Welcome to Season 4 of Weekly Pauper Recap! As always, we’re going to start 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. Note that i’m playing in the Friendly League until the new system is introduced. 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)

Given that this is the first “proper” article since the bannings, it might be a good idea to link my thoughts on the bannings themselves: Weekly Pauper Recap Season 4 – Prologue: Daze, Gitaxian Probe and Gush are banned in Pauper.

I absolutely did not expect W/x Midrange to be the most popular archetype. I’m also quite surprised that Tron dropped in popularity despite losing two bad matchups and a couple of close matchups.

Burn being popular is no surprise at all, it always seems to be. Judging from the other side of the table, the loss of Gitaxian Probe does not seem to hurt Burn too much.

I don’t think there’s much to analyse here, considering that the meta is still fresh and people don’t really know what to react to yet. The three RG Tokens deck i faced were all the same player – in one league, no less. This is going to make more sense when we start to get more data.

Unless the metagame changes drastically (which it very well might), i think Tron (list below) and Bogles (which i have talked about in Weekly Pauper Recap – Season 3 Chapter 8 and Weekly Pauper Recap – Season 3 Chapter 9) seem to be pretty good choices. To me, that is all this data is good enough for. We’ll be able to make more informed decisions as we get more data in the coming weeks.

What I Played This Week

As i mentioned in last week’s article, i think Tron is the big winner with the bannings, so that’s what i played:

(deckstats.net link)

Note that this is the list i settled on, not what i started out with. Maindeck Hydroblast is a reaction to the heavy Burn presence and i really liked having a clean answer to Thermo-Alchemist that i can search up with Teachings. The matchups it’s not useful in are either very good (Black decks), very bad (Elves) or rather fringe. I have played 61/14 with similar mana before and always liked it.

The way i play this list is pretty linear: Assemble Tron, bury the opponent in card advantage. I don’t think flooding is a big issue with this deck; you generally only need one Alchemy or Teachings to get going and start chaining flasback spells, which then lead to even more card advantage in the form of Mulldrifter and Mnemonic Wall. The worst thing that can happen is not having mana.

I previously played Elvish Rejuvenator over Reap and Sow. I preferred Rejuvenator against Delver decks, mostly because it plays better against Daze. That’s no longer a concern, so i went with the more powerful alternative.

The only change i’m considering right now is cutting the fourth Pyroblast. But i’m not really sure what to replace it with – a second Lignify seems reasonable, but i primarily want it for Burn and don’t really have room to bring any more cards against them.

I probably won’t play this for a while because i don’t particularly enjoy executing Flicker loops, but i think the deck is very strong. As i said earlier, if you’re looking for a deck to play, this seems like a good place to start.

If you’re interested in my mulligan decisions with this list, i’m going to post one opening hand from each of my league runs on twitter (@JonLX) over the next few days.

Intriguing Decks

(Orzhov Pestilence by ssWakizashI, 2nd Place in the 26/05/19 Pauper Challenge)

I thought this deck was a bit too durdly for the aggressive pre-bannings metagame, but considering that the metagame has slowed down a little, it might be decent now. It also put two people in the top eight of the challenge, which is a strong showing. I really don’t like this against Tron, but since Tron does not seem very popular in leagues (so far), it might be reasonable to play some Orzhov.

No League decklist this week because the latest league results still feature Gush, Daze and Gitaxian Probe.

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

j