Playing Pauper: Black-Green Threshold

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Welcome to the world of undercosted creatures, graveyard counting, and the Pauper Tarmogoyf—Moldgraf Scavenger. This week's deck is Black-Green Threshold, and I'm here to guide you through it!

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.

Black-Green Threshold Deck Tech

Black-Green Threshold vs Bogles

Black-Green Threshold vs Blue-Black Reanimator

Black-Green Threshold vs Green-Blue Drake

Black-Green Threshold vs Stompy

Black-Green Threshold vs Angler Delver

The Deck

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The starting lineup of creatures include these three cheap green creatures that all get powered up by the graveyard being full. The rest of the deck works to make sure that condition is fulfilled.

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Golgari Brownscale and Stinkweed Imp can dredge to fill up the graveyard while putting another creature in your hand.

Gurmag Angler takes advantage of all the cards in our graveyard and eats them up when we have enough to spare.

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The removal suite in the deck is varied and is mainly based on varying the card types to enable delirium for Moldgraf Scavenger. You can also include Nameless Inversion if you want to get Tribal among the card types mixed up in the delirium equation.

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Vessel of Nascency and Grisly Salvage fill up our graveyard while finding us more threats and do so very efficiently.

Pulse of Murasa gets back key creatures later in the game against removal-heavy opponents.

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The lands this deck uses are varied but they mainly consist of the common fetch lands (for mana fixing and filling the graveyard), artifact lands (for double delirium when milled), and cycling lands (for card advantage if you get mana flooded).

The Sideboard

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Nihil Spellbomb can take out an opposing graveyard without touching our own.

Echoing Decay does work against token decks and small creature decks in general.

Quiet Disrepair can be a Naturalize that works better for delirium, or it can enchant one of our own artifact lands against Burn.

Seal of Primordium also does a Naturalize impression while being good for delirium.

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Shrivel is there for the token decks and can sometimes help against Bogles.

Choking Sands is great against Tron and also come in against the Green-Blue Drake deck that has land auras like Utopia Sprawl.

Golgari Brownscale is great for lifegain and for beating small creature decks like Stompy.

Pulse of Murasa acts like additional copies of Gurmag Angler against control decks.

The Matchups

Against non-black decks, Black-Green Threshold works best. All our removal including Doom Blade works perfectly, and we generally don't have to worry about Bojuka Bog. However, we neither gain a ton of life nor have a ton of removal so aggressive decks such as Burn and Elves, respectively, can put the pressure on us quickly.

This deck mostly wants to play against other slow midrange decks to get maximum value out of Chainer's Edict and Stinkweed Imp, while attempting to dodge removal with Nimble Mongoose.

Beating Black-Green Threshold

If you want to beat this deck or decks like it, try the following:

Don't skip on your sideboard graveyard hate. Even if you're not playing Black, Relic of Progenitus can help you out.

Be prepared for the Gurmag Anglers. This deck will gladly sacrifice its graveyard and just refill it again later if it means playing an early Angler.

Pay attention to both threshold and delirium and whether there's anything you can do to keep your opponent off having one or both active.

Conclusion

Graveyard decks come in all shapes and sizes in Pauper, and I'm moderately pleased with the performance of this deck. I may have played it suboptimally at times, and our matchups weren't great, but I don't doubt the power of this type of deck in the format. It remains to be seen what the perfect build looks like, so let me know how you'd tweak the deck.

Thanks for tuning in for another episode, and join me in another two weeks for more Pauper action!

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!