Creature (23)
- 1x Augur of Skulls
- 4x Carrion Feeder
- 3x Faceless Butcher
- 2x Fume Spitter
- 2x Grave Scrabbler
- 4x Mesmeric Fiend
- 4x Stinkweed Imp
- 2x Twisted Abomination
- 1x Viscera Seer
Land (21)
Sideboard
Creature (4)
Instant (4)
Sorcery (7)
The Nightmare Effect
Introduction
What Is the Nightmare Effect?
Nightmares are a tribe from the Torment expansion. When they enter the battlefield, they remove one of your opponent's resources, such as one of their cards or some of their life. When they leave the battlefield, they return whatever they took. For example, Mesmeric Fiend takes a card from your opponent's hand, storing it in exile until Mesmeric Fiend leaves play.
"The Nightmare effect" refers to using an effect at instant speed to remove one of your Nightmares from play as soon as it comes into play. This causes its leaves-the-battlefield ability to trigger before its enters-the-battlefield ability. In the case of all Nightmares that remove your opponent's cards, these two abilities are linked, so if they trigger in the wrong order, the opponent's card that was exiled will never come back.
"The Nightmare Effect" is the name of a deck that abuses this interaction to cheaply remove enemy cards. By using Tortured Existence , the deck can bring back, play, and sacrifice creatures like Faceless Butcher over and over, smothering the opponent with card advantage while beating them to death with an increasingly large Carrion Feeder.
The original idea behind the archetype, which started life as a Legacy deck, is not mine — the oldest primer I can find is here, written by Poppeleseed on MTGSalvation. However, I claim full credit for porting the deck to Pauper, and the individual card choices this led to.
Why Should I Play It?
This is the deck for you if:
- You like slow, grindy decks.
- You like decks where your graveyard is an extension of your hand.
- You like decks that abuse the unintended interactions caused by poor wording on old cards.
- You want to play a control deck that runs a lot of creatures.
- You don't want to play lands other than the most metal of the five basic lands, the Swamp.
- You just want to beat faces with Carrion Feeder (I mean, who doesn't?).
Card Choices
Core Cards
Tortured Existence : The primary reason to play this deck. At the cost of only per use, you can move creature cards freely between your hand and your graveyard. This alone is powerful, as in a creature-heavy deck your graveyard essentially becomes an extension of your hand. And it becomes even more powerful when combined with creatures that can recur from the graveyard by themselves. Like Aether Vial in decks that run it, Tortured Existence is very bad in multiples, but so powerful in our strategy that we are basically forced to run the full four.
Carrion Feeder: Our main sacrifice outlet. The fact that it can't block isn't irrelevant against aggro decks, but this is usually outweighed by the card's other strengths. Its ability has no mana cost, allowing us to abuse the Nightmare effect from as early as turn two, and Carrion Feeder permanently grows, allowing us to use it as a win condition against removal-light decks.
Mesmeric Fiend: A cheap and powerful Nightmare. If we play a sacrifice outlet on turn one and Mesmeric Fiend on turn two, we can permanently exile a card of our choice from our opponent's hand immediately. Against slower decks, our plan is usually to recur Mesmeric Fiend with Tortured Existence so we can do this over and over again — once we've stripped away all our opponent's cards, we can kill them at our leisure. Even without abusing the Nightmare effect, Mesmeric Fiend can be a powerful piece of disruption against decks that can't remove it easily.
Stinkweed Imp: A crucial part of our recursion engine. Once you have a Tortured Existence in play and a Stinkweed Imp in the graveyard (hint: the former can help you achieve the latter), you need never draw from your deck again. Instead, you can dredge the Stinkweed Imp and then discard it to draw a creature of your choice. Every time you do this, your graveyard gets bigger and your options get broader. With flying and pseudo-deathtouch, Stinkweed Imp can even play defense in a pinch.
Removal and Disruption
Faceless Butcher : A Nightmare with the ability to directly impact the board. If you play Faceless Butcher after stripping your opponent's hand of removal, it can quickly take over the game, and abusing the Nightmare effect with it just feels dirty. Four mana is a little slow versus aggro decks — the right number to play is somewhere between one and three, depending on the metagame you're expecting.
Duress: One of the best discard spells in Pauper. Against control decks, we want to use Duress to remove their powerful spells. Against aggro, we just want to use it to take away their removal so we can gain tempo using Faceless Butcher .
Victim of Night: A broad and powerful piece of spot removal. Only a few Vampires and Zombies get played in Pauper, and nobody plays any Werewolves, meaning that this card is usually just Murder for two mana. It's the only card in our deck other than Duress that's entirely useless if discarded or milled, but in the absence of a common printing of Shriekmaw, it's the best we've got.
Fume Spitter : At first, I was skeptical about this underwhelming little guy from Scars of Mirrodin drafts, but it actually kills a lot of relevant one- and two-drops in Pauper (Delver of Secrets , I'm looking at you). It's also a creature, meaning that you can recur it with Tortured Existence to crush the decks it beats up on, or just to gradually cripple bigger creatures if you find yourself unable to draw any hard removal.
Chainer's Edict : A few sacrifice effects greatly improve our matchup against hexproof creatures, and we play too many creatures for Innocent Blood to be good, so Chainer's Edict is our go-to spell. The flashback ability is especially relevant in this deck, because once we hit seven lands we can start casting copies we dredged over earlier in the game.
Situational/Flex Cards
Augur of Skulls : An extra discard spell to supplement Mesmeric Fiend. It's better if we can't abuse the Nightmare effect, but worse if we can, as binning two cards of our opponent's choice is usually worse than exiling one of our choice. Even so, a two-mana Mind Rot is respectable, and against some decks recurring this every turn is enough to take over the game. The fact that you can just leave it in play, block and regenerate it isn't entirely irrelevant either. In a slower metagame, I would consider Chittering Rats instead of this.
Unearth : I've recently been trying to fit in some number of these. They provide a weaker amount of graveyard recursion to tide you over in games when you don't draw Tortured Existence . If you have Tortured Existence you can always cycle Unearth away if you don't need it.
Grave Scrabbler : Another recursion card. When combined with Tortured Existence , Grave Scrabbler is very powerful — a 2/2 for with Dutiful Return stapled to it. However, it is very bad without Tortured Existence , because our only other way to discard cards is using Augur of Skulls on ourselves (please don't do this). Two or three feels like the appropriate number to play.
Viscera Seer: Carrion Feeder number five. It can block, but scries instead of growing. Viscera Seer is much worse at ending the game than Carrion Feeder, but we run one just to make sure we can always abuse the Nightmare effect.
Twisted Abomination: A late-game finisher of sorts. Its main role is actually as a swampcycler, smoothing out our draws and making sure we hit our land drops — we usually just kill our opponent by attacking with Carrion Feeder and a bunch of 1/1s. However, in the event of an emergency, Twisted Abomination is the card behind the glass we break. Three toughness is unfortunate (hello, Lightning Bolt), but the turn after we play it we'll have enough mana to regenerate it ad infinitum, and it doesn't take many attacks with it to finish our opponent off.
Gathan Raiders : While technically this can be played in any color, I wouldn't seriously consider it unless I was at least splashing red. It's usually a Cathodion that sometimes casts Grave Scrabbler , which is a decent card, but it's an embarrassingly bad topdeck lategame unless you can hard-cast it. If you can, it's a five-mana 5/5, which is also decent, and in a version of this deck that splashes red, I would seriously consider Gathan Raiders . As is, Deepcavern Imp is probably better at playing the same role.
Crippling Fatigue : I did test this for a while, as a removal spell that we could dredge over, but at three mana this effect is way too slow, and against the decks it beats up (read: aggro), losing three life to cast this from the graveyard is too great a cost. There are better options.
Lands
Swamp: Considering that we run several cards with in their costs, and the utility lands in Pauper are mostly very bad, there's no sense in running any lands other than Swamps. Our deck needs four mana to function comfortably, so twenty-one lands seems like the right number, considering that we're playing three copies of Twisted Abomination. If you cut some or all of the swampcyclers, increase your land count accordingly.
Sideboard
Extra Chainer's Edict s and Fume Spitter s: Pretty self-explanatory. Side these in in matchups where the main deck cards are especially good.
Faerie Macabre : For fighting other graveyard strategies. Discarding this multiple times using Tortured Existence to clean out an opponent's graveyard is pretty disgusting. Later on, you can always get it back just so you can cast it as a 2/2 flyer.
Mind Extraction : A silver bullet versus other mono-black decks (the mirror, Innocent Blood control, mono-black aggro, Pestilence, etc). This is probably too fancy and I should just swap it out for something broader, but damn does it feel good when you cast Wit's End on turn three versus mono-black control.
Pharika's Cure : For aggro decks. The more creatures they run with two or less toughness, the more copies of Chainer's Edict and Victim of Night go out and the more copies of Pharika's Cure go in. This is probably also a pretty good one-for-one substitution for Victim of Night in the event that you actually run into mono-Vampires or mono-Zombies.
Shrivel : Because this is what passes for Wrath of God in Pauper. This is mainly for fighting token decks and the decks Fume Spitter beats up on. It's probably a good idea to pitch all your 1/1s to Carrion Feeder before you cast this.
Potential Splashes
Multicolored manabases in Pauper aren't fantastic. Playing a second color makes our deck slower, and we have more difficulty playing cheap spells like Victim of Night and the Tortured Existence / Grave Scrabbler combo. However, if you do choose to splash a second color, it opens up some cards that may be powerful enough to justify the cost.
White: White gives us access to Lone Missionary, Augur il-Vec, and/or Aven Riftwatcher versus aggro, Shrieking Grotesque versus slow decks, and Auramancer as a way to recover Tortured Existence if you dredge over it. We can also play a cute Stonehorn Dignitary lock, and have the option of playing Kami of Ancient Law in our sideboard. To fix our mana, we can split our swampcyclers with some number of Noble Templar s.
Blue: Blue is the color I'd be least likely to play in this deck, as splashing it doesn't give us access to anything better than Hapless Researcher s, Augury Owl and a Man-o'-War lock (which is almost always worse than a Faceless Butcher lock). Anything beyond a splash would substantially change the character of the deck.
Red: Red is the splash I'd be most likely to consider. It gives us access to Ghitu Slinger , which is as close as any Pauper creature will come to being Shriekmaw, and Stingscourger , which in our deck is a better version of Man-o'-War . We also get access to red flashback spells like Faithless Looting and Firebolt, and we can run Goblin Skycutter and Subterranean Shambler in our sideboard. The mana-fixing for this splash is also easiest, as we can replace some of our swampcyclers with Chartooth Cougar s, or just swap them all for Igneous Pouncer s.
Green: Green gives us access to Brindle Boar and/or Golgari Brownscale versus aggro, and Walker of the Grove versus slow decks (plus Fierce Empath to find it and our other big guys). Golgari Rotwurm and Krosan Tusker are other top-end cards to consider. The landcyclers for this splash are underwhelming — Elvish Aberration and Wirewood Symbiote — but luckily other fixing like Sakura-Tribe Elder is available. There's a different Tortured Existence deck that runs more discard outlets and madness guys (Mad Dogs, if I recall correctly), but we are not that deck and this is not a primer for it.
Matchups
Coming soon
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| Date added | 9 years |
| Last updated | 9 years |
| Legality | This deck is Pauper legal. |
| Cards | 60 |
| Avg. CMC | 2.13 |
| Folders | cool decks, Pauper, Pauper, kozi9, Pauper, Pauper, Pauper Deathtouch |
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