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Main » Articles » The Decks to Beat at MagicCon's Pauper Cup Event

The Decks to Beat at MagicCon's Pauper Cup Event

Paige Smith
Posted on February 14, 2024
 Reddit

MagicCon Chicago is right around the corner with the convention kicking off next Friday, February 22nd! While there's going to be absolutely no shortage of awesome things to do over the course of the weekend, there was one event in particular that stood out to me: the Pauper Cup event happening on Saturday! This is going to be quite an event to attend if you're a Pauper player, and I already know several people going just for this tournament. Not only can you get plenty of prizes for your efforts, but you can also play for your chance at a trophy for coming in 1st place!

All That Glitters
Kuldotha Rebirth
Tolarian Terror

There's going to be a whole bunch of people vying for that top prize, so today I want to help give you a bit of a run down for decks you can expect to face at the event! These decks are the ones that sit more firmly at the top of the metagame these days and will be the ones you should expect to have to beat to get all the way to the top. I'll follow the article up next week with a bunch of other decks you might run into as well.

I'd also like to note that with this article, I'm covering a ton of ground. As such, I'm only giving very brief overviews of how each deck plays and what to expect when you run into it. That way you can figure out how to approach it in-game. I still plan on doing deeper individual archetype discussions as I mentioned in my previous article on Bogles, but here, I'm leaning on a bit of simplicity to be able to hit a wider swath of lists. With that, there's a whole lot to check out so let's get right to it!

Kuldotha Red

Kuldotha Red | Pauper | Magic4ever_MTGO, 1st Place MTGO Pauper Challenge

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Burn has always been a pretty sturdy mainstay when it comes to Pauper. The classic version of the archetype - which I wrote about a few years back - was pretty close to Legacy Burn in that it was largely a lot of cheap bolt spells with a few creatures to help push through additional damage. This made it very easy to understand and play, gave players a bit of that "Legacy-lite" gameplay they'd been told about, and best of all it was fairly cheap. Count to 20, win some games, easy peasy. Those days are gone, however, and Burn has gotten quite a facelift.

Over the last few years, Mono-Red decks in Pauper saw quite a bit of innovation. This started around Crimson Vow when we got both Voldaren Epicure and Reckless Impulse. Epicure provided easy damage as well as a way to filter your draws to find more meaty plays, while Reckless Impulse provided outright card advantage. Further innovation came with Experimental Synthesizer, which provided more card advantage opportunities. Eventually, players realized you could use it with other cheap artifact cards to fuel Kuldotha Rebirth, go wide quickly, and drop a Goblin Bushwhacker. And of course, Monastery Swiftspear was good for a bit too before getting banned.

In short, this deck is trying to drop as many creatures as possible, bolt your face a bunch, and kill you with a kicked Goblin Bushwhacker. Some optimal solutions to dealing with it are copies of Blue Elemental Blast and Hydroblast, life gain cards, and board wipes to pick off all the small creatures before they can go off with Bushwhacker. It's blisteringly fast, but with a bit of preparation, can be dealt with handily.

Golgari Gardens

Golgari Gardens | Pauper | BoostersPacks13, 4th Place MTGO Pauper Challenge

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Next up is Golgari Gardens, one of the more innovative lists to come about in the last few years. If memory serves - and I could be wrong on this - the deck basically started from a variation on Mono-Black Control that splashed Green to take advantage of Avenging Hunter. The summation of how the deck looks now still rings true, but you're not going to find copies of Phyrexian Rager, Chittering Rats, or Gray Merchant of Asphodel here!

The game plan is pretty straightforward. As I noted above, it's very much like a Control deck in many respects. You utilize lots of removal spells to keep your opponents at bay while you utilize card advantage engines like Deadly Dispute and Fanatical Offering to draw through cards - effects that can draw you as much as three cards if you sacrifice an Ichor Wellspring. Eventually, you set yourself up to the point where you can play a Thorn of the Black Rose or Avenging Hunter to gain incremental value or else play a Troll of Khazad-dum to close out games quickly. Resource management becomes key when facing this matchup, because you lose if you run out of resources before your opponent does as they'll totally run away with the game and shut you out. Play around the removal best you can, utilize countermagic well (if applicable), and go for as much card advantage as you can muster!

Azorius Affinity

Azorius Affinity | Pauper | LasVegasChaos, 6th Place MTGO Pauper Challenge

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Affinity has been a part of the format for over a decade, and for a while it would come and go thanks to artifact hate being able to deal with artifact lands. Since Modern Horizons 2, however, the addition of a full ten indestructible bridges has paved the way for Affinity to be an absolute mainstay. This spawned tons of builds, which shifted quite a bit with the couple rounds of bans the deck went through, though it eventually settled largely on a Grixis variation - more on that in a moment - until Commander Masters released last summer. With that set came the downshift of All That Glitters, and with it came a whole new setup of Affinity builds.

Players quickly settled into playing this Azorius Affinity build. The list features lots of super cheap and low to the ground creatures that you can spit out fast so as to get a powerful All That Glitters online fast. It's not unusual to see games where opponents are able to have an 8/8 Gingerbrute attacking on turn two with the right setup! You back this up with a decent amount of card draw and a handful of counterspells in the form of Metallic Rebuke to focus on pushing that damage through fast. Even if the All That Glitters package fails a bit, a big 4/4 Myr Enforcer or two will pick up the slack easily.

While Azorius Affinity still shows up a fair amount, the deck that actually ended up taking the top spot among Affinity lists would be this next one:

Jeskai Affinity

Jeskai Affinity | Pauper | Videgain, 5th Place MTGO Pauper Challenge

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In some ways, Azorius Affinity walked so Jeskai Affinity could run. Players took a lot of what made Azorius work so well with All That Glitters and reworked it to utilize cards like Galvanic Blast to help push damage. In place of Of One Mind and Moon-Circuit Hacker, Experimental Synthesizer would be used alongside Kor Skyfisher and Glint Hawk for card advantage. At some point the deck was further reworked, with Kor Skyfisher showing up less and the deck began using Reckless Impulse and Wrenn's Resolve instead.

In some ways the core concept behind the two decks is similar: get a ton of artifacts on the board quickly, suit something up with All That Glitters, and go in for the kill with speedy efficiency. The difference is how they end up playing. The Azorius variant is more meant to play out fast, but can struggle if the game goes long and the deck can't get its footing. Jeskai performs a little slower - in part thanks to its greater emphasis on lands entering tapped - but can play a much longer game while still performing quickly in the early game. This dynamic has pushed Jeskai to be the much more preferred option, but both unique variants of so-called Glitters Affinity are contenders in the meta right now.

Still, there is yet another Affinity list to look at.

Grixis Affinity

Grixis Affinity | Pauper | ziofrancone, 11th Place, MTGO Pauper Challenge

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See? I told you we'd get to Grixis Affinity soon enough! Grixis Affinity is the variant that's been around the longest now, stemming from the period where the archetype settled following the release of Modern Horizons 2. Back then it was a lot more combo-aggro oriented, focusing on powerful kills with Atog and then Disciple of the Vault after Atog was banned. When Disciple too was banned, the deck settled between a more midrange and control build, shifting depending on the timeframe and pilot.

This deck relies on grinding out opponents with your advantage. If you can make it work well enough, it's not hard to get down Myr Enforcers quickly. If you get them out cheaply enough, you can even have cards to back it up after being cast like with Metallic Rebuke and Counterspell or else use removal to clear opposing creatures and make sure you can push damage through. Even if your creatures die, Blood Fountain can just help you get them back. Deadly Dispute and Thoughtcast are your main card advantage engines, with Deadly Dispute being particularly potent thanks to the Treasure token it leaves behind. Oh yeah, and make sure you watch out for those Kenku Artificers animating a bridge. You'll have a really hard time dealing with those if that happens!

To deal with all of these Affinity variants effectively, pack good removal and artifact hate. All That Glitters is one hell of a card, but you can deal with it if you land a removal spell at the appropriate time. Additionally, while the decks are packing a lot more indestructible lands, they can still be exiled to take your opponents off their game. What's more, there's still plenty of the original Mirrodin lands you can deal with no problem.

Dimir Terror

Dimir Terror | Pauper | O_danielakos, 1st Place MTGO Pauper Challenge

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Dimir Terror - aka Dimir Control - takes advantage of the power of Dominaria United common Tolarian Terror. This card can easily come down as a one-mana 5/5 with ward, making it hard to take down but easy for its controller to hold backup like countermagic and removal. The deck manages to get it on the board as quickly as it does thanks to cantrips like Mental Note and Thought Scour, which not only cycle through your deck but also fill your graveyard up with spells quickly to fuel your Tolarian Terrors. The deck plays quite similarly to the old Dimir Angler Delver lists that used to show up years ago and can be one hell of a threat to try fighting back against.

There's also additional variants, like this Mono-Blue Terror list.

Mono-Blue Terror

Mono-Blue Terror | Pauper | keme, 21st Place MTGO Pauper Challenge

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This one shaves the Black removal to go for a more streamlined Mono-Blue package and utilizes more countermagic instead. It also adds to other cards into the mix: the recently downshifted Cryptic Serpent in place of Gurmag Angler, and Delver of Secrets to help get early damage in.

Both Dimir and Mono-Blue are typically the main variants of this archetype and the more prevalent one changes depending on how the meta is looking. There's also occasionally an Izzet variant that pops up too, utilizing burn spells as the removal of choice, but it's a bit more infrequent than these two. Your best solution against both decks is to try going under them and also make liberal use of graveyard hate. Relic of Progenitus is especially great at chipping away at graveyard counts over multiple turns and even gives you an emergency button if need be.

Dimir Faeries

Dimir Faeries | Pauper | Beicodegeia, 2nd Place MTGO Pauper Challenge

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Faeries has been a key element of Pauper for as long as the format has been around. If you've been out of the format for a while, you might recognize it as a Delver variant, and it's because that's more or less what this deck is. At some point, Delver players realized the deck functioned quite well on its own without the copies of Delver of Secrets and focused on the utility of the faeries package instead.

For those unaware of how it functions, it's essentially a tempo-control deck. It does this by slowly countering opponents' plays with the help of Spellstutter Sprite and then bouncing it back to replay it with the help of Ninja of the Deep Hours, Moon-Circuit Hacker, and Snap, thus providing you a repeatable counter engine. You back it up with lots of cantrips, library manipulation, and some additional countermagic and removal like Snuff Out and good old Counterspell. When it comes to fighting against this deck, your best bet is to try to get under it as quickly as you can, otherwise you'll be playing a resource war to see who eventually comes out on top.

Altar Tron

Altar Tron | Pauper | Jormund, MTGO Pauper League 5-0

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Longtime Pauper players may recall just how much of a nuisance Flicker Tron - aka Fog Tron - was in the meta for a long time. Thanks to the banning of Prophetic Prism and Bonder's Ornament, the deck slowed down dramatically, even though it soon after got buffers from both Network Terminal and Energy Refractor. As the format picked up speed, though, Flicker Tron was unable to keep up. While it still shows up from time to time, it's far from the dominating force it once was. Instead, what you'll need to watch out for is one of the newer innovations in Tron brews: Altar Tron.

In truth, Altar Tron has been around for a little bit now. Unfortunately, it doesn't put up a lot of numbers on Magic Online, largely owing to the number of clicks involved in playing it. If you're familiar with how the Krark-Clan Ironworks combo deck worked in Modern, it's a little bit comparable to that, which was also somewhat difficult to pilot on MTGO effectively. Despite this, the deck is actually quite strong, and often makes some pretty big showings in paper events like the Paupergeddon tournaments in Italy, meaning it's likely to show up in Chicago as well.

There's a lot going on with the deck, so it can be difficult to get into the nuances of the list. In short, you're utilizing a lot of cheap card draw effects to set up a combo involving two Myr Retrievers, Ashnod's Altar, and Golem Foundry. By sacrificing a Retriever to the Altar, you can get back another Retriever from your graveyard that you can cast using the mana you got for sacrificing the first one. You can loop them repeatedly, and each time one enters the battlefield, it puts another counter on Golem Foundry, eventually allowing you to have access to an unlimited supply of creatures. This list doesn't run Makeshift Munitions, but many lists do, which allows the player to then sacrifice tokens for mana and then use that mana to sacrifice more tokens to the Munitions and ping down opponents' faces. Bringing in some graveyard hate to shut down this combo before it can take off is truly key to beating this deck, so make sure you're packing some of it!

Caw-Gates

Caw-Gates | Pauper | yesicabyalexisf, 16th Place, MTGO Pauper Challenge

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Caw-Gates is a fairly original deck to Pauper, taking some old concepts (Squadron Hawk with Brainstorm, for example) and melding it with something new. In this case, it's using Basilisk Gate from Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate to supercharge your creatures for big attacks. Only Legacy and Vintage can use Basilisk Gate and neither wants to rely on gates when they could instead be using fetch lands and ABUR duals, so this becomes something wholly unique to Pauper as a result. You'll be surprised at just how big you can make a Sacred Cat or Squadron Hawk off the back of a single Basilisk Gate and totally take over games!

Beyond that core element of the deck, it also has plenty of various card draw effects as well as countermagic and removal to stop opponents. To help battle against aggressive decks, the list plays multiple copies of Prismatic Strands - a big boon against Kuldotha Red in particular - and it uses Dawnbringer Cleric's modality to fight back on multiple angles. Set up plays quick and hit hard before they can fully set up, or you'll be dealing with some serious beatdowns in no time flat!

Familiars

Azorius Familiars | Pauper | ziofrancone, 3rd Place MTGO Pauper Challenge

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Last but not least, I wanted to highlight another Pauper classic: Familiars. This deck focuses around blinking creatures for massive value swings while locking opponents out from being able to play the game. I covered the archetype in greater detail a few years back, and while the list may have changed around in some respects, much of the core gameplay is the same as it was back then so if you'd like a quick rundown I'd recommend checking that out.

The newest innovations to this list are primarily the additions of Meeting of Minds and Lorien Revealed. Meeting of Minds provides an excellent additional form of card advantage since so many of your creatures just sit on the battlefield not attacking, you can convoke to get a really low-cost - if not free - draw two at instant speed. Lorien Revealed has shown up a lot, but it helps make sure you can get your mana that you need to keep going and if you no longer need the lands, you can instead use it to draw more cards. Additionally, many lists have also taken to running one or two copies of Murmuring Mystic, another recent downshift, as even just with a single copy, you can take over games fast with tokens thanks to all the spells you're casting.

As of the time of the last Pauper format update from Gavin Verhey on behalf of the Pauper Format Panel, the deck was noted as having a 56% winrate! That's pretty astounding, and as the deck is another one of those archetypes that is harder to play on MTGO than in paper, you can probably expect to run into a reasonable amount of this at the event too. Beat it by going fast and getting under them before they can get going, otherwise you're going to really struggle to get back into the game afterwards.

That about wraps up this quick rundown of the best that Pauper has to offer! Are you going to be running one of these or are you planning on trying your hand at something else instead? I'll be covering some more decks next week as well, albeit some lesser utilized or else less potent ones, so be sure to check back then for more Pauper goodness!

If you're going to MagicCon Chicago next week, I will be attending as a creator, so feel free to say hi if you see me! I won't be participating in the Pauper Cup event unfortunately, but I will definitely be hanging around it and checking out the event when I have time. If you're not playing the Pauper Cup but are still interested in what Pauper has to offer, I will be running a community panel at MagicCon Chicago alongside fellow Pauper Format Panel members Gavin Verhey and Emma Partlow. We'll be talking about Pauper archetypes, why you should check the format out, and perhaps even a little Q&A at the end! The panel will be taking place on Saturday at 2:30 PM, so come by and check it out!

Paige Smith

Twitter: @TheMaverickGal

Twitch: twitch.tv/themaverickgirl

YouTube: TheMaverickGal

TAGS articles, metagame, constructed, analysis, decklist, pauper, paige smith, 02142024, format overview

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