Pattern Recognition #338 - Proper Pauper Commander!

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

12 September 2024

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

And welcome back! Today, I'm doing an apology article for users legendofa and sergiodelrio who pointed out to me last week in my own words, that budget is not Pauper. You see, Pauper Commander is a whole thing entirely, and I had, quite by accident, misrepresented what I had done.

So today, I'm going to talk what is actually Pauper Commander!

Pauper Commander is a Commander variant that does away with all those pesky Rares (Both R1 and R2), and brings a focus to those cards that I find far too often in the garbage of my LGS after a tournament and prizing has bene handed out. Much like Pauper is a constructed format for 60 card decks and can be seen as a alternative to Legacy or Vintage with its alternative card pool, so too is Pauper associated with full Commander.

For Pauper Commander, the rules are the same as regular Commander, save for a few changes. First is that your Commander must still be a legal Creature, but it must be a Common or Uncommon. Not Rare. And perhaps most importantly, Your Commander doesn't need to be a Legend. One of the cards banned in two-player Pauper Commander is Loyal Apprentice because it did too much in the Command zone as the Lieutenant ability would auto trigger as it was your own Commander.

Second, all the other cards in your 99 deck must be Commons. No Uncommons or anything else. Just Commons. Now for the purposes of Rarity, if a card has its rarity changed at some point, like say, how Scion of the Wild was printed as a Rare in Ravnica: City of Guilds and in Tenth Edition, but was a Common in Modern Masters 2015. Becuase there was a Common printing, you can still use the Rare version in your deck. And to make things even more interesting, because Pauper Commander has a long history on MTGO, if a card was printed as a Common in a Digital Only set, it counts as being Common!

In addition, each player starts with 30 life instead of 40, and Commander Damage is reduced accordingly - 16 down from 20. The Banlist is not the same as Commander's as a lot of Commander's banned cards are already removed due to rarity. Instead, Mystic Remora, Rhystic Study, the cards with the Conspiracy card type, and the Racism Cards are all banned in the format.

Stepping back, those are the restrictions on a multiplayer game. However, Pauper Commander also supports two-players by reducing both player's life totals to 25, disabling Commander damage, and the first player doesn't get to draw.

If this sounds familiar to you, it's the setup for Historic Brawl on Arena. However, there is a slightly different Banlist here. Agent of the Shadow Thieves, Esior, Wardwing Familiar, Loyal Apprentice, Oubliette and Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh are banned, as well as Stickers, Attractions, Conspiracies and the Racism Cards.

And with these deck-building restrictions, go hog-wild!

So... why the format? Well, one of my peeves I have had with the game and with many of the people who play it since... checks watch ... forever, is their obsession with the idea that Rare is Better. It's not. Stop thinking that way. Seriously. Rarity is only an indication of complexity. Or of trying to have a limited impact in a Limited format.

Pauper Commander (and by extension Pauper itself) seek to redress this issue by showing off all the amazing and great cards in the game that weren't blessed with an arbitrarily high rareness and getting you to look at them instead. I should dig up one of the psychology articles I read about how gambling and gaming create false senses of worth by adding prefixes to established terms. You know, like Mythic Rare being somehow better than plain old Rare.

I love this idea. I love Pauper as a concept and I just wish I could crack the Commander-Only local playgroups to try and show it off for people. Sadly, this is not the case up here, a problem with a small community with a lot of money. People want to show off. Pauper doesn't let you do that because as it turns out, a lot of the bling that people have access too is focused on the Rares.

This is not the only reason, mind you. I'm gladly guilty of going for the Bling Option myself on occasion - In my Budget Commander deck last week, my copy of Blackblade Reforged wasn't the standard printing since Dominaria, but rather the Signature Spellbook: Gideon version of the card. With the supremely baller artwork. It still cost me the regular price in the budget and not the Bling Price, thank goodness.

Pauper Commander is also a response, in my view, to a certain degree of homogenization in decks. Yes, Pauper has some of this as well, but when I go to a Content Creator and watch their Latest Commander Game, I get annoyed when I see the same spells over and over and over again. Seriously, cut the f-ing Swords of X and Y already! I don't care how generically good they are, show some initiative and creativity!

Not that I'm naming names or anything.

One of Mark Rosewaters often overlooked axioms of good design, both by the designers and the players, is that Restrictions breed Creativity. Or words to that effect. Pauper is a restriction. You can't use a third of the cards in the game that are 'powerful', so what do you do now? This is your restriction, now get creative.

I've put my money where my mouth is before, and built for myself a Killian Pauper Commander deck, and I quickly rebuilt it for you guys to look at:

Killian, Broke and Tripping

Pauper EDH berryjon

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It's a Killian Spellslinger Deck, and I make no assurances that it is good. Just that it works. But how many of those cards would full Commander players not even give a second glance at just because it's not 'powerful'? Or Rare? A lot, I'll tell you.

There is nothing wrong with Pauper. Nothing wrong with not playing Pauper either. But ask yourself this... do you keep using the same cards? Are you falling into a mental rut in terms of what you want to build or don't want? Build a deck with a restriction. It could be Pauper in terms of rarity. It could be limiting or requiring certain numbers of a card type.

Restrictions Breed Creativity. And Pauper is a Restriction that does that, no matter the format.

Yeah, it's short this week, I just wanted to talk about what I misidentified last week. I am a responsible author, who actually listens to your feedback!

Thank you all for reading! Please leave your comments below, and I look forward to talking with you about my subject matter. Join me next week when I talk about something! What? I don't know yet!

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!