khirareq's picture
By: khirareq, Jack Rose
Jun 20 2008 3:10pm
5
Login to post comments
1877 views


PDC stands for Pauper Deck Challenge, a format where only commons are allowed. This popular format hosts to several PRE’s each week with numerous subformats to choose from. To find a game of pauper in the MTGO client, go to the /join pdc room. To learn more about our beloved format, check out www.pdcmagic.com.
 
 
Format: Standard Constructed
Registration: Thursday June 12th 2008,  8:30pm EST
Structure: 3 Rounds of Swiss followed by Single Elimination Top 4

The third time was not the charm for SPDC worlds, as only five players from the invitation list showed up after having been twice bitten by cancelled events. Since you can’t run a magic World Championship with five people, this event was finally cancelled for good. This marks the first time in SPDC history that a season has concluded without crowning a champion. This disastrous precedent was followed shortly thereafter by an announcement that Icarodx was stepping down as host of the venerable event. A call for hosts went out to all paupers who participate in SPDC and love standard – a call that no one to date has answered. Will this be the end of SPDC?

 

 
Format: Classic Constructed
Registration Begins: Saturday June 7th, 2008, 10:30am EST
Structure: 4 Rounds of Swiss followed by Single Elimination Top 4

 The innovative spirit of the pauper players was on display at Saturday’s Classic PDC event. Spurred on by the loss of Classic Stalwarts like Orzhov Blink and Cogs ‘n Stripes from the meta as well as the introduction of Shadowmoor to the environment, Classic paupers brought a rash of new decks to the event, including such rogue gems as RW Squire and RG Big Mana. The quarterfinals featured the first known instance of fratricide in a PDC event, as LLHF’s Burn Range faced off against his own brother Feigenberg’s Dragonaughts. Meanwhile, the other quarterfinals match had a little family resemblance of its own, as Evu’s Deep Dog faced off against scarecrow007’s similar but more budget friendly Jellyfish Threshold deck. The budget deck took the match in an upset, and went on to defeat Feigenberg’s tiny faeries in the finals to earn him the trophy!
 
The threshold mechanic has been showing up a lot at the top tables of Classic pauper events in the last two weeks. Will TPDC continue the trend?
 
 
Name: UPDC 4.01
Format: Future Extended Constructed
Registration Begins: Sunday June 15th 2008, 2:00pm EST
Structure: 4 Rounds of Swiss followed by Single Elimination Top 8
Metagame Report

 Affinity continued to make a strong showing at UPDC, also continuing its trend of being unable to bring home the gold medal. The deck’s free silver beaters were outdone this week by the free green beaters in LostSymphoniesSpore Cry deck. Spore Cry was extremely successful in the middle part of UPDC Season 2, but fell out of favor as opposing decks starting packing more hate for the powerful but fragile archetype. LostSymphonies took advantage of paupers’ recent tuning of their sideboards towards the Affinity and Freed matchups to bring back his old favorite and earn his Everything in Common clan a trophy in the first Clan Cup event. 

The Clan Cup
 
The Clan Cup is a new feature of the PDC which began with the Shadowmoor season. Run by the mercurial x_Force_of_Will_x, the event strives to prove which of the PDC clans is the strongest. Each clan receives points for top 8 showings by their clanmates in PDC events. Worlds invites are especially critical, since the points during season finale events are doubled! The clan that accumulates the most points in each of the major PDC formats (Classic, Future Extended and Standard) at the end of the season wins. In addition prizes will be awarded to the player with the most overall points and the clan with the best overall record. The prizes for the event are excellent by PDC standards, but most clans are likely playing for pride. It’s sure to make for a tense season as each group of paupers strives to do their best for the common good of their clanmates!
 
Name: MPDC 3.01
Format: Standard Contructed
Registration Begins: Monday June 16th, 2008, 1:30pm EST
Structure: 3 Rounds Swiss followed by Single Elimination Top 8
 
Monday afternoon was Shadowmoor’s first event in Standard. Alas, very little from the set showed up. That’s pretty typical for early release week – the cards are still pricey, and they call the format pauper for a reason! The only top 8 deck we saw with a significant Shadowmoor presence was Hokusai’s Safehold GW, a deck that combines early beats with late game saproling advantage to grind out wins. What we mostly saw instead were old favorites from last season, such as Dark Evocation, White Weenie, and RDWZeroFusion used Me5794’s Use UR Illusion deck to win out the tournament 6-0 and take home his first trophy. The deck combines large evasive beaters with creature based card advantage and prodigious amounts of burn. Its ability to control aggressive creature strategies like White Weenie while presenting a quick clock against control decks like Dark Evocation served ZeroFusion well on Monday. 
 
 
 
Name: TPDC 8.11
Format: Classic Constructed
Registration Begins: Tuesday June 17th, 2008, 8:30pm EST
Structure: 3 Rounds of Swiss followed by Single Elimination Top 8
 
TPDC did not feature a bevy of threshold decks as one might have expected from their success in previous tournaments. Instead, Tuesday night’s event featured the Return of the Burn, with decks such as Mono-red Burn, URb Grapestorm, RB and UR aggro-burn taking up a quarter of the meta. It was an unfortunate evening for paupers to have left their Cloaks at home! One of these decks took newcomer rabblerouser all the way to the finals. His fiery deck was unable to cook x_Force_of_Will_x’s Blue Fish however, giving the Captain of the Clan Cup 10 much needed points for his Stonecutters.
 
With the sun finally set on the Morningtide season in all PDC events, paupers will be devoting themselves next week on the new possibilities in the darkness of Shadowmoor. BPDC returns Monday to open its Shadowmoor season, and with its small card pool of Lorwyn-Morningtide-Shadowmoor block, the set is sure to have an impact. Two other events which had been on extended hiatus, FPDC and XPDC, return next week as well. This will triple the number of Future Extended tournaments available to paupers! Meanwhile Standard tourneys may be cut in half, as the venerable SPDC will falter without a host. Will anyone step up to host SPDC? Join me again next week for the answer to this question and more!

2 Comments

Great article! by kaityson36 (Unregistered) 69.63.49.182 (not verified) at Tue, 07/01/2008 - 13:31
kaityson36 (Unregistered) 69.63.49.182's picture

Great article Jack!

by rabble (Unregistered) 24.129.85.56 (not verified) at Fri, 06/20/2008 - 21:12
rabble (Unregistered) 24.129.85.56's picture

thanks for the shout out! Getting that far is just going to make me try harder