Magic is known to be a pretty expensive hobby and all the affordable ways to engage with it boil down to very casual fan-made formats like Dandan or The Basic Land Game. However, today I want to show you a way to play a competitive tournament format with decks costing a fraction of what you'd need to play in Modern or even Pioneer.

Let's discuss PAUPER!

What is Pauper? | Magic: The Gathering

Pauper is a Magic: The Gathering format where every card played is of common rarity. If a card has ever been printed at common, it is legal - even though it may have been originally printed as an uncommon or rare. You can play cards from throughout Magic's history, so you can sleeve up some of the most powerful cards ever! See the card images above? They are all Pauper legal.

It does have its own banlist naturally that keeps the most busted constructions in check. Some of the cards illegal include Atog, Daze, or Sinkhole.

Pauper encompasses cards from Standard legal sets, but also every other non-Standard release like Modern Horizons or Commander decks.

Except for these very specific aspects, it follows all the classic tournament format rules. 60 cards, 15 card sideboard, best-of-three, etc.

How Expensive is Pauper actually? | Magic: The Gathering

You might think it cannot be *that* cheap, as it's a tournament format with very old cards. You might also think that commons cost like from nothing up to 0.50 cent a piece maybe, so it cannot possibly be of any substantial price. What is in actually?

Let's take a look at the MTGGoldfish metagame overview with the most popular decks.

As you can see, in the top 15 decks played in the format, literally 0 of them cross the 100 USD mark, with most hovering between 50 to 70USD.

On top of that, most of the money in those decks is in a couple of key cards that see play across different Magic formats. For instance, in Mono Red, out of the 70USD total price, 20 is just a playset of Great Furnace. In Blue Terror, from the 55 USD over 15 USD is just Mental Note. In Broodscale, 25 USD is just Sadistic Glee.

It also means that you could be bases of the vast majority of decks to be able to swap around and just buy those key expensive cards from time to time. With a solid blue spell base, you can build a ton of versions of Terror and Fae decks. With Ichor Wellspring and Deadly Dispute you branch out into Gardens, Affinity, Broodscale, and many others.

To be perfectly honest, in most cases it's the availability of cards rather than the price. It's sometimes hard to physically find those old cards like Glee. But if you see someone selling a full deck at once, I am sure it'll get snagged in a heart beat.

What's the Metagame Like? | Magic: The Gathering

Let's now talk about the actual format, decks, and how games play out. So far, we know that you can acquire a deck for under 100 USD. While this is tempting already, as coming from, say, Modern you could have 10 tier decks at your disposal rather than a single one for the same price, it all comes down to whether the meta is healthy and games are interesting. Otherwise, it wouldn't really matter that decks are cheap.

So is Pauper a good format?

This is a very broad question, answer to which will depend on what you value to be good. However, let me list out the features of the format and then you can decide whether that's good or bad.

Meta is Diverse

First off, the metagame is pretty diverse. In the slide above, there are 15 decks presented and it doesn't exhaust the whole picture of the format. On the flipside though, there are cards and combinations of cards that are seen in a lot of decks. Ichor Wellspring + Deadly Dispute, Brainstorm and Tolarian Terror, Refurbished Familiar and Blood Fountain. There are a lot of such combinations. Therefore, on the one hand you see UR Skred, UB Terror, Mono Blue Terror, and some other in-between decks, but they all play Brainstorm and Tolarian Terror. One can think of it not really being diverse but those decks do play out differently. It means also that you can take a solid core and rebuild it to your own preferences.

There are truly, truly unique decks like Elves, Fog, Bogles, Dredge, and many others but they tend to be tier-2 and lower.

Cards are less punishing

If you come from other formats, you are surely aware of games which boil down to single cards taking over. It is not really the case here. While there are some really strong combinations, with the highlight being Krark-Clan Shaman and Toxin Analysis, most games play out very fairly. There is no Leyline of the Void to shut down graveyard decks permanently, there are no hate pieces that shut off your main engine, there is no Day of Judgement that demolishes your entire board regardless of what you have, there are no Planeswalkers that can take over the game, there are no one-card combos like Living End, there isn't really free interaction like Force of Negation.

Games play out slower

This might raise some eyebrows of existing Pauper players who express the sentiment that the format is fastest it's been in years with Kuldotha posing regular turn four Bushwhacker kills or Gruul Monsters taking over with Initative on turn three.

However, coming from Legacy, Modern, or even Pioneer, this is refreshingly slow, if I can call it that. With the number of taplands and setup pieces like Ichor Wellspring or Experimental Sythesizer, games play out pretty fairly and you experience a very organic progression of the game, in my estimation.

In other words, when you start the game, you can expect to always play a solid couple of turns before the game is concluded. To some, this might be a downside labelled as 'slow games'. To me, it's a comfortable feeling knowing that I will participate in the game and won't be cheesed out because I didn't have a very specific response. Naturally, I don't want to say that those games completely don't exist in Pauper but the frequency compared to Modern is absolute night and day.

Best Pauper Decks | Magic: The Gathering

There are a couple of key decks that you need to be ready for if you head out for your next tournament. Let me write a synopsis of what each deck does, so you feel more comfortable jumping into a league. You can find all these decks on MTGGoldfish here.

Affinity: A Deck whose entire manabase is artifact lands, discounting threats like Myr Enforcer or Refurbished Familiar. It takes advantage of the card draw available like Deadly Dispute or Thoughtcast, making it very hard to grind out. Plays a deadly combination of Krark-Clan Shaman and Toxin Analysis.

Mono Red Kuldotha: The premier aggro deck in the format. The most powerful draws include Kuldotha Rebirth and Goblin Bushwhacker. It also plays burn spells to finish off the opponent.

Broodscale Combo: Broodscale and Sadistic Glee create an infinite combo, resulting in an as big Broodscale as you'd like and as much colorless mana as your heart desires. From there, you can kill the opponent with that Broodscale or combine the combo with a third element that would win on the spot like Makeshift Munitions. It also plays Duress and Tamiyo's Safekeeping to ensure the combo isn't disrupted.

Gruul Monsters : Aggressive ramp deck that plays huge creatures early that both generate value and can dominate combat easily.

Blue Terror: A classic cantrip-dense Counterspell strategy whose finishers are discounted big threats like Tolarian Terror. There are a lot of flavours, depending on which the deck is more or less linear but the core stays the same.

Conclusion

In my opinion, this format is worth trying out - you can always borrow a deck and give it a go. If you tend to like fast formats, this might be a great way to interweave a different dynamic into your Magic regimen. As it's not a very supported format, it means it's mainly community driven which is great all in itself! Reach out to your local playgroup and you can be sure to be well attended to!