Dork Rituals: The Pauper Project #2

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Gattison

1 February 2018

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Dork Rituals: The Pauper Project

Issue 2: If Peter Pauper Picked a Pack of Printed Papers...?

Hello fellow TappedOut.users, welcome back to Dork Rituals: The Pauper Project. My name is still Gattison, I still maintain the Obscure List of Obscure Lists, I still write theme songs for Magic decks, and I'm still building paper pauper decks like mad. I'm on a mission to brew 32+ different paper pauper decks, one of each color combination (including 4-color & colorless), and I feel like talking to somebody while I do.

And of course, I wanna' talk pauper. Paper pauper, that is.

Not that I have anything against MTGO Pauper, or their community, their rules (such as an established banlist) or anything about it. I love it, in fact, because without it pauper wouldn't exist. I just don't play it. I don't feel it's right for me to comment on something with which I have no experience. I do have experience with paper pauper though. So that's what I'm going to focus on. I'm not trying to create a divide here, and I'm not trying to make any distinction between a paper pauper player and an online pauper player. We're all one big community that enjoys the same exact thing, and that's awesome.

That being said... it is complete chaos out here in the planes of paper pauper. Total anarchy, man. People here can do what they want, when they want, and no one can stop them. I'm talking about the MTGO pauper banlist. Officially--technically--there is no authority that oversees paper pauper. If your LGS hosts pauper events, they may in fact enforce a banlist, and it may very well be the same as MTGO's, or the one The Professor @ Tolarian Community College recommends. But that's like a lone town in the middle of the lawless, wild west, with a single, deputy-less sheriff trying to keep everything peaceful. Step outside the safety of that sheriff's jurisdiction and people are flying Peregrine Drakes over Sinkholes while throwing Goblin Grenades at each other for getting the words to Hymn to Tourach wrong. It's nuts.

Okay, so. Here's what we know. Pauper on MTGO adheres to the following banlist.

Well, there you have it. If you want to play paper pauper out here in the wilderness with the wolves that raised you and still feel civilized, here are some rules to follow. Seriously though, all smartass-ery aside, the MTGO bannings make sense, and so do The Professor's suggestions. You can tell from my color commentary that I'm not a fan of a couple of the suggested paper bannings, but I understand and (reluctantly) agree. That's not going to stop me from making the occasional "illegal" deck or two to mess around with at the kitchen table. For now, anyway. I have my rights, dammit.

So, right there, we just ran into our first little speed bump when it comes to pauper. The online/paper discrepancy, as I refer to it. But let's not get hung up on that just yet. Let's move on. Let's talk numbers.

According to this insanely detailed thread by BetweenWalls I found on MTG Salvation, there are a total of 407 Magic cards that paper players have access to that MTGO players do not. Conversely, due to rarity-downshifting in online-only "Masters Editions" and other sets, MTGO pauper players have access to 125 cards that paper players do not.

It may not seem like that big a deal, but that is a 532 card discrepancy in card pools. Although, BetweenWalls does go on to say that out of those 407 paper-only commons, there only 157 cards that are not automatically considered strictly worse than something else. Regardless, that's kind of a big difference.

Here's an interesting thing I noticed, however. At least one card on his list of "strictly worse" cards seems to be inaccurately marked, meaning that, of course, this resource I found is subject to human error. Probably not many errors, but as the pauper format expands and more and more commons are explored, who knows what we may find out in the future. For instance, take Agent of Stromgald. I believe the author was comparing Agent of Stromgald to ramp cards, such as Elves of Deep Shadow, Skirge Familiar and Sisters of the Flame. In terms of ramp, yes, Agent of Stromgald sucks. It only adds , and you can only spend on it? Well, yes, because it's not a ramp card. It's a filter, like Unknown Shores, or, more accurately Initiates of the Ebon Hand.

I only noticed this because A), Agent of Stromgald was right there at the top of the list, and B), I just happened to be working on a deck built around that same concept of filtering. And that's only because I always wanted to build around the aforementioned Cult of Dirty Fingernails, and pauper is the outlet in which I can do so. I've also always wanted to build a Drain Life deck, and I just may have figured out a way to combine the two.

There's only one problem. Initiates of the Ebon Hand and Drain Life both suck. Agent of Stromgald and Consume Spirit are both, respectively, better. To start, Consume Spirit is, in fact, strictly better than Drain Life. Drain, just like the more costly, but less mana-intense Soul Burn, both put a limit, a cap, on how much life you can gain (and, obviously, damage you can deal). Consume, on the other hand, does not.

Notice the recurring theme of requiring for this effect, and only --with the obvious exception of Soul Burn, which allows only . Because and are friends in direct attacks on a life total. This is more than likely why they printed cards like Agent of Stromgald, Initiates of the Ebon Hand, Bog Initiate and Manaforge Cinder... and that's it. -mana filters seem to be something they stopped bothering with a while ago.

Now, in looking at Agent of Stromgald versus Initiates of the Ebon Hand, you'll see that they actually do two similar, but different things. Looking a bit further, you see that it isn't actually strictly better than any of its cousins, either. Initiates of the Ebon Hand allows you to filter any mana into , but it dies if you spend or more on this ability in one turn. Bog Initiate lacks this drawback, but it costs more to cast, making it a "slower" card because you probably won't be able to get it out until turn 2. Manaforge Cinder is a hybrid mana one-drop, which is always awesome, but his ability straight up limits you to per turn. That's it. No more. Finally, Agent of Stromgald lets you get as much as you want, but you can only spend to get it.

I could use Bog Initiate in the deck (if I had any) and it really wouldn't hurt me having a 2-drop creature. However, a 1-drop that does the exact same thing for me would be better, right? Thus, you would think Initiates of the Ebon Hand would be perfect for my deck, right? Because I'm obviously building Golgari, right? for ramp and for my Johnny-cards, obviously, right? Well no, of course not. I rarely do things that simply. I'm puking out token:1/1 goblins and sacrificing them to Skirk Prospector, actually, because there's another card I go all Timmy-eyed over. So in the end, it turns out Agent of Stromgald is perfect for my deck (...if I owned any), but an MTGO player who wanted to play the deck would have to make the choice between Bog Initiate or Manaforge Cinder--because MTGO doesn't have access to Agent of Stromgald OR Initiates of the Ebon Hand. Both of which I would prefer over "real" pauper cards.

So, woah, Gattison, wait a minute... why are we even talking about this? How did we get from the pauper banlist to the defunct art of filtering mana into ? Well, stream of conscious, mostly, but the reason I indulged myself in this tangent is because it brings up a bunch of important questions about pauper that I've been discussing recently offline. Questions such as... (please try imagining The Professor's voice reading these questions. It'll be better that way. Promise).

• How should a paper pauper player handle cards that MTGO players don't have access to?
• Should we just say screw it and go ahead and use playsets of Sinkhole in our decks because, well, lucky us?
• Should we follow The Professor's _suggestion_ to include Sinkhole and several other obviously powerful cards on an expanded paper pauper banlist?
• If so, who would maintain it?
• If you're just getting into pauper, how would you find it?
• What about the opposite question? Should paper players, who already have access to 407 cards that MTGO players do not, now also have access to 125 _additional_ cards? They _were_ officially released _as a common_ in a Magic: The Gathering product, after all.

Personally, it just feels wrong to play Chainer's Edict or Arrogant Wurm in one of my paper pauper decks because they were never printed at common. I can't go and find a common copy of those cards to prove they're commons. Instead I have to go online and cite a digital printing, which technically doesn't exist. It just feels more natural for me to go to the Gatherer, look up a card I have a question about, and if it was only printed online, then it has nothing to do with me, because I don't play MTGO. I play paper, and in paper, it doesn't exist. But who am I? I'm just some amateur pauper player who likes talking about the format way too much. And besides, that's just the purist in me being an elitist douche, anyway. I'm the guy who gets pissed off and hates an entire franchise just because Wolverine is being played by a guy over six friggin' feet tall. I mean what the hell? It's like these people have never even read a comic book bef-- ...Look, see? It's happening again. I'm gonna' go smoke a cigarette and calm down. You wait right here.

I'm back. My point is, this purist, "printed-in-paper-only" elitism is the wrong mindset. Magic isn't limited to just paper anymore, and arguing over what "pauper legal" means just because people play it in two different environments is not the way to "solve" this Orphaned Format problem we have. So if Wizards of the Coast themselves deemed certain cards would be just fine if released at a lower rarity, i.e. common, and we have proof because they did it, online or not, then we should just accept that. Also, note how I used the word "released" last time, and not "printed." I personally just tend to use the word "printed" by default, because I'm dealing with printed things. I should be using the word "released" though, because that is what truly matters, not in which form it was released.

Pauper should be a single unified format, so that there is no discrepancy between MTGO and paper pauper. The easiest way would, obviously, be for Wizards of the Coast to just go ahead and finally release the 21 (and counting) sets that never got a full release online. Then MTGO would be able to use every single card that paper players could, and we could just simply follow their lead in regards to banlists and such.

I have no idea if that will ever happen, though, so until then my mission is two-fold. Not only do I have the very Vorthos goal of building a paper pauper deck in every color combination, but I also want to do some playtesting, with the end result of providing some evidence to support a paper pauper banlist--or not. The Professor's suggested banlist is good advice, and is obviously based on at least a lot of common sense, but is that all, or was there some actual playtesting involved to provide him some tangible proof? I don't know the answer to that either, thus I'd like to find out for myself. That way I can develop an informed opinion and confidently support it.

To that end, get ready for a wide variety of decks. I'll be showing you a bunch of "normal" pauper decks, meaning ones that either a paper or MTGO player should have no trouble building. I'll also be showing you an occasional something-something that'll basically just be for the paper players. Things like Peregrine Drake decks and Cranial Plating decks. At the very least I want to build decks that prove why a card should be banned in paper as well as MTGO. As a reference, of course.

Well, I'm out of breath now, so this looks like a good place to wrap it up. Feel free to respond in the comments below to anything discussed in the article above, especially if you feel I might have missed something important, or gotten something wrong. Or if you just have something you want to contribute. Remember, my main goal is to create good, productive discussions about pauper, so don't hold back. Questions are always welcome also, because you just don't know until you ask. Now I'll leave you with some more Pauper goodies, and until next time, stay safe everybody!

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