Examining Post-B&R Update Prophetic Prism Pauper Lists

Posted on April 16, 2025

It's been a little over two weeks now since the most recent Magic: The Gathering banned and restricted update tremendously shook up the Pauper format. New decks are popping up for the first time, old favorites are making a comeback, and some thought dead with the changes continue to thrive. As a member of the Pauper Format Panel, it's been a blast to look through and keep up with!

Last week I took some time to take a look at the all new High Tide lists that have come about as a result of that card's trial unbanning. It was an exciting card that people were eager to play with and see if they could break it. Naturally, people wanted to hear exactly what that was getting up to, and I even got to present examples of how the Pauper Format Panel came to the decision to unban it. Now that we've gotten that one out of the way, I wanted to spend a day talking about the other card that was unbanned on a trial basis: Prophetic Prism.

Okay, so first and foremost: Prophetic Prism? Really?

Why exactly was this card on the ban list in the first place? To most Magic players, Prophetic Prism looks rather innocuous. In fact, it's frequently seen as a filler card at worst or a sketchy mana fixer at best in a variety of Limited formats. However, context is everything and at the time, it was sort of problematic when it came to Pauper.

The big elephant in the room at the time was Affinity, which led to the banning of Atog in early 2022. However, there was another threat looming close by: Flicker Tron. This deck had long been the boogieman of the format for some time, often taking long turns and proving difficult to counteract. Being an already top deck, there was a desire to bring it down to earth a bit in power.

Numerous methods were looked at here. Do you kill the deck's flicker loops with Ephemerate and Ghostly Flicker? If you do, you probably also need to deal with the similar Displace spell as well. What about the fog effects? Well there's a lot of redundancy there and while removing something like Moment's Peace and Stonehorn Dignitary hurts the deck, but there's enough ways to replace Fog effects it doesn't hurt much. Some decks even stopped running some of those in the first place at the time!

This goes on and on with other cards as well, like Mystical Teachings and Pulse of Murasa. There's even a realistic argument to just hitting the Tron lands outright. The problem, however, was that short of the nuclear option of hitting the lands, the deck simply has far too much redundancy or alternative options that there wasn't really a clean ban to be made. Because of this, we looked at the mana instead.

Tron decks historically rely heavily on colorless spells thanks to the fact that the core of the mana base is colorless. If you look at Modern Tron lists, for example, they're often either fully Colorless, use Green mana for a handful of spells, or on rare occasions go Red-Green for that extra oomph. Pauper lacks the density of these low color threats to utilize, and instead players have utilized mana fixing lands and artifacts to enable the deck to do different things.

This is where Prophetic Prism comes in - as well as Bonder's Ornament. Both cards fixed the deck's mana so well that the deck was able to function to the extremes it was pushing. Couple this with the fact that both also happened to provide excellent draw engines (when paired with Ghostly Flicker in Prism's case) and you had a real problem. Bonder's Ornament was seen as a bridge too far and pushed decks like Jeskai Ephemerate into the stratosphere. The logic with banning Prism as well was that it would really bring Tron's mana access down, and it would also have solid splash damage to Affinity in the process.

Eventually, Tron would see a minor comeback thanks to the printings of Network Terminal in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and Energy Refractor in The Brothers' War. While Energy Refractor was indeed very good, it wasn't quite on the level of Prophetic Prism, and so Tron stayed as a mostly mid-level deck in the form of Flicker Tron. Combo Tron builds like Altar Tron thrived a bit more though. With the format speeding up so much, the slower control-oriented Flicker Tron lists just couldn't keep up.

As such, the idea with unbanning Prophetic Prism was that given how the format had sped up a fair amount, maybe giving Tron a little more juice would be worth trying. If it's super dominant, Prophetic Prism can be banned once again. The hope is that aggressive decks like Burn can outpace it and the prevalence of decks like Ponza and builds taking advantage of Cleansing Wildfire could fight against it.

That brings us to now. It's been two weeks since Prophetic Prism was unbanned, so how has it been faring? Just what decks has it been showing up in?

Flicker Tron | Pauper | Kampo, 2nd Place MTGO Pauper Challenge

Creatures (7)
3 Mnemonic Wall
4 Mulldrifter

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To the surprise of no one, Flicker Tron is back with a vengeance! The deck has been putting up some pretty solid results and is easily the Prophetic Prism deck with the most tournament finishes and 5-0s so far. Kampo's list above is an excellent example of this, as they've been putting up plenty of results on their own. Not only did they finish second in this Pauper Challenge, but they also came in first in a smaller Pauper Throwdown event around the same time.

I've already sort of explained how this deck functions, but basically your goal is to set up a controlling board state using Moment's Peace, counter magic, and board wipes. You can also utilize the powerful combination of Mulldrifter and Ephemerate to draw a truckload of cards and get ahead. From there, you loop Ghostly Flicker and Mnemonic Wall in order to continuously draw cards or even loop spells if you have two Walls to cast Ghostly Flicker on. Eventually you either win by attacking with your Mulldrifters or going to the face with Rolling Thunder.

Despite this, lists can vary quite a fair amount with these Flicker Tron decks. Here's another example from the same tournament as Kampo's list that came in third place:

Flicker Tron | Pauper | RClint21, 3rd Place MTGO Pauper Challenge

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If you took one look at this list and think it looks pretty comparable to Kampo's, you'd be right! A lot of the same core gameplay elements are here. A few spell slots have changed a bit, but the real shift is in the win conditions.

Kampo's list utilizes Rolling Thunder to push through big damage in order to close out the game. However, some builds take a different approach. RClint21's list doesn't rely on winning through damage as its only method of victory. Compulsive Research is a spell that you can buy back over and over once you've set up a lock to forcibly mill out your opponent before you run out of cards. If you're worried about them casting their cards they draw, don't worry. To mitigate this, you can do the flicker loops with Dinrova Horror and rip apart your opponent's battlefield as well as their hands - stopping them from taking further game actions.

There are other methods by which this deck can win, but often these are some of the more common ways that it achieves victory. It should also be noted that this same event featured one more Flicker Tron list in its Top 8 as well, with that third deck using Murmuring Mystic as its primary win condition. Is this concerning? A little bit, however it's only one event in a new and still settling meta. We'll have to see how things continue to evolve in the coming weeks!

We are also seeing Prophetic Prism showing up in Altar Tron lists utilizing Pactdoll Terror, but these lists are showing up far less frequently. Here's the only list has shown up in a non-league event since the B&R update from a smaller Pauper Throwdown rather than a larger Challenge event:

Altar Tron | Pauper | Crazy Morango, 6th Place MTGO Pauper Throwdown

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This deck wins by sacrificing Myr Retriever to Ashnod's Altar, allowing you to return a second Myr Retriever to your hand and play it. You can then loop them, and even generate infinite mana if you have a Foundry Inspector in play. The real trick is to establish this loop while having a copy of Pactdoll Terror in play to deal infinite damage to your opponent and win the game. While the deck gained Prophetic Prism, it did lose Deadly Dispute at the same time, causing the deck to fall back more on the alternate option of cards like Eviscerator's Insight instead.

It'll be interesting to see if this version of Altar Tron adjusts and performs better as the meta settles. For now, though, it looks just fine among a sea of other contenders with little more than the single Throwdown result as well as a handful of league 5-0s to date.

So now let's move onto another of the obvious winners from this change: Affinity! Most people expected this one to be a bit of a no-brainer. After all, it's a great way to fix the deck's mana in a deck that's famous for wanting the fixing. In reality, though, the results may surprise you!

Grixis Affinity | Pauper | LuffyDoChapeuDePalha, 1st Place MTGO Pauper Challenge

Sorceries (4)
4 Thoughtcast

Enchantments (1)
1 Makeshift Munitions

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That's right, this list won a Pauper Challenge in the first weekend following the B&R update and it only ran a single copy of Prophetic Prism! Going through most of the lists that have been published over the last week or so, the common trend is that the card is showing up as either a one-of or else is not showing up at all. Out of 17 lists published from April 8th through today, only two featured higher numbers. One had two copies and the other had three.

Instead, Affinity is relying on its same classic package to get the job done, and it's doing a fairly solid job of it. However, the loss of Deadly Dispute was still a real blow to the archetype, and while there were no shortage of options to replace it, it's become a lot more modest in its showings since the B&R update. It'll be interesting to see if it returns to being one of the top things you can do in the format or if it evolves further thanks to the unbanning of Prophetic Prism. Heck it's already showing innovation still with the recent addition of Hunter's Blowgun to the deck.

Last but not least, I want to touch on another deck that's been popping up a little more that felt like a no-brainer for Prophetic Prism to show up in once more: Mardu Synthesizer.

Mardu Synthesizer | Pauper | SoterX, 5-0 MTGO Pauper League

Sorceries (3)
3 Duress

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This classic Pauper archetype probably caught the most splash damage when Prophetic Prism was banned. The deck was a top performer in the olden days, but wasn't quite the top dog at the time of the ban. Still, it utilized Prophetic Prism to both help fix its mana as well as provide a cool way to bounce and get value out of with Glint Hawk and Kor Skyfisher. The thought at the time was that the ban wouldn't hinder the deck too much thanks to the plethora of other options at the time like Golden Egg, for example.

The deck hasn't put up any serious results yet, but it has made a modest showing with a number of 5-0s in Magic Online Pauper Leagues. A big recent benefit to this deck is the addition of Refurbished Familiar, which - love it or hate it - provides the deck with that much more reason to land firmly in Mardu colors.

Select other decks have also utilized Prophetic Prism, but they're far less noteworthy than the lists presented here today. It's been interesting to see what the reintroduction of the card has done to the format. While Flicker Tron has certainly put up some strong early results, it remains to be seen if it can keep up this momentum with a little bit of time. There's still over two months left until the ban is revisited for the June 30th B&R update after all and a lot can happen in that amount of time.

I hope this article has helped contextualize both why it was banned in the first place a little better as well as understand why we figured it was worth trying once again! The card is surprisingly dangerous, as the performance of Flicker Tron is proving, which caused the Pauper Format Panel to be hesitant on freeing the card in the past. However, we felt it was worth trying so even if it doesn't end up sticking around in the long term, players can enjoy the gameplay it provides in the moment. Get out there and try some of these cool new builds at your next Pauper event!

Paige Smith

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