10 Pauper Decks to Watch Before Paupergeddon: Top Contenders & Dark Horses

Pauper is a very wide format, and the pool of playable competitive decks is vast. While listing out all the decks you could face would necessitate a list at least 20 items strong, let me show you 5 top contenders and 5, let's call it, dark horses of the upcoming tournament - each deck with a brief description and a sample decklist.

If you're not a big Pauper player yourself (yet!), you might be surprised how wild, diverse, and powerful the format is!

Let's get into it!

Top Contenders

Mono Blue Terror

Mono Blue Terror is the blue deck of the format. It has two main gameplans: aggressive Delver of Secrets openers and deploying a ton of discounted Snakes. 

To facilitate our Delver plan, we utilise none other than Brainstorm - the most powerful cantrip in the history of Magic. We typically play Delver on one, and then Brainstorm on our own upkeep on turn two in response to Delver's trigger to ensure its flippage.

The discount on Snakes also comes very naturally with the help of 8 self-mill spells. Moreover, just playing our cantrips and counterspells organically fuels the graveyard.

The end goal is to deploy 5-15 power on the board, protected by counterspells and ride them to victory.

Mono Red Madness

Mono Red Madness is a Combo-Control take on the red colour in Pauper. It typically won't play like a traditional burn deck going face. Rather, it's going to try to present you with a Guttersnipe and 'combo' kill you from that position with a slew of spells.

Alternatively, it can employ a more fair creature beatdown plan with recurring Sneaky Snackers and Voldaren Epicures.

It's not a classic red deck that's good early and falls off fast. On the contrary, it's very well-equipped to compete in longer games thanks to Grab the Prize and Highway Robbery.

If you want to read more about this deck and how it compares to other read decks, here is my piece on it.

Jund Wildfire

This is the epitome of Midrange in Pauper. A strategy that's 50% against almost everything and can always sneak out a win.

It's comprised of the strongest tools the format has to offer, in no small part thanks to Modern Horizons 3.

It has a mass removal on a stick in Krark-Clan Shaman, a value creature Refurbished Familiar, and a hard-hitting Chrysalis.

Moreover, it draws a true ton of cards thanks to the engine of Ichor Wellspring and so-called Dispute effects that result in the Jund player drawing 3 cards!

The manabase is also surprisingly stable for Pauper standards, as it's comprised of artifact bridges and uses Cleansing Wildfire to ramp and mana fix.

Elves

Elves in Pauper have access to the strongest synergy cards you could want - Quirion Ranger, Wellwisher, Timberwarch Elf, and crucially Priest of Titania.

It's all in a shell that has powerful creature top-end with Generous Ent, Sagu Wildling, and Avenging Hunter - which can enter the battlefield as soon as turn three.

All the extra mana you're generating with Priest also has a perfect mana sink in Nyxborn Hydra - that frequently necessitates two removal spells when it's bestowed upon a different creature.

And this deck does not lose to a single sweeper. It has so much card draw it re-builds trivially easily - thanks to Lead the Stampede and Winding Way.

Grixis Affinity

Another artifact-based deck on the list. Similarly to Jund, it plays Familiar, Krark-Clan Shaman, and the draw engine of Ichor + Dispute effect. However, this is where similarities end.

This version's entire mana base is artifact lands! While it makes it more susceptible to targeted hate, it also empowers crazy synergies. The main feature is that it's more aggro and creature-centric than Jund, with its iconic quadruple Myr Enforcer, but also a new toy - Utrom Monitor. Now, the creature suite looks very scary, and Affinity can close games in a surprisingly fast fashion. Especially if you take into account that it's a deck with four Galvanic Blasts.

Dark Horses

In this section, I'll present decks that don't traditionally belong to the strict tier1, but could stir the pot at the next geddon. Veterans of the format have heard of most of them, as they seem to pop up here and there. Some seem to be Geddon-slayers but are nonexistent in online play! Let's see them.

Caw-Gates

A very unique deck enabled by the fact that Basilisk Gate is, shockingly, Pauper legal! It plays a lot of creatures that are hard to kill, generate more bodies, or are overall annoying to deal with. It plays the legendary Squadron Hawk, as you can synergise it with another all-time strong card - Brainstorm. Moreover, it has Guardian of the Guildpact, which is surpsisingly hard to kill in Pauper and in tandem with Basilisk Gate kills blazingly fast.

As yet another synergistic piece, there are four Prismatic Strands that can be hardcast or discarded with The Modern Age and then reused straight from the graveyard with one of many of our white creatures.

This deck has done well in all recent Paupergeddons while being much less of a force online. I would definitely expect it to show up at the top tables again!

Familiars

Yet another Azorius deck and also another that performs excellently at Geddons, typically boasting the highest day2 conversion rate!

This is a Combo-Control deck that tries to stay alive early in order to execute a combo later in the game. 

The control tools include creatures that block very well, such as Sea Gate Oracle or God-Pharaoh's Faithful, and a slew interaction such as Negate, Prohibit, or Snap.

The combo part typically involves Sunscape Familiar(s) as spell discounting, Archaeomancer, Ghostly Flicker, and some payoff such as Faithful for infinite life or Murmuring Mystic for infinite birds. In the simplest of terms, with two Familiars, your Flicker costs {U}. Therefore, you can:

1. blink your Island and Archaeomancer
2. Island comes back untapped
3. Archaeomancer returns Flicker back to hand
4. You can perform step 1 again

All while you're casting Flickers as many times as you want, you're gaining life and/or making Birds.

Another card worth explicitly mentioning is Snap, which, in conjunction with Familiar, actually generates mana, as you pay {U} but get to untap two lands. Now, if one or both of those lands are Azorius Chancery, you're generating even more mana, turning your Unsummon into a proper Dark Ritual!

It's a hard but exciting deck that rewards hours of practice!

Mono White Aggro

A god-honest aggro deck of the white variety. You will notice the number of lands is on the higher side, and that's for a good reason - the deck has expensive spells, but also a ton of card draw. Every of eight Inspectors make Clues, you replay them frequently with Kor Skyfisher, and Milita Bugler draws into even more creatures, being a three-drop itself.

Moreover, there is an absolute banger of a four-drop in Battle Screech that will often make 4 flyers for four mana. It might not sound like an insane rate, but when you combine it with Guardians' Pledge as a mass buff, it becomes much scarier.

The perfect addition to the deck is recently printed Leonardo, Big Brother, who benefits from everything the deck was already doing. It picks up value creatures for another replay, it hits like a train thanks to us going wide with aforementioned Bird tokens - and you can even protect it from damage removal with Prismatic Strands!

This is a deck that went from tier 2.5 to possibly tier 1-1.5 overnight with Leonardo, but that shall remain unknown until Geddon itself!

Dimir Tempo Faeries 

I might be biased, but I think this might be the flavour of the month for the Faeries archetype. Popularised by yours truly, this deck wants to take advantage of the fact that you enact your tempo plan of early creature into a Ninja, but then bolster it with a suite of black removal to clear the way for the attacks.

While the black colour slows the deck a tad, it gains a lot in how the matchup spread shapes up - making matchups such as Spy or Elves winnable, which is a crucial consideration for a tournament like Geddon.

You can read more about the deck here and listen about it on my YouTube channel here.

Pizza Combo

This is my biggest wild card on the list. This deck barely existed a week ago, but with the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set, we received Guac & Marshmallow Pizza which happens to combo with an old classic - Devoted Druid. 

If you play Retraction Helix or Banishing Knack on Devoted Druid, you can tap it to return Pizza to your hand. Then if you play it, you untap the Druid and give it +2/+2, which allows you to tap Druid, and use Druid's -0/-1 ability twice, generating mana and using the Helix ability again to bounce the Pizza. The result is infinite casts of Pizza, with infinite green mana, an infinitely large Druid, and infinite bounce of the opponent's board.

This deck is far from refined, and I've already seen at least three completely different versions of it. I have high hopes to see some brave Devoted Druid gamers in Day 2 of Paupergeddon!

Conclusion

As you can see, the diversity of decks is unmatched, and the power level is surprisingly high for a format comprised entirely of commons!

I cannot wait for Paupergeddon, and I hope to see you there! And if not - make sure to tune in to coverage of the event live!