The Power of Pauper: Here There Be Heroes!

Howdy folks! It's time yet again for another edition of The Power of Pauper! I'm your host, Joe Dyer, and this week we are on the lookout for any heroes we can find as we look at Mono White Heroic in Pauper! In addition to that we've got two Challenges to look at (with full data)!

Without further ado, let's dive right in!

The Heroes We Deserve

Pauper definitely has its fair share of aggressive creature strategies in the format. While Bogles is one we will eventually talk about for sure, this week we're talking about a very similar deck, but this one encourages a bit more spread on its creatures than Bogles typically does. I'm talking of course about Mono White Heroic.

The most important aspect of this deck is that many of its creatures are very cheap, so it can deploy multiple creatures and then boost those creatures with the wide array of auras and protection spells that the deck wants to play. These cheap creatures are important for swarming the board, making it hard for the opponent to block and wonder if they will be receiving a lot of damage anyways from the unblocked creatures. It plays a lot of powerful auras to boost the creatures while also having spells that protect against removal.

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This is not only a really powerful deck in current Pauper as it has a lot of threats but also a lot of strong life gain aspects, but also it's one of the formats cheaper decks. In paper Pauper this deck would only run about $20 and on Magic Online even less.

The downside of this deck is that if you don't have a protection spell at the right time, cards like Breath Weapon can sometimes wipe clean your board state and then rebuilding from there can be difficult. That being said, a critical protection spell can also stop those kinds of cards in their tracks so it goes both ways.

This is certainly something to keep in mind if you're looking for a really fast and aggressive deck that can be put together on the cheap for sure.

Pauper Challenge 5/27

The first Challenge event of the weekend was the Saturday event. This event had 48 players in it thanks to the data collected by the Castle of Commons Discord.

You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.

Affinity was the most popular deck here, but it's win rate sat right on the line. Burn was also quite popular in addition to Gruul Ponza, and both had strong win rates. Despite a top finish, Bogles didn't do well overall. The deck with the best win rate overall here was Golgari Gardens.

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Definitely an interesting Top 8 for sure here. At the end of the event it was as noted, Golgari Gardens that took it all down.

This deck is honestly so cool. It may be a deck I might build because of how much fun it looks. It's got a lot of powerful things it does and it seems incredibly fun to play.

In Second Place we've got Jeskai Gates.

This deck also is insanely fun looking. Evasive threats and Basilisk Gate are very powerful here, and the deck draws a lot of cards thanks to the cantrips plus The Modern Age being a thing as well.

Further down this Top 8 we had Bogles.

As noted overall Bogles didn't do well in the event, but this player certainly did well with it. Just goes to show how much perseverance and hard work can pay off in events.

Pauper Challenge 5/28

The second Challenge event of the weekend was the Sunday event. This event had 61 players in it thanks to the data collected by the Castle of Commons Discord.

You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.

Gruul Ponza was the most popular deck in the event, and it had a really strong win rate overall. Burn also did very well, as did Golgari Gardens and Jeskai Ephemerate. Affinity did not do well at all in this event.

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Quite a bit of Gruul here, as well as a spread of other decks. In the end it was Dimir Faeries that actually won the event.

We just talked about this deck last week so it's no surprise at all to me to see it show up in some capacity. It's definitely a powerful albeit slower version of the deck, but it has a lot of controlling removal to make it good.

In Second Place we had Jeskai Ephemerate.

I still love seeing cards like Cleansing Wildfire being used in ways that are amusing like ramping your own lands with the MH2 Bridges. One card I also like here is Late to Dinner as a reanimation option to get back a Mulldrifter or Archaeomancer.

Further down the Top 8 we had Walls Combo.

Pretty solidly stock looking list here. I am iffy on Holdout Settlement myself, but I get how good it can be. I like the Ulamog's Crusher in the sideboard as a "big creature that clears the board" effect to use all your wall mana for.

Around the Web

• Alex Ullman has a recap of last weekend's events. Check it out here.
• Rainbow Familiars! Check it out here.
• A profile on MTGO player Kalikaiz is available by TheMickslash. Check it out here.

The Spice Corner

You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here.

This Boros Ephemerate deck continues to be quite fun to look at.

Wrapping Up

That's all the time we have this week folks! Thanks for continuing to support the column and join us next week as we continue our journey into Pauper!

As always you can reach me at all my associated links via my Link Tree! In addition I'm always around the MTGGoldfish Discord Server and the MTGPauper Discord Server.

Until next time!