A Comprehensive Guide to Pauper Playables: 2024 Update

Posted on December 11, 2024

Last year in mid-2023, I put out an update to my original Comprehensive Guide to Pauper Playables series from 2020. This series aimed at one simple goal: to provide Pauper players everywhere with a detailed list of cards that either have seen play or have strong potential to be played. This way anyone looking to see what is viable can do so with ease, thereby allowing them to acquire cards and build decks in a meaningful way.

When you look up a list of Pauper staples on websites like MTGGoldfish or Scryfall, it doesn't tell you the whole picture. Goldfish primarily looks up the cards currently being played the most, while ignoring cards that have a history of play or else ones that only rarely see play for specific metagames. Scryfall is worse at this, as searching Pauper there doesn't curate anything at all, instead showing you the entire card pool up to and including a deluge of worthless vanilla creatures. And don't even get me started on Gatherer, which shows several Arena-only downshifts as legal, despite the fact that these are very much not legal.

If you'd like to read the previous iterations of this series, you can find the articles here:

2020 Part 1: White and Blue

2020 Part 2: Black and Red

2020 Part 3: Green and Multicolored

2020 Part 4: Colorless, Lands, and a small list of cards not on Magic Online at time of writing

2020 Part 5: Complete Text List

2023 Update

With this update, I hope to cover roughly the last year and a half of Magic releases. The 2023 update included sets up to Commander Masters and we've now seen several releases since. Additionally, some cards from the past have shown up in ways they might not have previously. The most notable example of this is, naturally, Sadistic Glee, which has become a key piece of one of the format's top decks: Broodscale/Glee Combo.

This article is also meant to be a companion piece and expansion to the previous articles, so the images section won't feature the full list or else it would be gigantic in scope and scale. For those who want a complete list, though, there will be a full text list following the images that can be used to easily copy elsewhere. This way you can put the list into spaces like Moxfield, Magic Online, a spreadsheet to further curate to your own needs, and so on. This allows the originals to still be relevant to read through while letting this one stand on its own.

With that out of the way, here's the criteria by which I'm pulling cards for this list. If this looks similar, it's because it's largely pulled from the same methods as the update last year:

Cards will be added that were previously missed and later brought to my attention. With a massive card pool, it's difficult to cross-check inclusions, so things get missed. It helps with these updates if you inform me of missing cards, so please let me know on social media at the bottom of this article.

Any release since Wilds of Eldraine that added new cards to Pauper will be pulled from.

The most recent sets as of the writing of this article (Duskmourn: House of Horror and Foundations) may not be fully represented because it's possible some cards may have yet to make an impact at this time. Some may not be as impactful as initially predicted.

A cursory overview of all top decks on MTGGoldfish was conducted to find cards not previously on this list. This is why older cards will also be included.

Last but not least, please remember that this is attempting to cover Constructed Eternal Pauper and I am ignoring spaces like Pauper Commander, Pauper Cube, and Arena Pauper for the sake of this list, though many of the cards here will work well there as well.

Additionally, the reasons for why the cards chosen are included follow the following criteria as laid out in previous articles. This helps to determine the most relevant options for players looking to easily parse through a list for playables to mess around with.

White

Blue

Black

Red

Green

Gold

Colorless/Artifact

Lands

Double-Faced Cards

Full Text List

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