Pauper is a favorite format of mine, especially since the banning of Cloud of Faeries has added a substantial amount of diversity to the format. In the wake of the banning, the format is powerful enough to allow for very competitive games, but diverse enough for people to brew up something awesome. Something like this gem from i-n-s:

Sprouting Vines Combo ? Pauper | i-n-s

• Spells (43)
• 2 Gigadrowse
• 3 Sprouting Vines
• 3 Tolarian Winds
• 4 Brainstorm
• 4 Gush
• 4 Impulse
• 4 Manamorphose
• 1 Kaervek's Torch
• 4 Inner Fire
• 4 Preordain
• 2 Conjurer's Bauble
• 4 Chromatic Star
• 4 Lotus Petal

• Lands (17)
• 17 Island

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Gigadrowse
• 4 Hydroblast
• 4 Gut Shot
• 4 Accumulated Knowledge
• 1 Flaring Pain
• 1 Kaervek’s Torch

Buy This Deck

Any constructed deck that actively wants to play Sprouting Vines has my attention. This deck is looking to sculpt a hand with cantrips for the first three or four turns and then try to do something crazy. The key cards you’re looking for are a Red source, a Manamorphose, Sprouting Vines, Inner Fire, and Tolarian Winds. That’s a lot to ask for off the back of Preordain, Brainstorm, and Impulse, but when you get there, it’s beautiful.

On the combo turn, this deck wants to chain together free spells like Lotus Petal and Gush to generate a huge Storm count. Then you can use a combination of Lotus Petals, Chromatic Stars, and Manamorphose to generate Green and Red mana. Then you want to cast Tolarian Winds, hold priority, and respond with Sprouting Vines to fill your hand with Islands and thin your deck of a whole mess of lands. Once all of your Sprouting Vines and the subsequent Tolarian Winds resolve, you should be drawing upward of fourteen cards with which to stitch together a win. The way this deck actually ends up winning the game is chaining together Inner Fires, Manamorphoses, and cantrips until you have enough mana to Kaervek's Torch for lethal.

This deck is a massive glass cannon. It’s fragile, so it loses to itself frequently, and when there are a reasonable number of decks capable of forcing interaction with cards like Duress, Dispel, and any number of Ravenous Rats and Liliana's Specters, it quickly becomes very difficult to assemble the critical mass of cards necessary to combo off. Despite all of its problems, the deck is awesome, and its existence makes Pauper much more diverse.