One of the cool things about having your own blog, is you get to talk about all of your weird little hobbies, todays topic is about
Pauper Magic (MTG), the all commons format (which is also my personal fav).
Here's is a deck I cooked up several weeks ago, It's name for now is simply "Zombor" named after the large zombie boss you fight in the SNES game Chrono Trigger. This deck, simply put, is a four color control deck, it's four colors and likes to "control" the board to win, lets have a look at it's guts:
The List:
Rotting Legion x2
Spellstutter Sprite x4
Gravedigger x1
Mnemonic Wall x1
Prophetic Prism x4
Doom Blade x2
Fog x2
Incinerate x2
Mana Leak x2
Staggershock x2
Blightning x2
Firebolt x2
Flame Slash x3
Foresee x2
Preordain x4
Forest x1
Island x8
Mountain x7
Swamp x5
Terramorphic Expanse x2
(Side board incomplete at the moment)
This deck is all about 1-upping your opponent through a mix of direct card advantage (Staggershock, Firebolt, Foresee, Blightning, Spellstutter Sprite), having better cards (Rotting Legion, scry [through "sifting"] effects) and/or having decent answers to an opponents plays (Doom Blade, Fog, any burn, counters).
I'll admit the card counts are a bit awkward, two of this, one of that, four of those, but with a combination of scry (Foresee, Preordain) card drawing (same cards, plus Prophetic Prism) and reuse through card recursion (Mnemonic Wall, Gravedigger, Firebolt), the awkward numbers soon smooth out. The mana base was also another challenge, but Prophetic Prism makes it possible as do again scry effects and to a lesser degree the two Terramorphic Expanses, which there are only two of so as not to draw as many in the mid to late game. Many of the cards are pretty straight forward, burn kills creatures, counterspells for cards I might not be able to handle with a kill spell, Blightning (discard) to punish an opponent with a low hand size, however there are three cards I'd like to focus on here:
Rotting Legion: the black 4/5 zombie, rotting legion is simply better than most other creatures in the pauper format, it's huge body lets it survive combat, burn spells and lets it ignore most black kill spells. Tapping when it enter's play is rarely a penalty, compare rotting legion to guardian of the guildpact and you'll find legion survives more types of spells (and combats!) for one more mana.
Spellstutter Sprite: It's no surprise how good this card is, but frankly I am surprised by how little it's used in many pauper decks sporting blue. There are an abundance of one casting cost spells used in the pauper format by a variety of decks and the sprite hoses all of them regardless of color. This made it to good to pass up and after using them as just a four of with no other faerie support, I've found they work just fine, they break all kinds of plays from burn to combos and they put you up a card by giving you a (flying!) 1/1 creature, of course these sprites are the perfect bodyguards for the legion.
Fog: The "alpha strike" the "all in","all chips on the table" play, usually involves a player attacking with all of their creatures with the hope it kills their opponent, I've found this to be troublesome when building control decks as most can't handle an overwhelming attack, sometimes it's not possible to kill all or most of an opponents creatures before they kill you. Enter fog. Fog is truly a delightful card, for a point of green mana, it can stop a lot of bad things, like a mob of attacking creatures, if used cleverly it can also net you extra cards off an opponents plays (boosting their creatures with instants before they attack, for example). One of the best parts about fog in this deck, is that using Prophetic Prism you can "hide" your fog plays pretty well, by leaving a prism untapped and any land open, generally if people don't see the green mana on the board they don't see fog. Fog is a fail safe for when your other spells fall sort.
I'll probably update this deck more in the future (at least a SB!) but for now it does fairly well and crushes all kinds of archetypes, shines best against aggressive decks though, for an additional resource here's a nifty little website I use to look up Magic cards:
http://magiccards.info/
a nice site, good search engine with excellent scans of the cards (used above). Look for more pauper decks here in the future, as I will be posting them.
