Welcome to Season 3 of Weekly Pauper Recap! This time around, i will only be playing 25 matches per week. (Note that i’m playing Friendly Leagues because i dislike waiting for matches.) Because of the low sample size, we’re only going to look at the four week metagame, although i will still link to the complete data. Since i’m playing less, i’m no longer going to play one new deck per week. Don’t worry though, Intriguing Decks will still be included in these articles!

Metagame Recap

(google spreadsheet)

For those unfamiliar with my grouping conventions, Mono Red is Burn + RDW; W/x Monarch encompasses Boros Monarch, Kuldotha Boros, Boros Bully, Orzhov Monarch and Orzhov Pestilence; Blue Tron is everything with Ghostly Flicker; Faeries is UR Faeries + Mono Blue Delver; UB Control is everything from UB Alchemy to Teachings. Check out the Google Spreadsheet linked above for more detailed data.

Burn is still on top of the metagame and in a way, that surprises me even more than last week. Not because it’s there for the second week in a row, but because i have played UB Delver against Burn now and it felt really good for Delver so far. Burn is not trivial to play against though, and many decks are underprepared in my opinion; if you add to that the fact that you can play many matches in a short amount of time, i can still see what some players might see in Burn. To each their own.

The one deck that made it in last week but failed to reach the 5% threshold this time around is Elves. It was close though and i think it’s entirely possible that this is just variance. If you have spare slots, Elves might be a reasonable deck to prepare for.

To replace Elves, UB Control made it in. Specifically, i played against UB Flicker three times this week, which was enough to guarantee UB a spot in the rankings for at least the next two weeks. UB Flicker has never worked for me, but i suspect it might be decent against UB Delver. If i had the time, i’d experiment with both UB and UR Flicker to see how they compare. On one hand, Chainer’s Edict is better than Lightning Bolt when you’re facing Gurmag Angler, but on the other hand, Skred is better than Doom Blade there as well. But maybe there’s too much Tron in the metagame for either deck. Still, i always have a hard time finding arguments for not just playing Tron when i’m playing control in Pauper.

And that is actually all that changed – we have the same decks in the same order, with only Elves being swapped out for UB Control. Maybe there will be more to talk about next week.

What I Played This Week

I gave in. I abandoned my brew to pick up “the best deck”. There’s more to it, but basically, yeah, that’s what happened. I have a system to make sure i don’t play any one deck for too long, so i already knew i was going to play something other than Mono White Tron when i wrote last week’s article. It just so happened that i wanted to try UB Delver before something got banned.

And even though it’s undeniably a very good deck, i am still not convinced it actually is “the best deck”. That’s probably still UR Faeries, but UB is so much easier to play. It may actually have trickier decision trees, but because games are much shorter, it’s not as taxing to play as UR. I enjoy the condensed, “protect the Queen”-style games UB Delver offers. So far, at least.

There are some aspects i have changed (check back next week for an updated list), but overall, theis list is more than solid. Thanks to its fast clock, Daze, and Foil, there aren’t any glaring problems for the deck and it doesn’t “just lose” to anything. Most games i lose are because of Augur misses, drawing too many lands off Gush or not casting Gush enough. For the record, this is the only deck other than Tribe i actually like Gush in. Yeah, that’s kind of scary.

Intriguing Decks

(Corrupt Control by Grantfly, 5-0 from this week’s League results)

Between Pristine Talisman, Pestilence, Sign in Blood and Thorn of the Black Rose, this has a lot of cards i enjoy playing with. Unfortunately i’ll probably stick with UB Delver for a little longer, so i won’t get to try too many new things anytime soon. Sorry!

(Lavarunner Burn by _Shatun_, 1st place in the 24/02/19 Pauper Challenge)

As mentioned above, i think i understand why Burn sees play and is decently successful and i actually enjoy playing it every now and then. I have a tendency to play slightly bigger, less explosive versions of Burn (regardless of format), but that doesn’t mean i can’t appreciate straight forward lists like this one. If only i had time to play all the decks i share in these articles…

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

j