Dimir deck featuring discard and madness effects for Pauper.
Turns out a 2/4 Deathblock in the form of
Gorgon Recluse
is pretty good in Pauper! Many creatures in this format have a very hard time attacking through 4 toughness, and when they do they end up dying anyway. In the land of 2/2 bears, the Gorgon is king! ...err queen!
The madness engine of this deck is set up with looter effects granted by cards like the titular
Merfolk Looter
and her shadowy cousin
Looter il-Kor
. Further discard is available via
Trespasser il-Vec
and
Urborg Syphon-Mage
. The balance between cards with Madness and discard outlets is a tricky one, but after a number of games with this on MTGO I think I've struck the right chord here. With the right numbers, Madness turns our card neutral looter effects into a full-on repeatable card advantage engine!
We don't generally use the Madness on
Call to the Netherworld
unless we have multiple looter effects on the board so that we can also Madness whatever it is we returned, or if we are returning a creature without Madness such as Phyrexian Rager. Between
Call to the Netherworld
,
Grave Scrabbler
, and
Macabre Waltz
you will have no trouble trading your
Gorgon Recluse
over and over, while getting ahead on cards with Phyrexian Rager and Compulsive Research. This deck, much like the traditional Mono-Black Pauper decks, is all about going for the long game.
Your versatile win conditions are slow burn from shadow creatures like
Looter il-Kor
and
Trespasser il-Vec
, as well as reach from
Urborg Syphon-Mage
.
Trespasser il-Vec
in particular is really good at racing (being essentially 3 power unblockable) in those situations where you cannot fully stabilize the board.
This deck is based on a number of somewhat-similar Pauper Dimir Madness decks that I have seen out there with many of my own additions. I came across a form of it when reading about the history of the general Pauper metagame here:
http://puremtgo.com/articles/pauper-people-premier-event-decklists-examined
I tweaked numbers to make cards like
Dark Withering
more effective (trust me, you don't want 4), and also replaced a lot of cards that I did not like. A fair number of people are onto the Madness/Looter combo engine, but I think cards like
Gorgon Recluse
are the key to stabilizing your board so that you have the time to really exploit it.
