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It was the Season Four Pauper League Championship.
I was very excited to see what Mike Evans was playing (I would not be disappointed). Mike is the man behind decksandthecity.org, the central hub where New York players can see all things Pauper. From Mike's website I can both see that Elves is the most popular deck in League, and that it has a 19% win rate against my beloved Madness Burn.
Despite being the most popular deck, Elves also boasted an incredible 60% win rate last season... way the eff better than second-most-popular Rakdos Madness at 40%. I honestly think that decksandthecity is going to be the template for local gaming leagues everywhere. We already have an homage from the Premodern side, thanks to the inimitable SWB.
Anyway, I myself was playing a deck that I got from Mike, Dimir Grandmas. I wouldn't do nearly as well as Mike did that day. Hopefully via this article you'll be able to see why he went with the rogue deck that he did.
Mike played another all-new deck (or at least all-new to me)...
Monster-Tron | Pauper | Mike Evans
- Creatures (17)
- 2 Wretched Gryff
- 3 Boulderbranch Golem
- 4 Bramble Wurm
- 4 Generous Ent
- 4 Maelstrom Colossus
- Instants (5)
- 2 Crop Rotation
- 3 Breath Weapon
- Sorceries (4)
- 4 Ancient Stirrings
- Artifacts (15)
- 3 Chromatic Star
- 4 Candy Trail
- 4 Expedition Map
- 4 Pinnacle Kill-Ship
- Lands (18)
- 3 Forest
- 1 Bojuka Bog
- 2 Crystal Grotto
- 4 Urza's Mine
- 4 Urza's Power Plant
- 4 Urza's Tower
From one perspective, the deck is simple. You just have this absurd mana engine - Urza's Mine + Urza's Power Plant + Urza's Tower - and a handful of absurd threats that are too expensive for any other deck to be able to cast.
Surely Monster-Tron does have some structural issues. What happens if you don't get all three UrzaTron lands? Can you cast much of anything?
Mana Problems, and Not the Ones You'd Think
The deck is "mostly mana" in that charming way of Pauper decks. Because it only plays 18 "technical" lands, Monster-Tron can put itself into some forced mulligans. At the same time, Mike's Ancient Stirrings, Crop Rotations, and Expedition Maps don't have a lot of text beyond finding your missing UrzaTron piece. Flooding out is a real possibility (again, despite playing fewer pieces of cardboard that tap for mana than many or even most opponents).
Pauper is a format rich in card advantage, or at least card selection. The beauty of the Terror decks - both Mono-Blue detailed here and Dimir discussed here - is that their cards mostly cost one mana, so they can cast lots of them. Some of those cards, like the popular-to-ban-or-at-least-restrict Brainstorm can fix your draw. But come the middle turns, Lorien Revealed goes from "Island that enters the battlefield tapped" to "overcosted Ancestral Recall" on an impressive turn.
The fastest aggressive deck, Mono-Red, is arguably the best deck at fixing its hand... or at least digging for Fireblast with Guttersnipe in play. Everyone has Grab the Prize because it helps you to do so much damage, and Sneaky Snacker can turn even the humble Faithless Looting into a card advantage engine.
There are all manner of decks based around two-mana cantrip artifacts.
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Whether you're sacrificing a Nihil Spellbomb with an Eviscerator's Insight so that you can pay the extra 
or picking a Cryogen Relic back up with a Glint Hawk for more and more triggers, these decks will pass the turn with a full seven over and over on sheer tonnage.
But not Monster-Tron.
Monster-Tron has its cheap artifacts, too. But an Expedition Map exists to complete the UrzaTron specifically, not draw cards in the abstract.
Instead of itself having a ton of cards - even as it crashes over and over again into decks with so many cards themselves - Monster-Tron does so without a bulk card drawing engine.
Instead, Mike chose it as "a metagame call" that relied on a deep understanding of what his fellow top competitors would do... Or rather not do.
I mean, how many 7/7 creatures could one of them actually kill?
Too Big for the Most-Played Removal
Let's look at the typical Jund Wildfire deck. It plays what? Four Cast Down? Sure they can pull off a Toxin Analysis trick once or twice, but if they draw their whole deck, a Jund mage has four real ways to clear a fatty.
How about the Champ? The Jeskai Gates deck that won the Invitational can really only get rid of a 7/7 creature by pairing a Lightning Bolt with a fully loaded Galvanic Blast. One-for-two. Not just that: one-for-two every time. Monster-Tron has a different kind of power.
"How do you lose if they can't remove your stuff?"
-Mike Evans
For all its question marks that was the refrain Mike took all the way to the Top 4.
Which is not to say that Monster-Tron doesn't have its own incentives.
Maelstrom Colossus isn't just a 7/7... It might be two giant attackers.
Wretched Gryff might be "only" 3/4... But that's a heck of a lot bigger than your average Kor Skyfisher or Refurbished Familiar in the sky. More than that, Wretched Gryff is one of the few cards in Monster-Tron that actually draws a card on the way down, so it can keep your deck moving, given that you've just overpaid by 100% or so.
But what does overpaying even mean in the context of a deck with so much more mana than everyone else in the room? Sure they might two-spell you, but every spell in Monster-Tron out-classes basically every singular spell in basically every other deck. Pinnacle Kill-Ship can kill everything and everyone beyond the most bulgingly-fed Writhing Chrysalis players, and at some point will graduate to yet another 7/7.
Mike didn't himself play Weather the Storm in his sideboard (more on that later), but the deck can actually put up quite the resistance to Mono-Red.
Bramble Wurm, Generous Ent, Boulderbranch Golem, and even Candy Trail can all gain life, and in two of those four cases, more life than a Fireblast. For its part, a successful Bramble Wurm gains five, and an unsuccessful one gains ten life. Given Red's general inability (as a color) to remove 7/7 attackers, five, six, or ten life gained might be enough to take Monster-Tron over the finish line.
Aces Up Monster-Tron's Sleeve
Mike also built multiple exploits into his version of Monster-Tron, and two in particular are important to note.
The first one is Breath Weapon.
Elves has consistently been the most popular deck in League, and it eventually put two players into the Top 8. Mike's deck might not play even a single basic Mountain, but he can get 
from Crystal Grotto or Chromatic Star. That means he can punish an Elves player for committing small creatures to the battlefield.
The second card worth looking at is Reap and Sow.
Back when Standard big mana players were gearing up for Tooth and Nail or Darksteel Colossus, Reap and Sow was a popular way to get your last UrzaTron piece onto the battlefield. Which it can theoretically accomplish here. But subtly this card is also a terrible Stone Rain. A truly terrible Stone Rain that costs 33% more mana, and colored mana at that (when colored mana is at such a premium).
But any Stone Rain might be welcome against the Wall Spy deck that has only four basic lands (and only one of them is a basic Swamp). The threat of a Stone Rain might force Wall Spy to side in their fifth land, which at a minimum slows their combo down by a turn... Or they might not even have the second Swamp, meaning Reap and Sow might - in some narrow cases - even make it impossible for the opponent to win.
A card I'm going to play more copies of when I eventually try this deck is Kaervek's Torch.
Last weekend at a regular Saturday League event Mike was able to keep my podcast co-host Rich Bucey from the coveted 3-0 with a well-placed Torch. Rich was on beloved Dimir Terror... A deck that does actually have sufficient removal to contend with Monster-Tron's many large monsters. Rich was up a game and way, way ahead in the second when Mike asked if he had specifically Blue Elemental Blast or Hydroblast in hand.
Rich was puzzled as to why good old Counterspell wouldn't have been good enough.
And then he was introduced to this classic, some three decades long in its flaming tooth now.
"It's like a Fireball... But with Ward 2."
-Rich Bucey
The reason Counterspell wouldn't be good enough was that Rich didn't have enough open mana to Counterspell for four. He was probably even more puzzled as to why he'd have Blue Elemental Blast in his deck... Against Mike's ostensibly Mono-Green (but really mostly colorless) UrzaTron deck.
You can hear more about this exchange (but more importantly how Rich found himself at the 2-0 playing for the League belt) in this week's The Princes of Pauper.
Monster-Tron Making Waves
I had never seen Monster-Tron prior to Mike's great run at the Invitational, but it had already been making some waves in the wider world. Consider this version, played to a 5-0 in a Magic: Online League by GoatGamesFL.
Monster-Tron | Pauper | GoatGamesFL
- Creatures (13)
- 2 Ulamog's Crusher
- 3 Wretched Gryff
- 4 Boulderbranch Golem
- 4 Maelstrom Colossus
- Instants (4)
- 4 Scour from Existence
- Artifacts (25)
- 1 Campfire
- 4 Candy Trail
- 4 Expedition Map
- 4 Lembas
- 4 Pinnacle Kill-Ship
- 4 Relic of Progenitus
- 4 World Map
- Lands (18)
- 1 Forest
- 1 Mountain
- 1 Rumble Arena
- 3 Haunted Fengraf
- 4 Urza's Mine
- 4 Urza's Power Plant
- 4 Urza's Tower
- Sideboard (15)
- 4 Gut Shot
- 4 Weather the Storm
- 4 Breath Weapon
- 2 Faerie Macabre
- 1 Staunch Throneguard
There's actually a lot to heart emoji here. GoatGamesFL played both a Forest and a Mountain main deck, but was far less reliant on colored spells than Mike was, broadly speaking. In fact, you can cast every card in the main deck with only colorless mana. That's a huge deal given the number of purely colorless-producing lands in any UrzaTron deck. So, in order to get over the fact that they couldn't reliably cast an Ancient Stirrings, GoatGamesFL simply doubled the number of Maps in their deck.
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I am going to try both versions, in part because I love the mere concept of having Scour from Existence in my deck. Who ever thought that was going to be a viable Magic: The Gathering card? I don't even like playing Vindicate in Premodern, and Scour from Existence is more than twice the cost. Moreover, I have a set of alternate art Weather the Storms burning a hole in a long box, with no deck to go into... yet. Could this be the one?
Whether I'll have the 
up to Weather under pressure is another question entirely. But hey. One basic Forest am I right?
LOVE
MIKE
