Playing Pauper: Green-Red Madness

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Hello fans of Playing Pauper, and welcome back to another great week! This time around we're piloting Green-Red Madness. This deck makes use of discarding cards for value and casting spells for cheap in order to overwhelm the opponent with aggressive creatures and efficient removal.

Check out the matches, then read the discussion below. If you enjoy Playing Pauper, subscribe to the MTGGoldfish YouTube channel! It helps us draw more people to the channel, and it helps you to never miss any of our great video content.

Green-Red Madness Intro

Green-Red Madness vs Mono Blue Delver

Green-Red Madness vs Elves

Green-Red Madness vs Mono Blue Delver

Green-Red Madness vs Mono Blue Delver

Green-Red Madness vs Burn

The Deck

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Basking Rootwalla starts the curve off at zero and is great discard fodder when you don't have extra mana available for paying for a Madness spell. Insolent Neonate and Wild Mongrel provide free discard outlets that come on an efficient body.

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Bloodmad Vampire and Arrogant Wurm are our big Madness creatures, while Hooting Mandrills earns a spot due to how easy it is to fill up our graveyard early.

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Our Red burn-based removal is hyper-efficient and Fiery Temper and Lightning Bolt can also go to the dome to finish off the last few points of damage when necessary.

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Two copies apiece of Faithless Looting and Tormenting Voice serve to help us find discard outlets and Madness spells, while simultaneously being discard outlets themselves.

The Sideboard

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Electrickery comes in against Mono Blue Delver and Elves, while also sometimes working as removal against Bogles.

The extra Lightning Axe is good against decks like Temur/Murasa Tron and Affinity that pack lots of big creatures.

Pyroblast helps us beat counterspell decks and counters Mulldrifter, which is the most powerful Pauper creature ever printed.

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Vines of Vastwood is super-secret tech against removal based decks like Mono Black Control and Kuldotha Jeskai.

Feed the Clan is our anti-burn card of choice since it isn't too hard to get the Ferocious trigger.

Gleeful Sabotage is our Naturalize effect and works wonders against Affinity while also being applicable in other matchups. Gorilla Shaman is another good option.

The Matchups

Despite our performance in the league, Green-Red Madness felt like it had a lot of weaknesses. We can easily run out of threats when facing Mono Black or Kuldotha Jeskai, which we dodged in the league. Our Bloodmad Vampires can be blocked by anything, and our clock isn't quite fast enough to prevent dying to a Fling from Affinity or a Rolling Thunder from Tron.

The best matchups are Stompy, Mono Blue Delver, and Goblins, but none of those are even close to being automatic wins. You still have to work for your wins.

Beating Green-Red Madness

In order to beat this deck, remember the following:

There are a limited number of threats. If you can kill all the 4/4 tramplers, the rest of the creatures should be able to be dealt with by blocking.

There are a full eight Bolt effects in the deck. If you can keep yourself above 3 and 6 life, you can protect yourself from being Lightning Bolted out of the game.

Don't forget about Wild Mongrel's color-changing ability. You don't want to Doom Blade it as long as your opponent has cards in hand.

Conclusion

This deck feels just a little underpowered compared to the rest of the field, and could probably be bumped up from Tier 2 to Tier 1.5 if the list could be tweaked to pack a little more punch in the form of aggressive creatures. If you want to try brewing, look to Deepwood Drummer or Gathan Raiders for different directions in which to take the deck.

Submissions

Viewer submissions are open! I'll still be playing known decks occasionally, but I'll mostly be playing:

Decks submitted by viewers

Decks created from viewer challenges (e.g. build a deck around Horned Kavu)

Decks created by Jake (especially ones comprised of cards from new sets such as Eternal Masters)

Email me at pauper@mtggoldfish.com or Tweet to me @JakeStilesMTG with your decklist or challenge, and I'll give you a shout-out if I use your submission!