CoolStuffInc.com

Ships Friday! Preorder Magic: The Gathering Marvel Super Heroes and get your cards first!
  
Account Meeple
Location IconLocations
Account MeepleLogin
0 Item
Advanced Search
   Sign In
Create Account
Main » Articles » A Look at Hawkeye's Bow Combos in Pauper

A Look at Hawkeye's Bow Combos in Pauper

Paige Smith
Posted on June 16, 2026
 Reddit

Last week, previews wrapped for the next Magic: The Gathering expansion, Marvel Super Heroes. While many players are eagerly excited to play with their favorite character from the Marvel franchise that is Marvel, Pauper fans have gravitated towards a single card.

Hawkeye's Bow

Hawkeye's Bow is a new Common that grants the equipped Creature Reach, and the option to tap it to ping an opponent of your choice. Best of all it's cheap both to cast and to equip, making it perfect for a format made entirely out of Common cards.

An Infinite Combo

What makes it far more interesting, though, is that players quickly identified an infinite combo with the Bow and another card.

Seeker of Skybreak

Seeker of Skybreak is a card first printed back in Tempest in 1997 and had only two other small printings in both 7th Edition and Mystery Booster 2. It's been a fan favorite over the years for its ability to untap a variety of permanents that you can use for more mana, blockers after an attack, or getting additional uses off your activated abilities.

In some spaces - particularly Commander - Seeker of Skybreak has become well known for its ability to not only untap other permanents but also itself. If you tap it to activate its ability targeting itself, it'll then untap and you can do this as many times as you'd like.

Typically, this would be little more than a durdle-fest. However, with certain cards you can make this grant you a tremendous amount of value.

Great examples of this have been comboing with the likes of Mesmeric Orb or Wake Thrasher, where continually untapping the Seeker will continually trigger abilities that you can take advantage of.

Seeker of Skybreak
Hawkeye's Bow

When you equip Hawkeye's Bow to Seeker of Skybreak, you'll deal a point of damage every time you tap the Seeker. Since you can tap and untap it an infinite number of times, you can defeat your opponent instantly, assuming they have no way to interact with your loop.

Exploring The Options

This has garnered a lot of attention from the greater Pauper community and has caught the eye of the Pauper Format Panel, of which I'm a member. As a result, there's been a bunch of discussion as to whether it should be banned. This combo is reminiscent of the Basking Broodscale + Sadistic Glee combo that was banned in 2025.

There are trade-offs, though. Seeker of Skybreak being a 2/1 means it's much easier to kill; it dies to cards like Lava Dart and Gut Shot. The Bow is also susceptible to Artifact hate, of which there's plenty in the 2026 meta. The question then becomes, will that be enough to keep it from being too dominant?

This is what the Pauper Format Panel are watching to see, with Gavin having already confirmed that there won't be a pre-ban of this combo. As such, part of my task as a PFP member is to try finding ways to see if the deck is truly broken and ways that decklists may look when Marvel Super Heroes drops.

Since a ban could happen one week after the set hits digital clients, I'm trying to take a very proactive approach to jump right into the trenches alongside everyone else. So, I'd like to share some of my early builds that I think could make a showing in the first days of the combo being available.

Each of these are unpolished, rough draft lists that likely won't be exactly what you'll see on MTGO day one. I'd love to see people take the ideas and push them further.

Turbow Combow

Let's start with a more extreme example for a decklist.

My very first thought when looking at this combo was to try coming up with a way to see if it could be performed as early as turn one. After all, this was a big reason why other things were banned in the past, such as several of the Initiative Creatures.

Very quickly I identified this opening hand:

Lotus Petal
Rite of Flame
Expedite

  • Untapped Forest or Mountain

  • Lotus Petal (or Simian Spirit Guide if land is a Forest)

  • Rite of Flame x2

  • Seeker of Skybreak

  • Hawkeye's Bow

  • Expedite

With this hand, you're able to cast a Rite of Flame generating rr. You then use one of those mana to cast the second Rite of Flame to end up with rrrr. You then use g from the Forest or Lotus Petal to cast the Seeker of Skybreak, leaving you with rrr.

Now, play and equip Hawkeye's Bow with two of your remaining mana and with the last one, cast Expedite targeting the Seeker. You can now combo off and win the game.

Now, let's be real here: you need the right set of seven cards to pull this off. The odds of that happening are going to be pretty low even if it is technically possible. Nevertheless, I wanted to try working with this concept to see what a Turbo Combo (or Turbow, if you will) deck might look like.

What I came up with was this:

Turbow Combow | Pauper | Paige Smith

Card Display

Buy This Deck Export text

For this list, I took inspiration from a lot of classic Storm decks. My first experience playing Pauper was with Grapeshot Storm back around 2011. As such, several of these cards are permanently etched into my brain.

Lotus Petal
Hickory Woodlot
Geothermal Crevice

Naturally, you have your Lotus Petals, Rite of Flames, and Simian Spirit Guides as means of making fast mana. You could go deeper with the likes of Desperate Ritual, Pyretic Ritual, and Seething Song but this seemed like a tighter way to build it.

Dark Ritual and Cabal Ritual are no-gos due to being off-color and Manamorphose doesn't really push you ahead on mana.

The other core element to this type of strategy are the Lands that you can use to tap for two mana. Cards like Hickory Woodlot and Sandstone Needle are great for spitting out your Seekers or Bows in quick succession.

You can also sacrifice your copies of Tinder Farm and Geothermal Crevice for another short burst of mana.

Bitter Reunion
Malevolent Rumble
First Day of Class

Rather than going all-in with Expedite, which is easily answered, I prefer to go with Bitter Reunion and First Day of Class. Each offers solid card filtration while also providing strong Haste options for your core combo.

Often, you won't find your combo until a long period through your game, which gives you plenty of time to set up. Additionally, Bitter Reunion can be found using your copies of Malevolent Rumble - a powerful card that lets you find both of your combo pieces.

First Day of Class has some interestingly unique play to it as it not only grants your Seeker of Skybreak Haste, but it also has it enter with a +1/+1 counter. That makes it just a little harder to kill as you prepare to set off the combo. Best of all, though, is that you can use the Learn ability to either filter through your deck or tutor for one of many sweet Lesson cards to bolster your game plan.

Call Damage Control

I do also want to highlight Call Damage Control as another great option for pulling back your key combo cards. This is great not only if they get removed, but if they end up being milled over.

This is the only copy I've included in these lists, but the card should easily be one of your prime sideboard selections as you work on figuring those out.

Ultimately, I don't necessarily think this deck is quite the way to go. It's a little too all-in and has a lot more pain points than what your average deck is going to offer. It's a fun way to build it that should be explored, but I'd bet it ends up on the lower performing of these decks.

Gruul Monsters

The next list will certainly look familiar to any active Pauper players.

Gruul Monsters is a deck that utilizes Arbor Elf alongside Utopia Sprawl and Wild Growth to ramp into massive threats. You might also know this as Gruul Ramp, Gruul Cascade, and Gruul Ponza, depending on the build.

Arbor Elf
Utopia Sprawl
Avenging Hunter

Typically, though, it involves getting something like a Writhing Chrysalis or Avenging Hunter on the battlefield fast.

Some builds use land destruction effects like Thermokarst and Mwonvuli Acid-Moss to help you get there. Others ramp all the way up to a big Cascade Creature such as Boarding Party and Annoyed Altisaur that can conveniently find a copy of the other beaters.

Here's an example of one of these lists:

Gruul Ponza | Pauper | Terminus0, 5th Place MTGO Pauper Challenge

Card Display

Buy This Deck Export text

Thanks to the Seeker of Skybreak and Hawkeye's Bow combo working great in these colors, it seemed like a great fit to a lot of people. Since you can ramp fast with Arbor Elf and the extra mana Auras, it's not impossible to put the entire combo onto the battlefield as early as turn 2 with the right set of cards.

Many of the lists I saw shared around felt somewhat unoptimized, like they just shoved in the combo and hoped to make it work somehow. Here's the build I landed on:

Gruul Combow Monsters | Pauper | Paige Smith

Card Display

Buy This Deck Export text

As you can probably tell, this deck slims down heavily on the aggressive threats.

Instead, it leans into a handful of ways to help set up your combo as well as protect it. Many of these you'll recognize from the first list, as cards like Bitter Reunion, Malevolent Rumble, Commune with Beavers, and Tamiyo's Safekeeping all make appearances.

Commune with Beavers
Tamiyo's Safekeeping
Jewel Thief

The additional minor differences are having this list lean into Jewel Thief instead of Eldrazi Repurposer. This helps to ensure your mana is good for when you manage to assemble your combo. It's especially solid since this list cuts Wild Growths.

After all, you're not ramping up to six or seven mana value spells, so this trimming on those is reasonable.

Additionally, most Gruul lists go all in on Generous Ent since they're more Green. Here, I've opted for a single Oliphaunt to better help you find your Red mana while still providing a big threat should you need it.

Ultimately, the goal here is to find a happy medium between the two strategies. It also has some great flexibility between removal, Pyroblast, and Snakeskin Veil or Vines of Vastwood out of the sideboard. It's a familiar archetype and a decent place to start if you're already playing the format.

Jund Combow

The next list is based on the old Basking Broodscale and Sadistic Glee combo deck.

Basking Broodscale
Sadistic Glee
Nadier's Nightblade

This deck worked by putting a Sadistic Glee onto Basking Broodscale and Adapting the Broodscale.

When that happens, you get a 0/1 Eldrazi Spawn token that you sacrifice. Doing so puts a +1/+1 counter on the Broodscale and you make another token. Rinse and repeat infinitely for infinite Colorless mana and an infinitely large Creature (or more with the help of other Sadistic Glees or copies of Writhing Chrysalis).

While you could just attack with a giant Broodscale and win the game, odds are good that it would be chump blocked repeatedly by your opponent. To get around this, you would use cards like Makeshift Munitions or Nadier's Nightblade to deal tons of damage. It wasn't required, but it definitely helped.

I spent a lot of time with the deck prior to its banning and even won the first Upstate New York Pauper Open with it. Here's how that list looked:

Jund Broodscale Combo | Pauper | Paige Smith, 1st Place Inaugural Upstate NY Pauper Open

Card Display

Buy This Deck Export text

You can also see how this deck took advantage of cards such as the now banned Deadly Dispute and Eviscerator's Insight to draw lots of cards.

Additionally, having access to this Black mana provided additional ways to defend your strategy by ripping problem cards out of your opponents' hand with Duress and - in some builds - Mesmeric Fiend.

While you don't necessarily need the Black mana the way you do with how Basking Broodscale required Sadistic Glee, it still provides great support. Here's the final list:

Jund Combow | Pauper | Paige Smith

Card Display

Buy This Deck Export text

With this combo build, I wanted to go in some similar directions as Broodscale Combo overall. However, there were some notable differences in my approach. Particularly, cards like Nadier's Nightblade are useless and need to be replaced.

Duress
Evolution Witness
Makeshift Munitions

Evolution Witness and Makeshift Munitions. They aren't quite as good without the combo potential.

For example, Evolution Witness could repeatedly buy back permanents with Sadistic Glee. They had some modest utility worth keeping, but I'd definitely consider them more of flex slots than anything.

Given the similarities between this new combo and Broodscale Glee, I'd expect a lot of people to land here pretty early. It's a solid strategy with a lot of play and will be easier to execute online than the tedium of clicking through Broodscale triggers like crazy over and over.

Temur Combow

The next list is another that was inspired somewhat by the old Jund Broodscale lists. Instead of Jund, though, I wondered if it might not be possible to craft a Temur - or Blue, Red, and Green - build instead.

Here's the list I came up with:

Temur Combow | Pauper | Paige Smith

Card Display

Buy This Deck Export text

The logic is simple. Since your core combo is only Red and Green, you're not quite so beholden to Black as you were before.

This means, probably, better card selection - even if it isn't necessarily better card draw - by using Blue instead. This lets you rely less on cards like Ichor Wellspring and allows you to also run cards like Counterspell and Dispel to protect your combo.

Counterspell
Cleansing Wildfire
Tanglepool Bridge

I also opted to try out a Cleansing Wildfire strategy here as well. This entails targeting your own Indestructible Bridges to search for a Basic Land and draw a card without destroying your own Land in the process.

Earlier builds of Broodscale Combo used it to ramp until they realized you could ramp just as well by sacrificing a Shambling Ghast to your Deadly Dispute variants.

Since you're not using Black with this list, I liked trying Wildfire once again. It also helps ensure that you hit your Islands so that you have the mana for Counterspell at the ready.

Writhing Chrysalis

The more I looked at this list, though, I felt like there was one glaring weakness. Writhing Chrysalis stands out as though it's just kind of hanging out in the list. The Jund list offers you ways to sacrifice your Eldrazi Spawn tokens for more value while also granting you a large threat. Instead, here it's just a big dumb idiot.

As a result, I opted to try this secondary list instead:

Temur Combow (No Chrysalis) | Pauper | Paige Smith

Card Display

Buy This Deck Export text

The change is rather simple. Swap out the existing Basic Lands for Snow-Covered Basics and then swap out copies of Writhing Chrysalis for Skred.

Snow-Covered Island
Skred

This allows you to act as a sort of Control deck, picking off threats while you set up for the turn where you can combo kill your opponent in one turn. It's a subtle shift but lets you go far more all-in on your combo without being extremely fragile.

This is where I'm most interested to see if the combo has legs: a fresh take that's built entirely around protecting your combo while stopping your opponent. I doubt this is an optimal list, but I'd love to see if someone can take a build similar to this and make it sing.

Combow Elves

The final deck I want to talk about is something that I saw garnering a lot of attention: what if you put the combo into Elves?

Priest of Titania
Nyxborn Hydra

The theory is easy to understand. Seeker of Skybreak is an Elf and various builds of the deck use Birchlore Rangers and Jaspera Sentinel to generate non-Green mana. Shouldn't be too difficult to slot in, right?

Well, not quite. Take a look at a recent list:

Mono-Green Elves | Pauper | KidRenan, 5-0 MTGO Pauper League

Card Display

Buy This Deck Export text

This deck cares about two things: ramping and then slamming a huge threat. It's a lot like Gruul Ramp in this way, but it really cards about you putting a wide spread of Creatures onto the battlefield at once.

Additionally, since you need such a huge number of Creatures for your core strategy, you have to rely way more on cards like Winding Way and Lead the Stampede.

Since you're playing those, it doesn't really give you a good opportunity to play cards like Malevolent Rumble or Commune with Beavers.

Because of this, the only way you can reliably play the combo is to draw it naturally. Elves can't do that super well in its current form and as a result, you'll often end up falling back on the Nyxborn Hydra victory plan anyways. At that point, why bother playing it at all?

There is one way to do it that I think could work, however, and it requires going a bit old school.

Combow Melody Elves | Pauper | Paige Smith

Card Display

Buy This Deck Export text

This version goes back to the more classic Elves strategy. It takes advantage of the aforementioned Birchlore Rangers and Jaspera Sentinel to not only play Hawkeye's Bow but also Distant Melody.

Birchlore Rangers
Distant Melody
Jaspera Sentinel

Unlike the Winding Way and Lead the Stampede builds that search up specific card types, Distant Melody lets you draw lots of cards outright. Because of this, it's much easier to draw into your core combo pieces and play them. Since you're drawing so deeply, I've opted to include a copy of Tuktuk Rubblefort in place of the usual Bitter Reunion or First Day of Class.

I do think it's worth noting that since you draw so much if you're going all-in on the combo, I don't believe that playing four copies of both Seeker of Skybreak and Hawkeye's Bow is correct.

Instead, I think the correct numbers are three of one and two of the other. Here, I tried three Seekers and two Bows since the Seeker has more general play when paired with cards like Priest of Titania and Timberwatch Elf.

I do think there is a solid argument for more copies of Hawkeye's Bow thanks to one simple card: Nettle Sentinel.

Nettle Sentinel

With a single Nettle Sentinel, you can equip it with multiple Bows after you've drawn tons of cards from your Distant Melodies.

With a full grip of spells, you can tap it for Birchlore Rangers' ability to generate mana, thus triggering the Bows. When you cast a one mana Elf spell, you'll then untap Nettle Sentinel and get to do it all over again.

This used to be a way to win when Distant Melody builds were popular, using Viridian Longbow instead of Hawkeye's Bow.

That card still has the advantage of being a good mirror breaker while also shutting down Faeries. It had the nasty tradeoff of not playing well with summoning sickness, which Hawkeye's Bow gets around.

As usual, the biggest problem with Distant Melody builds remains its susceptibility to board wipes. That makes it extremely fragile in an era of cards like Breath Weapon. However, if you can pull it off, it offers a variety of uses for your Hawkeye's Bows.

Land Grant

I'm a certified Land Grant hater when it comes to Elves and I always have been. If you play it in this deck, it tells your opponents exactly how to counter your game plan and shut you down. In other words, what Creatures to remove or what spells to hold countermagic for.

It comes and goes in popularity, but I think it's a pretty hard detriment to your plan. It might be seeing play now, but it isn't worth playing in your lists.

Conclusion

Ultimately, this is just a small sampling of decklists that you can expect to see as this brand new combo enters the Pauper format. Thanks to the simplicity and splashability, many players are trying it in a variety of archetypes.

I simply think that these will be some of the more interesting ones that will draw a lot of attention very early on. This is largely due to the historical pedigree of similar lists throughout the format's history or - in the case of the Temur build - the way it riffs off the concepts of those prior lists.

I'm eager to take these and put them to the test in the coming week ahead to see if indeed this combo is too strong or if we on the Pauper Format Panel want to let it ride. It's going to be a fascinating time.

If you're looking to jam, let me be the first to tell you: good luck, have fun, and enjoy the ride.

Paige Smith

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/themaverickgirl.bsky.social

Twitch: twitch.tv/themaverickgirl

YouTube: TheMaverickGal

Send us your cards, we'll do the rest. Ship It. No Fees. Fast Payment. Full Service Selling!

TAGS articles, combo, constructed, equipment, mtgo, mtg, pauper, common, magic: the gathering, artifact, analysis, paige smith, pauper format panel, june 2026, msh, haweye's bow, seeker of skybreak, marvel super heores

Recent Articles

View Archive
Sell your cards 25% credit bonus