The 4 Decks You Should Play at Our Pauper $1k

Owl Central Games is hosting its first Pauper $1k on Saturday, September 6th! I’m super stoked to see the community grow so much. In preparation of this inaugural event I’ve put together my four decks I’m playtesting the most against for the format. These are likely the best decks to play!

Let us know that you’ll be in attendance by pre-registering ahead of time! For all the details about that, make sure to check out our website here. But in the meantime, here’s the decks you should consider playing at Owl Central Games’ Pauper $1k.

Madness Burn

Mono Mountains dot deck is explosive, literally (figuratively). The archetype plays multiple copies of Fireblast and Lava Dart so ending a game with little to no lands left in play isn’t uncommon. Your typical play patterns will include discarding Sneaky Snacker to a Grab the Prize or Highway Robbery, Casting a Kessig Flamebreather or Guttersnipe and launching a barrage of Lava Dart and Fireblasts.

There is a Rakdos version of this deck that leans more on the Madness mechanic and has the ability to gain life against decks where you have to race but I prefer this version in order to take advantage of how good Lava Dart is right now. There’s a laundry list of X/1s you want to be able to hit and it starts with Spellstutter Sprite. Aside from almost the entire Faeries decklist you get to knock down Delver of Secrets, opposing Sneaky Snackers, powerful mana dorks like Arbor Elf and Priest of Titania, and occasionally match up well against both sides of Lunarch Veteran, which should it ever show up against you is a nightmare. Because of Guttersnipe and Fireblast the burn deck has a lot more reach than you might initially expect.

Against this deck, count the cards in their hand and do the math keeping those previous two spells in mind, you may not be so safe at ten life. Be prepared for this deck with a plan to get your life total out of the danger zone once you’ve stabilized or finish the game quickly if the Madness deck stumbles setting up. If you wanna go fast sleeve this up, otherwise pack some Blue Blasts, Weather the Storms, or some other cheap interaction to keep pace.

Faeries / Mono Blue Aggro

Beat down your opponent with a bunch of fliers while backing them up with some timely counter magic. Dropping an evasive one drop and following it up with a Ninja of the Deep Hours while protecting it with Counterspell is a winning formula. Faeries has been around forever but just recently picked up the new Illovi Galeblade from Edge of Eternities. A one mana Flash Flyer for a single blue lets you keep your mana up on turn one for countermagic while still providing a way to apply the aforementioned line of one drop into ninja.

Spellstutter Sprite is your all-star. The tempo gain from successfully countering your opponents early game while you set up can compile into huge leads in a turn or two. Use your 8 ninjas to bounce your sprite to get as many uses out of them as possible. Since most of your creatures fly you have some baked in protection against the format’s most popular sweeper Krark-Clan Shaman. In fact, most creatures you can ignore. For the ones you can’t like Writhing Chrysalis, Bind the Monsters is here to help force your army through in the air.

If you’re playing against this deck you want to have interaction for their cheap threats or a way to stop a Ninja from hitting you at instant speed, Cast Down, Lightning Bolt, or a timely sweeper like Breath Weapon of Suffocating Fumes. Having an army of reach creatures or fliers yourself is also a solid plan. Remember if you’re facing a Spellstutter Sprite you can let the Sprite resolve, put the trigger on the stack, and then kill a faerie to reduce the number they have in play to stop the trigger from countering your spell!

Jund Wildfires

Most of the cards played in this archetype are Modern Horizons cards if that tells you anything about the general power of the deck. Most of your cards will trade one-for-two and the longer the game goes the more those tiny advantages will rack up. You’ll typically see a combination of Krark-Clan Shaman and Toxin Analysis from the massive levels of card draw to help your match up against creature oriented strategies. Playing this deck it is important to remember that not only will Toxin Analysis provide an artifact you can sacrifice to the Shaman, you can hold priority after doing so and cast an Eviscerator’s Insight or Fanatical Offering and sacrifice the, presumably going to die anyway, Shaman for a lot of value! If you should draw either of these pieces independently of each other it isn’t the end of the world. Toxin Analysis can pseudo cycle as well as make your Refurbished Familiar trade up or your Writhing Chrysalis gain you a modest amount of life points. The deck comes filled with enough artifacts that Krark-Clan Shaman can clear most things without too much difficulty.

Lastly, your deck is slooooow, so keep an eye on that clock and make timely plays. Your main win conditions are bashing a handful of times with Writhing Chrysalis or getting your opponent to a state where you’ve grinded them out with card advantage and then drop a Makeshift Munition to finish them off. When you’re facing this deck it’s also important to keep an eye on the clock. If you can’t come back in Game 1, you should concede to give yourself enough time to win Game 3 and not go to a draw. Remember that with Krark-Clan Shaman you can let the activations resolve one at a time if you have any tricks like Prismatic Strands or Wrap in Vigor to save your 2 or more toughness creatures. It won’t matter if they gave Shaman Deathtouch but they won’t always have it. Try to speed your deck up after board, lower your curve, attack their lands, or bring in more threats. The early game with all their tap lands is where they’re at their weakest, they play Cleansing Wildfire for a reason, and you don’t want them getting to play for long after they’ve developed.

Spy Combo

Balustrade Spy has come a long way from its previous iteration as an “all-in” turn 1 combo deck. The more recent incarnations see it being hybridized with the Walls combo deck. The best of both worlds are presented to you in having the option of playing a not-so fair game of magic with the Walls mana engine and giant threats, or taking advantage of your opponent reacting to your development by brutally punishing them for tapping out with what is essentially a one card combo casting Spy.

If you’re not aware of the combo, the ideal scenario here is that you’ve gotten all four lands out of your deck over the course of the game, cast Balustrade Spy targeting yourself. This will cause you to put your entire deck into your graveyard. From here you want to cast a Dread Return using Flashback and target your freshly binned Lotleth Giant. If you didn’t have any extra creatures lying around to sacrifice to the Dread Return then there’s Acorn Harvest to supply the other two (+ Spy makes three!) that you need.

I would be double plus remiss if I didn’t address the fact that you do only have FOUR lands in your deck. If you count Land Grant you’re up to 8. That means you’re going to be forced into some mulligans just to play the game. You need to have a path to two mana and once you’re there it’s off to the races. Keeping a hand with only Land Grant to get you started on the draw can open you up to getting blown out by a Spell Pierce but that’s the kind of deck you’re playing, at least you can be pretty confident they’re cutting it for games two and three.

Fighting this deck’s combo isn’t the hard part, it’s applying enough pressure to win the game without giving them an opening to do so. Cheap graveyard interactions like Relic of Progenitus or Nihil Spellbomb can sit on the board and slow them down while you execute your gameplan. Don’t take too long though because they can just cast their threats eventually and they’ll probably be the largest creatures on the board.