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By: PiDave, Dave
Jul 20 2011 1:09pm
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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 13 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 this topic you should find them all here. Have a nice read!

Hi everyone and welcome back to the weekly MPDC metagame update! This week we have the most varied Top8 to date, with 8 different decks out of 38 participants battling for the top spot. Let's see who did best:

Gatherling Entry -- Winning deck thread on pdcmagic.com -- Buy winning deck on mtgotraders.com

And our congratulations go to DarkestNight with his Kuldotha Red! The new 2.0 version packs less creatures but has a ton more reach thanks to Artillerize and Porcelain Legionnaire, which are a pretty decent 8 damage combo by themselves. This is the first time Kuldotha Red reaches the top in MPDC: let's hope this is not just a flash-fire! In 2nd place there's ImSoHawt with a Bant Tokens version that sports Shared Discovery as the card drawing spell of choice instead of Vivisection or Foresee. That seems like a little step back in this list's evolution but since right now there are less Shrivels around than a few weeks ago this might actually be a sensible choice; after all, drawing three with one mana (and a minor drawback) is very good in this deck. The Top4 sees the return of Esper Control to the upper part of the standings with Doqpelganger and the first Top8 of the season for 3 Color Control (a.k.a. Team America) with pk23. The Esper list is still in its usual pre-NPH condition, while the WRU one has been upgraded with two Psychic Barriers in the maindeck in place of the previous Stoic Rebuttals.
The Top8 has a 4CC, piloted by Cleomar (still lacking the most recent modification in its Gatherling entry), a Teetering Infect run by KFG_EaterOfWorlds, a Metalhawk by pelao28 and this week's spotlight:

 

 

It's been a while, MonoBlue Control. DonFluso2's DrawGo is your latest incarnation and, even though you've lost some powerful creatures since the old times, you fared well enough to reach Top8 in a Standard event. Alright, let's not get too sentimental with this weird head-to-deck talk...As you probably realized, MUC is a deck I've been missing for a long time, but not because I love it! Actually it's quite the opposite: MUC is my very own arch-enemy, my deckbuilding "rival", my nemesis; this also means that, while I don't really like such a playstyle, I respect the archetype and I admire it for its ability to survive without hard removal.
That said, let's start the deck analysis: the creature package is strong and on-style with what you would expect from such a deck: the creatures are basically walls that are hard to climb for the opponent and every one of them also has a valuable secondary ability; Sea Gate Oracle is just awesome Card Advantage, Spire Monitor is expensive but it can easily establish air superiority and also act as surprise combat trick against a Kor Skyfisher that managed to pass through the counterspell barrier. Calcite Snapper is always hard to deal with and worth 4 damage a turn in the lategame, even though it's almost unusable as attacker against Infect decks. Pilgrim's Eye helps to thin the deck while providing some chump-blocking; it also serves as lategame landfall enabler. Speaking of which, the landfall sub-theme runs through the whole deck: Deprive helps returning excess lands to the hand so they can activate the landfall triggers once again; Mysteries of the Deep should be more often a slightly underpriced Jace's Ingenuity than a five-mana Divination; we already talked about Calcite Snapper and its capabilities as endgame beater. With just 12 creatures the spell list is long and varied as it should be: it's basically a full-fledged counterspell anthology with Deprive, Psychic Barrier, Cancel and Mana Leak. The mix seems good enough in the current meta: the anti-creature Psychic Barrier is the best way to answer the opponent's Kor Skyfishers, Gravediggers and Sea Gate Oracles. Deprive and Cancel can block most powerful spells before they hit the board and Mana Leak serves the double duty of early hard counterspell and psychological warfare: if an opponent plays around it, Mana Leak can really slow down his early and mid games even without physically being in the player's hand, providing him with time to build up some real answers.
Counterspells aside, the list also has pseudo-removal with Narcolepsy: this aura effectively shuts down most creatures, even though it needs backup against bounce effects. Speaking of which, Into the Roil is arguably the best bounce spell ever: it can target everything and can also draw you a card in the late game as well.


ColorPie: Spells inside, lands outside (lands that enter the battlefield tapped are in lighter colors)

The mana base is plain enough, with the added bonus of Quicksands: these colorless lands are a must-have in any mono-colored deck. I probably would have gone the extra mile and put in four Glimmerposts as well because they should fit properly in the landfall subtheme and provide some useful lifegain in the most aggressive matchups; furthermore, they also come into play untapped, avoiding tempo loss at the small price of having "just" 14 Blue sources (and that should still be enough in such a mono-colored deck). The manacurve is also what you would expect from a deck named "DrawGo": 2 lands are enough to enter midgame and wait out to ambush the opponent as soon as he plays anything, while hopefully not missing any land drop to keep the pressure up.
The sideboard is very interesting even though it doesn't seem optimal to me: Pith Driller seems a solid choice to deal with aggro decks such as Infect and Kuldotha Red, but I probably won't include that lone Swamp (I'd just pay two life and recover the loss with Glimmerposts)...anyway, it could help the player draw a card when activating the Nihil Spellbombs and it's fetchable by Pilgrim's Eye. Even so, I cannot understand the similar inclusion of Blinding Souleater without a single Plains to activate its ability without lifeloss being a problem. On the other side, Harbor Serpent seems a very sensible inclusion since the strongest control decks are all running Islands. Granted, you'll have to protect that beast from Doom Blades and Journey to Nowheres, but that's excatly what this deck is good at. Unsummon is great against (Infect) and the additional Cancel could help to win in a counterspell battle, even though I'd prefer Dispel in that role.
In the end this deck seems solid and with some room for improvement as well. We'll see how its evolution will go in the next few events.

Time for the season recap graphs:

With just one more event in the pipeline before Worlds Infect is still ahead of the pack, which is composed by a nice variety of decks; this is probably the most balanced situation since I started tracking these numbers, and is a very good representation of the liveliness of the Pauper Standard metagame.
Next week the decisive battle between Infect and 4CC will take place: will the control deck be able to close the gap and take the performance crown once again or we'll finally have something that's not a control deck as the best performing list of the Season? /join mpdc next Monday, choose a side and contribute to the struggle. I'll be there as well.

And on this (sort of) bombshell, I'm out!
See you next week!
-- Dave

1 Comments

Wow, what a diverse metagame. by chokehold at Thu, 07/21/2011 - 09:33
chokehold's picture
5

Wow, what a diverse metagame. Contro,Aggro, Infect, burn.. only missing Combo to really make it perfect.
got to hand it to wizards. On Pauper level, things seems to be in order.. I applaud all the fantastic deckbuilders out there that make this a fantastic time to play Standard pauper!

Let's cross our fingers that V4 will have some love for standard pauper.