Dime a Dozen #42: Is Pauper Dying?

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Jason Moore

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  1. I feel like pauper would be more popular if there was a smaller card pool, maybe standard or modern or some group of sets unique to the format. As it stands the card pool is just too deep. If people could brew standard or modern common only decks I think it would take off.

  2. Selesnya Tokens-styles are no joke vs. Delver. Gain enough life and they simply can’t win. Like ‘bonesplitter’ is to affinity, lifegain is to delver…the weapon the pilots don’t want you to know about lol…(sounds like some cheesy AM radio commercial)

    Great article – love all the props given out to all those who greatly deserve it, and are keeping the formats interest up. I have a fantasy of putting up ProTour sized money to all pros and making our own pauper pro tour – be cool to see what Finkel/Sam Black etc.., would brew up…

  3. Justin – I’ve never thought about it that way, you could be right…I think the current card pool has a lot of appeal to some of us though!

    deluxeicoff – It’s a nice fantasy, I too would love seeing more pro involvement with the format!

  4. Thanks for the shoutout, I have changed my outlook on Pauper as you highlighted. I don’t know what I specifically said about it in that episode, but I had been pretty salty before and came to terms with reality of the format.

  6. So if Classic Pauper is relegated to ‘casual’ now, then my hope would be that Standard Pauper is given the chance to become the new competitive Pauper Format of choice. It’s so easy to get new players into it and it requires getting new cards and staying current with the game with each set release. As a bridge between limited and constructed, I find Standard Pauper to have the least barrier to entry and it’s an easy way to get players to try their hand at brewing, deckbuilding, analyzing metagames, hemming and hawwing over the last sideboard slots, all that good stuff. I was a limited only player until I dived into the Standard Pauper format. Since then picking up Standard and Legacy decks has not been nearly as difficult as I thought it would.

  7. I can only speak for myself, but in my eyes Pauper is dead. Without Dailies, Pauper has no competitive outlet. It makes me sad because this format was the first place I went on the “going infinite” train, and I know it used to be recommended by many as a good, cheap format to dip your toe into the competitive corner. Now, the “cheapest” format is probably Block Constructed, and some of those cards are hardly inexpensive. As for myself, I’ve moved on from Pauper to Modern. Of course, to help do this, I sold all my Pauper cards and haven’t played a single match since. Goodbye Pauper. :-(

  8. Wizards took the intentional step of killing pauper by removing daillies. This was a revenue boosting move, because it forced new players to purchase more tickets.

    Personally, I love the format because it has a large card pool but lands and mana bases are not totally busted. Yes, an occasional mono-colored deck makes a splash once in a while in legacy, but its an exception rather than the rule.

    That said, the fixing that is available in the format is fair and imposes a real cost. It slows your deck down, so tempo/aggro decks can’t really go multi-color. (Domain Zoo is really controlling/midrange when you get down to it) It is also limited enough that control decks that don’t mind their lands coming into play tapped risk stumbling against aggro builds and getting overrun.

    Although the control mirror is boring, (basically in comes down to who can resolve the most mulldrifters) this is true of any magic format. Alas, we must strive to keep pauper alive! Its still a blast playing for a few hours in the tournament practice room, even if you know you will never have time to play a premiere event!

  9. Wizards saw the opportunity to take down pauper dailies when the tournament structures on modo were redone (due to the uproar against the unstable big tournaments ignited by Brian Kibler.)
    They did this because pauper dailies were the cheapest way of profitably playing constructed magic online. The decks are waay cheaper but offer the same payout as the other format.

    So with that in mind it makes sense that they temporarily took daily events down too, although they werent affected by the stability issues at all.
    They used a totally unrelated incident to get rid of pauper dailies.

    Basic politics i guess…

  10. DrChrisBakerDC – That’s an interesting thought! Hopefully Standard Pauper can get some more PRE representation in order to grow?

    D4fault – I appreciate your viewpoint. However, going infinite is not everyone’s goal when it comes to Magic. Hope to have you back one day!

    Mike Fellman – Let’s do it :) Long live Pauper!

    bilocan – Seems kinda shady LOL…

  11. Appreciate the shout out man. As a writer its always nice to hear that what you had to say was at least meaningful to some. I like to think I was one of those people who put a ton of time into writing and I think my continued pauper guide was (hopefully) a great example to people as to the passion and effort I put forward on the format. While I know I am at odds with several people (including Chris’ above comments) on my feelings on the format one thing is clear; it isn’t changing. Not only has the change of the format removed me from the scene, but it has actually gone as far as kill my interest in the game itself. I’m sure I’ll be back at some point, but I know for sure Pauper won’t be going back to what it was and I won’t be involved in it.

  13. Of course we can hope that Wizards starts to realize that pauper is dying and cares enough to reverse their policy. My guess is they were hoping it would be fine without dailies. As for card pool, I think it is easier to convince people to play a format with a wider card pool than desired than it is to convince people used to playing good cards to play a format where you have a small number of relatively bad cards to choose from.

  14. I’m sure it is easy to get 4-5 local players interested in paper pauper standard. That is the definition of casual magic. The draw to pauper online was tied to being able to play competitively in a fashion that didn’t continually force good players to spend money. I don’t see competitive online players having any kind of real interest in standard pauper – if anything, that takes away from the already dwindling group that is interested in playing.

    On a separate note, if you want a significant # of people to be interested in a format it has to either be sanctioned at a minimum (paper) or have a reasonable chance of at least pseudo going infinite for serious players (dailies).

  15. I quit Pauper for a long time after getting sick of Cloudpost. After the Banning I was just about to return to it, but removing the dailies put a stop to that. I really dislike 8-mans and 2-mans are such terrible value that I’m not just motivated anymore.

  16. ramela – I agree that the value is quite bad. Sometimes I wonder if Wizards could’ve just raised the price (entry fee) of Daily Events a little bit?

  17. As someone who has been supporting a similarly “dead” format, I actually envy the amount of participation that Pauper still gets. Classic is a format that has always struggled to get enough people to participate in just a single 16 person event each week, and now it finally has an expiration date (i.e. Vintage Masters release).

    I guess what I’m trying to say is that if anything, Pauper is simply evolving. It no longer is the superior “plus-EV” format on MTGO and there is nothing wrong with that. I believe that Pauper can remain relevant in far more significant ways than my beloved format Classic has ever been. It’s hard to stem the tide of negativity, but that will be Pauper’s downfall, not anything that WotC has, or ever will do. Keep up the good fight!

  18. Jason Moore – I definetly think they could have increased the entry fees a little for the constructed dailies, propably limited ones too. At least I would not have batted an eyelash.

    That is what they have done with the Phantom Events like Cube too, after all…

  19. i think one problem with the format was the banning of cloudpost… yes the post decks were good, but they allowed for a legitimate control deck… without cloudpost, you just have a bunch of aggro/tempo decks in pauper, which a lot of players don’t particularly enjoy.

  20. ramela – I don’t think it’s a bad idea personally…

    zac – I think that MUC and Izzet Control are legitimate, even MBC. The format is by nature very creature-based, and you’re right, it has become even more so as a result of the bans.

  22. Also, playing Tempo decks is fun and while playing against Tempo decks is not the most fun, it is more fun than playing against Post decks…

  23. Hey Jason, sorry I’m writing in so late! Somehow I missed this article during my regular cycles. First of all, thank you for writing such nice things about me, and thank you for the plugs! I really appreciate the work you do, and your willingness to help the community even now that DEs are gone.

    Second, I want to address my view on the “death of Pauper.” Pauper originated as a casual, unsanctioned format, but WotC allowed it to grow into a competitive format. It started with PEs, and 8-mans, but Pauper really exploded when we got DEs. Once this happened, I, like a lot of people, joined in with a grinding mentality. But when WotC chopped off the competitive subsidy our community, unsurprisingly, began to revert to pre-DE levels. I don’t think Pauper is evolving as one commenter mentioned, instead I think it is devolving to where it was before DEs. As such, I don’t think Pauper itself is dying, but how I – and apparently a lot of other people – interact with Pauper is. In that sense, my departure was carved in stone on Decimation Day.

  24. I would like to point to point out that singer_from_sengir did not mean to add Wring Flesh to his domain list. I confronted him about it as soon as I saw the list. He told me that he was scrambling to put together his final deck before entering the tournament and ended up submitting a list containing wring flesh by mistake. Singer may be a madman, but he’s not THAT much of a madaman.