Welcome to Season 4 of Weekly Pauper Recap! As always, we’re going to kick things off with my Metagame Recap. My goal is to play 50 matches per week and analyse 200 matches worth of data. You can read about my process here: Weekly Pauper Recap Season 4 Overview. Next is the What I Played This Week section, where i’m going to feature a different deck every week. To wrap things up, we’re going to look at two Intriguing Decks, one each from the most recent Pauper Challenge and the most recent League results.

Metagame Recap

(google spreadsheet with the complete data)

Metagame Going Into The Week

This Week’s Metagame

Except for the 10% Stompy part, this is pretty much in line with what has been going on in the format previously. UB Control has all but disappeared and Faeries is on the decline as well. This makes perfect sense – currently, Pauper is about either extracting maximum value from Arcum’s Astrolabe or going under the decks that do. The decks that are in the middle (such as Delver or Black Control strategies) are very bad against the value-oriented decks while being prone to clunky draws that decks such as Elves, Affinity and Stompy seek to punish.

I’m fairly sure the Pauper hivemind has not figured out the Astrolabe + Skyfisher decks yet, but what we do have now is clearly enough to push out all the interactive decks that don’t use Astrolabe. If they’ll also be able to figure out the matchups that come down to races is yet to be seen. It’s possible that Pauper is going to evolve into a “pick a linear deck and hope players don’t have the right hate” kind of format within the next few months.

Next Week’s Metagame?

Again, the metagame hasn’t really changed. We lost Bogles and UB and got Stompy back in return. Stompy is pretty decent against Tron and there are much fewer copies of Prismatic Strands around, which were a natural predator for Stompy.

What would i play right now? I’m having a hard time adjusting to this metagame and i don’t have two years’ worth of experience in the format to fall back on. Pauper has changed so drastically over the past three months that i would hardly consider it the same format – the way it has changed is akin to a Standard rotation where a handful of decks stay intact, but even those have to adapt to an entirely new environment.

My experience with both Astrolabe Tron and Snow Skyfisher has been that neither deck is really awful against anything. In the past, Tron and White Midrange were both clunky enough that they had some very glaring weaknesses, but both archetypes have gotten leaner and more flexible, so it’s much easier for them to adapt to problems. It’s very possible that some linear deck would be your best choice for league play, especially when you factor in time spent playing, given that Snow Skyfisher and Tron are both quite grindy. But if there is one that stands out right now, i haven’t found it.

I managed to come up something that works, but isn’t necessarily great:

What I Played This Week

(deckstats.net link)

This is a throwback to the Mono White Tron deck i wrote about in Weekly Pauper Recap – Season 3 Chapter 1. I wanted to try a two-colour version of the deck back when Guild Globe was spoiled, but the metagame never felt right for it.

The plan for this version was to trump what the other Kor Skyfisher decks are doing by virtue of being Tron, beating non-Astrolabe Blue and Black decks by virtue of being a Kor Skyfisher deck, have decent game against Burn, be able to win sideboard games against other Tron decks off the heavy land destruction plan in the sideboard and address some linear decks with the remaining cards.

Interestingly, i ended up going 2-4 against Kor Skyfishers but 5-3 against Tron. I only lost two of my remaining 11 matches, to Mono White Heroic and Elves.

Against Skyfishers, i either got out-valued (in the case of blue versions) or out-aggro’d (in the case of straight Boros). The problem is that a) these shortcomings are polar opposites and b) Boros Tron is an engine deck and there isn’t much room to sideboard or remove pieces altogether, especially if you want to keep removal spells in the deck.

For example, i would like a second Settle Beyond Reality (which was great, by the way), but having only four copies of Flame Slash as spot removal is already pushing it and i’m not sure cutting a Rolling Thunder would be a good idea either. The least convincing card in the maindeck is probably the third Custodi Squire, but i generally like drawing them.

As for the sideboard, i liked most of it. I only cast Leave no Trace once, against Mono White Heroic. I wanted to play the card to deal with Bogles and Journey to Nowhere, but it turned out i didn’t actually face Bogles and didn’t bring them against Boros either. I could see myself running another Aven Riftwatcher for Burn (the deck is rather low on lifegain for a deck without countermagic) and potentially the fourth Electrickery. It’s also possible that one or two copies of Prismatic Strands should be in there somewhere.

I’m not sure if i’ll keep playing the deck because i like switching around a lot and i like to be careful with recommendations, but i do think this deck is playable in its current form and just one good idea away from being a great metagame choice.

Intriguing Decks

(Slivers by Znurvel, 5-0 from last week)

I have all these cards and never got around to using them. Maybe now’s the time?

(Ephemerate Faeries by Modern_Monkey, 4th place in the 21/07/19 Pauper Challenge)

This checks a lot of boxes for me, i don’t know what else to say. It has great mana, great spells and Spellstutter Sprite. I like it.

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading, see you next week!

j