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By: PiDave, Dave
Dec 08 2011 11:22am
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This article is about MPDC, a Player Run Event organized by the PDC Community for the MTGO Community at large. The format is Pauper Standard, one of the most rapidly changing formats around. It has a very lively metagame and lots of incredibly talented players and deckbuilders. You can find all the info you need to participate to this series of events in the MPDC Season 15 Master Document and in the MPDC Player Primer, the latter being an incredibly thorough guide written by the event host himself, gwyned. MPDC is sponsored by players themselves and mtgotraders.com, which also brings you this very article. If you're interested in past articles on the Pauper Standard topic you should find them all here. Have a nice read!

Hi everyone, welcome back to yet another issue of the Pauper Standard Metagame article series! There is a lot of material this week so let's just proceed right away with the results:

Gatherling Entry -- Tier 1 decks thread on pdcmagic.com


Click on trophy to open decklist in another window

Congratulations to DonFluso2 for his victory with Kuldotha Hawks! This is the third time in a row that the deck takes the 1st place, effectively becoming the most influential deck of the Season. I encourage everyone to click on the trophy to get to DonFluso's own tournament report and decklist! Moving on: FlxEx took the 2nd place with the new iteration of his Next Delver Blue, running more Stitched Drakes than ever before but still using 14 Islands as mana base. The Top4 is composed by PatheticLoser with Green Green White, a deck we're going to talk about in a few paragraphs, and Yantos with the most recent version of his Rakdos Vandals in which Altar's Reap finds some more love: it seems like the trade with Pith Driller paid off since this is the deck's best placement so far. In the Top8 we have joekewwl with White Weenie, Malum with a pretty interesting take on the Boros theme, RW Tokens, which tries to exploit the absence of board sweepers to generate a critical mass of tokens to alpha strike the opponent; we then have milegyenanevem with Blackburn, a Red/Black deck with just 5 creatures and tons of burn spells (Bump in the Night included!), and last but not least, we have Sherm with his version of Hexproof.

A few considerations before we dive into this week's spotlight: it's been a while since a Green/White has been competitive in Pauper Standard; during the previous seasons the various declinations of Skyfisher Control made really hard for such a deck to exist and the lack of Green ETB playable creatures limited the color's presence mainly to the Infect linear with just a pinch of Metalcraft/Artifact flavour (Copper Carapace, Fangren Marauder and, more recently, (Thundering Thanadon)). The most recent really competitive GW deck is probably the Qasali Pridemage-powered Exalted Army from MPDC Season 10. However this has changed with the introduction of Innistrad: the latest expansion has lots of playables in these two colors and also has a dedicated linear which is doing great in limited play - I'm talking about the "GW Humans" archetype, of course. In Pauper Standard, however, we lack the main bombs of such a deck, exception made for these two cards:

Travel Preparations Rebuke

In our only-commons world, these two are very powerful cards indeed. Rebuke is one of the best removal spells ever printed in white and in an environment where most creatures need to attack to bring home some results it's almost as good as unconditional removal; it cannot deal with Hexproof creatures but neither can Doom Blade, after all. Travel Preparations is a totally different story: in limited it just wins games on its own, in Pauper it's still waiting for a deck that can break it for good but PatheticLoser's Green Green White is definitely going in the right direction. Just for the sake of comparison, the most similar cards I could find are Sigil Blessing and Seeds of Strength, both of which are non-permanent effects, require both color to be available at the same time and, most importantly, lack Travel Preparations's best ability : Flashback.

On with the list:

 

 

The deck is clearly going down the Aggro way with 28 total creatures (also counting the full set of Living Weapons) and a very short list of spells, with Travel Preparations playing the star-player role. Doomed Traveler is the first creature of the list and we've already seen how good this puny Human can be: "dying for a greater good" is definitely applicable to this guy. This is also true for Viridian Emissary anyway, since the oil-infected Mirran Elf can effectively fetch lands in a way that in my humble opinion is second only to Terramorphic Expanse: it does find a land, it thins out the player's deck and it does not require a dedicated slot in the deck for such effect (Traveler's Amulet, for example, does "waste" another spell's slot to obtain the same). It's also decently aggressive and fits the deck's curve pretty nicely. Ezuri's Archers is a very interesting metagame choice. It fills the Green 1-drop slot nicely and can withstand without too much trouble a mid-game flyer such as Stitched Drake; its body also prevents them to trade with similarly priced creatures: they can survive both Doomed Traveler's incarnations and they also are Geistflame-proof, at least in the early game. The third 1CMC pseudo-creature of the list if Flayer Husk: it should be very good, especially when equipped on the Archers or on a flying Spirit Token, but it also can pull its own weight in the early game for some quick damage. They also can trade with any x/1s the opponent might have without compromising Card Advantage. Sunspear Shikari kinda wait for the Husk to die and Voltron-up to a 3/3 Lifelink First-Striker, but it's probably the creature that impress me the least. I've never been a fan of equip-activated creatures and I think those two slots could be more effectively used by better creatures like Ambush Viper - that can also be used as additional removal - or Gideon's Lawkeeper - that can tap down the opponent's best attacker (or blocker!) - or, if you really want to stick with aggro, even Darkthicket Wolf. Village Bell-Ringer, on the other hand, can really surprise an unprepared opponent, screwing up his/her plans in the worst way possible. We already talked last week about how good Thraben Sentry can be in the right deck and this one should not make an exception: with so many creatures and such an aggressive strategy it should not be difficult to make them fully powered right out of the gates. They also go pretty well with the Bell-Ringer surprise play: untap on the opponent's counter-attack, chump block with a Doomed Traveler or a Viridian Emissary and transform the Sentry. Chapel Geist is a solid choice that can act both as an evasive attacker and as a very good blocker in the air, since it trumps even the more expensive Abbey Griffin. There's one more card I'm not totally sold onto and that card is the even higher-end Grizzled Outcasts: I know it's big but does this deck really need something like this maindeck? I mean, it's clear that they can be useful in the late game where the player's hand should be almost depleted (thus enabling the Outcasts transformation) but I'd rather maindeck two Somberwald Spiders than these guys: the ability to block flying creatures seems more precious to me than an easily-chumpable-non-trampling 7/7, especially with so many (Kuldotha Rebirths) being played in the current meta.

On to the spells: we already talked about Travel Preparations and why it is so good; Bonds of Faith is another impressive card from Innistrad, acting as a Pacifism against any non-Human creature and as a pump spell for the player's creatures, even though the deck doesn't run that many Humans. Sylvok Lifestaff has been warping the metagame since its appearance and it's just the best Equipment currently available in the format, especially with so many aggressive decks around. Revoke Existence is both a concession to Hexproof and all those Perilous Myrs that are swarming in every artifact-based deck.


ColorPie: Spells inside, lands outside.

The deck's curve is very impressive: two lands, hopefully of different colors, are what is required to be out of the early game. Once this is taken into consideration it's easy to understand the number of lands played, just 20; however the manabase seems a little unbalanced to me: the deck requires more White mana than Green mana overall but that Green mana is almost entirely needed in the early stage of the game: I would have gone with a slight prevalence of Forests above Plains, the 10-8 split seems good enough, but perhaps the presence of the double White on (Chapel Geists) could bring this to a more balanced 9-9. I'm also alright with the couple of Shimmering Grottoes thrown in for good measure. Consider this:

PlainsShimmering GrottoSylvok LifestaffEzuri's ArchersViridian EmissarySunspear ShikariChapel Geist
Probability of a Forest being drawn in the first three turns: 34%. Same for a random land: 45%.

This hand would have been a snap-keep with a Forest in place of that Plains, wouldn't it? On with the sideboard! A full set of Pacifisms should take good care of all those "when it dies" creatures, Perilous Myr included, and should probably take over Bonds of Faith's slots when facing a Human-heavy deck. Nihil Spellbomb is a must have against many Blue Zombie and Flashback based decks such as NextDelverBlue and could also be useful against the opponent's Travel Preparations; The Spellbombs' secondary effect is also turned on by the Shimmering Grottoes so I guess there's one more reason to have them in the list. Two (Somberwald Spiders) (which I would have maindecked, as I said before) should be pretty good against any flying creature; some more artifact and enchantment hate take up four more slots evenly split between Revoke Existence and Naturalize. One more Thraben Sentry is there to shift the balance toward being even more aggressive and another singleton Bonds of Faith is there against any deck that doesn't run Humans at all such as the Red-Black Vampire we saw in the last few weeks.

Alright, time to take a look at the combined metagame status of the first six events!

Aggro still owns the majority of the field as the Paupers struggle to put together a viable Control deck. Aggro-Control seems to be the second best choice but it's currently on-par with Aggro/Combo, the archetype powered by Hexproof and Kuldotha Hawk. This last deck is the undisputed leader of the current Performance rankings with a staggering 2.67 Points-Per-Event average. This is the single most powerful deck since forever, as the previous record was set by Teetering Infect during MPDC Season 13 with an average of 2.41 PPE after six events. however, Kuldotha Hawks stellar performance is also caused by the lack of players adopting the current winning list. Most of the RW players are missing one of the key components in their lists, but it's the combination of all of those factors that make this deck so good (look here for a brief explanation about those factors). Anyway, the most impressive thing is that the metagame is as lively as it's ever been! The Paupers are struggling with their own brews and netdecking is at an historical minimum. Keep up the good work guys!

There's one last bit of information I'd like to share: the Top 10 Cards!

As you can see Perilous Myr is still the most used creature by far in the decks that make it to the Top8; furthermore, four out of the Top 5 cards are artifacts with Shimmering Grotto being the single exception. This should make artifact-hate spells like Crush, Revoke Existence and Naturalize pretty relevant cards in the current metagame. Think Twice also makes it to the 6th position as the most used colored card together with Glint Hawk, which, unsurprisingly, is the creature that has the most synergy with artifacts. Brimstone Volley gained some credit over Geistflame for its versatility but I guess they just go together pretty well in a R/X deck. Ponder closes the ranks at 10th as it currently is the one and only way to get some handy library manipulation in the format.

This is all for this week, folks!
See you next time!
-- Dave

1 Comments

5 colourless cards in the top by JMason at Thu, 12/08/2011 - 13:15
JMason's picture

5 colourless cards in the top 10! Why are mono-coloured decks not doing better in this environment?