Pauper Magic @ MTGO

In a nutshell, Pauper Magic is "commons-only" Magic. That means no mythic rares, no regular rares, not even uncommons. Just your plain old commons -- the ones you never use and just rot inside your card boxes, or wherever it is that you store your Magic cards.

I've been wanting to give it a try for the longest time -- to give myself a break from the Bitterblossoms and Cryptic Commands of "normal" competitive Magic -- and with its increase in popularity and support lately (having been supported officially as an actual format in Magic Online), I finally decided to give it a try.

Obviously, it is a very cheap format... but until I built my first Pauper deck, I never really imagined that it was THIS cheap. I mean, for less than three tickets (2.9 to be exact), I managed to purchase my whole deck (via Cardhoarder.com)! That's less than 150 pesos!

Here's the deck that I built:



// Lands
22 [ALA] Island

// Creatures
4 [10E] Cloud Sprite
4 [LRW] Spellstutter Sprite
4 [SHM] Briarberry Cohort
4 [LRW] Pestermite
4 [MOR] Dewdrop Spy
3 [MOR] Latchkey Faerie
4 [LRW] Mulldrifter

// Spells
4 [10E] Remove Soul
4 [LRW] Broken Ambitions
3 [10E] Unsummon

// Sideboard
SB: 4 [MOR] Negate
SB: 4 [LRW] Faerie Trickery
SB: 4 [10E] Cancel
SB: 3 [ALA] Relic of Progenitus


It's mono-blue faeries. I've always wanted to play a blue aggro deck -- and with the control elements of faeries, this is actually a perfect deck for my playstyle. The sideboard though is so-so. I don't really have any idea about the Pauper metagame, so I just squeezed in a couple of blue cards that I know"might" be useful.

To my surprise, the deck actually performed pretty well. Or should I say, VERY well. After a couple of games in the Casual Room, I managed to beat a few decks, only losing to a mono red burn deck (which is the weakness of the faerie deck). In fact, I even tried to play in a 2-Player Pauper tournament (which is basically just a single match, and whomever wins it gets a pack), and I won! The pack turned up to be crappy -- Brilliant Ultimatum was my rare -- but I was just happy to have won something... from 150 pesos worth of cards. :)

My previous attempt at MTGO was a bit of a disappointment -- I never really pursued it due to budget constraints -- but with Pauper Magic, I'm actually sure that I will be back to play. It's fun, it's cheap, and it's new. :) In fact, let me just publish this blog post, and I'll be back right now. ;-)