see you playing against them, and the mechanic of “when to go off” strikes me as very hard and I often fail at it. A little insight on storm would be most welcome!
EdwardGein — I appreciate the support. I will eventually get to Storm, though I don’t have much experience piloting those kind of decks. Any variant in particular you’re interested in?
Having multiples of him in the war falcon build makes you want to hit 4 mana so that you can pay for the double extort triggers when you drop a 2-drop. It seems like by that point cloudpost may have moved their life total far enough away from the red zone to just not care about what you are doing, but I could be wrong. Hitting a 1 drop with 2 of them on board and 2 mana would definitely be possible though.
Just want to make a honorable mention of Devour Flesh. It’s basically Diabolic Edict with a medium-sized downside (sometimes even a smallish upside) and it doesn’t cost you 10-12 tix to acquire a playset.
Devour Flesh 1b Instant Common
Target player sacrifices a creature, then gains life equal to that creature’s toughness.
Michael – As mentioned in the article, I don’t particularly like Syndic in the War Falcon build. You’re not wrong about Cloudpost, but that’s already the deck’s worst matchup so card choice shouldn’t necessarily be made with them in mind. They’re gonna hate on us no matter what we do.
hiveking – Thanks for the mention!
If you wanted to try out the ninja I would cut a snag, stitched drake, bonesplitter and curse from the md. Ninja might not be optimal in this deck, but he has good synergies with man o war, the 8 one drops, spellstutters, vapor snags, and the spire golems (Late game when you can recast them for 0-1 mana). That alone merits trying him out in my opinion.
as we basically talked about in game I couldn’t agree more with the odd lack of gate interactions.. I would have put money on having something a bit more substantial to it and I’m curious to see what if anything the Delver players decide to do with the Raptor because its great, but where do you find room for it? lol
Donzo – I will probably try him, but I’m just not really sold on the idea. There is the benefit of playing a Spire Golem to pump Raptor, returning Golem with Ninja and then playing it to pump Raptor again I suppose. It also wouldn’t hurt to have another “must kill” creature in the deck.
JustSin – These Ravnica sets just have a ton of stuff going on in them, so there probably wasn’t much room to really emphasize gates. Gates are essentially a device in limited to help players fix their guild colors and splash some stuff. As far as playing Raptor in Delver, you’ll just have to wait for my next Blackborder article (I have no shame)…
Hey Jason, went ahead and put together your pestilence list without the gates.
Obviously, the mana is a lot worse, so thats going to be great once gatecrash comes out.
I went ahead and cut the Augurs, they just didn’t seem to be doing much. I put in a couple Auramancers as you suggested, and they have been sweet. They let you preserve your life total by using dead weights a little bit more aggressively early. It gets a little awkward if you don’t have a wall with pestilence + sign in blood and rager.
I also through in a couple duress and a faiths fetters main. Duress helps out against control and can potentially hit a rolling thunder. The fetters hasn’t been excellent, but its an out to crusher, tutorable with guard, and adds a little more life gain. Its super awkward with pestilence at times though.
I cut an Abomination for the fetters, but I think the deck does want three, the card performs on both modes. You always need lands, and he definitely closes games where you can’t find a guardian.
Storm is …yeah.
Definitely looking forward to evolving the deck with the guildgates. I realize the deck was made with them in mind, and boy will they help! I hope you get the time to follow up on it.
WindDrake – That’s awesome that you’ve been testing the deck! Thanks for the notes. Do you think I should do some videos with the deck when Gatecrash comes out?
Definitely. I don’t how well it will do, but the deck is a blast to play.
I would definitely enjoy them.
I love these articles. I can’t wait to see what kind of stuff that can be pulled off now that wizards put the ban hammer down on grapeshot, EtW, and invigorate. Things like guildgates and more multicolor strategies might actually be playable. I’m looking forward to an article with your thoughts on the bans, I think your BG deck gets a lot stronger now, not sure if anything from gatecrash makes it in there though.