Pauper Tech: Elves
Ever wanna play roughly all the creatures in the same turn? Wanna be able to play Tolkien's favorite race? Wanna be mono-green but still get away with running other colored spells? Wanna do all of this in pauper? If you answered yes to any of the above, pauper elves might just be for you!
Ready for one of the most wombo-combo aggro decks in all of pauper? Well, if not, go somewhere else because that is what we have today. This deck has a lot of the classical elf flavor in using its dorks, such as Fyndhorn Elves, Llanowar Elves, and Elvish Mystic, but we have some fun spice from older sets that lets the deck play out almost like a bad legacy deck. While all of those creatures are one-ones that tap for a single green mana, they aren't the only mana producers in the deck. Also in the one drops, we have Birchlore Rangers which is arguably one of the best mana makers in the deck with how we intend to abuse it. With it, we can tap any two elves to make one of any colored mana. While that might seem 'eh' on the surface, it allows us to fix our mana, and potentially play out our entire hand with the cards Nettle Sentinal and Lys Alana Huntmaster — either untap when we cast a green spell or make a creature token we can then tap. So, if we have a Birchlore and one of these creatures, we can cast as many one drop elves as we have. Playing the first elf, we can tap the one we just cast and then tap either the Sentinal or the token to make one green. Use the one to play another one drop to either untap the Sentinal or gain a token that we can keep going with using the creature we just played. This gets even crazier when we have copies or a mix and match of the two enablers on the field because we actually start to net gain mana when casting creatures allowing us to have a massively explosive turn. We then have one more mana maker in Priest of Titania. For those of you who played back in the era of Scourge, you might remember this card and it was so sweet that it was sad to see it leave Standard when it rotated out. While it does need friends to be more than a Llanowar, it can easily get out of hand if left unchecked.
For our payoffs, we have three primary ways of winning the game (in the main board), all of which are elves. One, we already touched on in Lys Alana Huntmaster which lets us just go so wide our opponent can't stop us from overwhelming them. Then we have a beloved classic in Timberwatch Elf. Some of us remember the nightmare of this unit hitting the board and causing us to pray to every being that might be listening to top deck some form of removal so as not to be obliterated on our opponent's next turn. Not much has really changed. Timberwatch lets us tap it to pump any creature equal to the number of elves on the field, including our opponents. So, we can go wide, wait for blocks to be declared, then just tap to give a one one a massive boost. We also have Elvish Vanguard which is a slower, but more consistent version of Timberwatch. Any time ANY elf enters the battlefield, we put a +1/+1 counter on it. The nice thing about this is that unlike Timberwatch, it is a permanent effect, so once it is above four toughness it becomes much harder to hit with removal alongside still being a threat if it is the only creature left on the board. Yes, you won't be able to do combat tricks and what not, but you can still get there by beating them down eventually. In the side, we have two more finishers that we bring in for matchups where attacking isn't viable. Those are Viridian Longbow and Harsh Sustenance. With the Longbow, we intend to just pass it around and take advantage of untapping to ping our opponents annoying creatures down when need be. Sustenance is more like a spirit bomb in the sense that we just build up our board in order to throw its essence in one massive hit.
Moving onto utility cards, we run two different ways to refill our hand, Lead the Stampede and Distant Meldoy. Both have their uses and moments where they shine more, but the purpose for both of them is to give us more elves to cast. To fight burn and the like we have Wellwisher to gain more life than your average Soul Sisters deck. Spidersilk we have one in the main and one in the side to help with blocking, keep Electrickery from wiping us, and give us a way to stop flyers.
The final card of note is so versatile it gets its own paragraph. Quirion Ranger is a one one for one that can untap any creature at the cost of returning a forest to our hand. Not only does this allow us to double down on our tap effects, it allows us to get extra mana from our lands when we are otherwise missing a land drop. While it doesn't seem like much, it can make our one land hands feel like two land hands in addition to allowing us to potentially have three mana on turn two after casting it if we had a dork on turn one! The other obvious uses are the ability to use Timberwatch and Wellwisher twice in the same turn, but those are thankfully a bit more straight forward.
So, that is elves in a nutshell for Pauper. While there is more I could go over so far as sideboard options, but the painful truth is you need to build it around the current meta a lot of the time. Just remember that when you're designing your side and you should be fine. Well, that is all from me and I hope to see all of you next time I stream. I stream fairly sporadically, but I generally am online every Wednesday around five or six. I may or may not still be trying to find a schedule that works. Have a Twitch link and enjoy your pauper grinding!
