Corpses on Clearance
Pauper Budget Control Counterspell Creature Cheat Discard Reanimator Sacrifice UB (Dimir)
Sorcery (22)
Creature (10)
Instant (8)
Land (20)
Sideboard
Maybeboard
Instant (1)
I immediately gravitated to Reanimation as an archetype when I began playing this game. Something felt so compelling to play cards from your graveyard as opposed to your hand, almost as though you were manipulating the game to be played in a way it was never intended to be (though clearly by design, it can be). I wanted to create a low budget Pauper reanimation deck to have on hand, should the desire to play it arise.
The format doesn’t afford us a lot of options, but we do the best we can with what we have to work with. Though the split leans in favor of , we run an equal number of each land type. This is owing to the fact that 1) Counterspell requires double and 2) we won’t be hardcasting any of our fatties, and unless something goes awry our spells will take precedence over our ones, as setting up our hand/graveyard is key in the early game.
•Dismal Backwater covers both colors and recovers a life point lost.
•Witch's Cottage functions as a way to recur one of our sac outlets in the face of removal without wasting a precious limited resource.
•Islands, 8, and Swamps, 7, populate the remainder of our mana base.
Here’s an interesting one. In Ye Olden Times, a farmer might find himself ‘helling potatoes’. Etymologically, this is a fascinating phrase. Rooted in the original meaning of the words She’ol>Hades>Hell as referring to the grave, the phrase carried the connotation of putting potatoes in the ground just as one may bury a deceased person.
We may lack the taters but we’ll be taking a page from that book nonetheless. And just like a farmer, if we invest the time, the effort, and with just a bit of luck, we may find ourselves reaping a windfall.
•Careful Study is a top tier method of selectively filling our graveyard and replenishing our hand at the same time. 1/7th of the god hand for this deck.
•Putrid Imp acts as a semi-permanent discard outlet. More than likely it’ll draw the attention of our adversary, which is fine owing to the number of similar spells we run.
•Contingency Plan lets us strategize a few moves in advance for a reasonable price.
•Discerning Taste is a great new card from Modern Horizons 2 and well worth including. It excels as a Turn 3 play to set us up for the next turn’s recursion while buying back quite a hefty chunk of lost life.
Anyone who’s ever planted a garden knows the importance of pest removal. Be they voracious beasts intent on devouring your rhubarb, or be they a tangle of tendrils threatening to choke out the string beans, they must be stopped.
We run a spate of spells to ward off danger.
•Duress is like preventative pesticide, eliminating threats before they can cause damage. A little Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane never hurt anyone.
•Bone Shards is magnificent in a deck like this. In exchange for creature removal, we need only pay the terrible price of putting one of our big creature threats in the graveyard—exactly where we want it to be.
•Counterspell will save our butts at least once per game, make no mistake. When it comes to catch-all’s, you’re looking at the G.O.A.T.
•Mana Leak is no slouch either, forestalling calamity just long enough to turn the game around.
If you want tomatoes, you have to plant tomatoes. If we want to reanimate a powerful creature, then that’s what we need to stow away in our graveyard. I took a look at the stable of powerhouses printed at the common rarity this game has to offer and settled on a few I particularly liked. There’s some room for personal taste here, so choose whatever suits you or your play style the best. From there, simply Exhume the creature of your choice to smash your opponent.
•Ulamog's Crusher and Eldrazi Devastator are par for the course in the format/archetype, and for good reason. Though I like to distance myself a bit from the typical, these are simply too effective to not include.
•Gloom Sower seemed like a fun choice to me. An 8/6 that will force a secondary negative outcome is a good thing. Once it attacks we’re guaranteed a positive result no matter what.
•Stay afloat in the early game with a suite of control and removal spells.
•Cast Putrid Imp early as a means to discard fatties, or else abuse spells like Careful Study to inter them.
•Cast Exhume and reanimate potent threats to squash the opposition.
Still working on my Pauper sideboard skills. Any tips for the format are appreciated; I haven’t had enough experience to design a ‘the usual stuff’ type of sideboard yet.
•Spell Pierce is cheap and effective.
•Cast Down for simple removal.
•Hydroblast is included here because in what little Pauper experience I’ve had thus far, seems to be a prevalent color and Burn a fairly common archetype. It felt right to specifically anticipate this and add in this card.
•Feed the Swarm was originally in the maindeck before I discovered Discerning Taste, which is just more efficient. Still, a way to handle Enchantments felt like something I should plan for too.
”Be not deceived…for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
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Casual
97% Competitive