This deck is a fairly straight forward control deck. The goal of this deck is to clear the battlefield of all opposing creatures, then chip away slowly at your opponent by attacking with saproling tokens.
As far as creatures go, there are only 2 different creatures: Thallid and Deathspore Thallid. Thallid is a great turn 1 play that will generate saprolings for us with enough time and proliferation. Deathspore Thallid does the same, however is turn 2 at best and has the added bonus of being able to sac our saprolings to deal with our opponent’s creatures.
In order for the deck to really start controlling the board, we need to dig for our saproling-making fungi creatures, which we have some ways to do this. For starters there is Abundant Growth. This card allows us to filter mana and provides a card draw on etb. It is most optimal to enchant our depletion lands, so that they provide mana even if they run out of depletion counters. Our second shovel is Adventurous Impulse, an early game card that doubles as a way to dig for our fungi and a way to ramp if we already have some fungi in hand. It is our quintessential early game fungi shovel, with Lead the Stampede as a backup in case we don’t find our fungi early on enough. Lead the Stampede also allows us to be more consistent with our early game digging, giving us the ability to run 6 early game dig spells.
Altar's Reap and its functional reprint Costly Plunder are our main sources of card advantage, giving us 2 cards for 2 mana and a saproling. Pretty good deal if you ask me!
Removal is the next major part of this deck. Just about all of the removal in this deck is creature removal. However, pauper is almost entirely creature based, with the exception to that being monored burn and blue/dimir mill, but even those decks tend to use creatures in some form. Bone Splinters is a must have for a deck like this, considering that the sac part of the cost is of little to no concern to us really. One mana to destroy a creature is extremely valuable.
Apart from that, Deathspore Thallid is our other main way of removing creatures, as well as some other spells like Fungal Infection and Grim Affliction can help us finish off some slightly larger creatures with added benefits.
Dash Hopes is there because what would a control deck be without counter magic? Not to mention, having to pay 5 life to counter the spell can sometimes be detrimental to our opponent, meaning they will always have a tough choice to make which you can use to determine what is most important in their strategy.
Our final piece of removal is Night Soil. This card, while it stops our opponent from recurring creatures from the graveyard, also rewards us for killing our opponent’s creatures by letting us exile dead creatures for more saprolings. A really good card, however we need no more than 1 on the field at a time and it isn’t quintessential to our strategy, so that is why there are only 2 in the deck list.
The mana base is very straightforward. Jungle Hollow simply for mana fixing (and it’s one of the least bad tap lands in pauper), Peat Bog and Hickory Woodlot are great for early game ramp so we can properly establish our saproling board state, plus the proliferation from Grim Affliction as well as Abundant Growth allow our depletion lands to last us longer. The rest of the mana base is all basics.
