To begin class today, I’d like to explain my rather long hiatus. In the past month or so, I haven’t had more than five or six hours to do anything Magic-related, and those moments have been spent building and playing. Today, I’d like to delve into a deck that I built for my new favorite format: Pauper.

In my last article, I shared with you my first days of infancy in the Pauper format. Since that time, I’ve built about seven or eight decks, each of which is fun and enjoyable to play. It seems every time I play or research Pauper, I find some new idea. There are just so many options! If you play Pauper, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t play Pauper . . . you should! Today, I’d like to run through the process I went through in building my strongest Pauper deck. The deck turns out to be a familiar theme, as I’ve encountered nearly a mirror match in a handful of games, but the process itself can be an educational tool for deck-builders.

Finding Critical

When exploring a new format, combo/Johnny players like myself need to learn what the “critical turn” is. What I mean by critical turn is at what time in a game an unhindered deck will win. For example, if I built a simple deck using just a bunch of 2/1’s like Youthful Knight, I could win the game on turn six. That’s assuming a land drop each turn and having at least four Knight cards. Of course, this isn’t the fastest route or even a good deck, but it serves as an easily understood example. Now take that same deck concept and mix in a few Wojek Sirens, Akrasan Squires, and Hyena Umbras. With a proper mix, the critical turn is turn five. Still not an ideal deck, but if it were the quickest aggro deck, a combo player would need to “go off” by turn five or lose the game. Understand that if the combo player were to incorporate a Hurly Burly or Crypt Rats, he would gain a significant number of turns against this deck.

When I search for a critical turn, I almost always start with Red. In the color wheel, Red gets the most low-casting-cost, quick-hitting, high-damage-for-limited-mana cards. In years of old, it’s been a mix of concepts that put Red decks as the fastest available. Sometimes it was via creatures like Goblins, sometimes it was all sorceries and instants, like Burn Deck Wins, and mostly it was building the best of both with a proper mana curve like Sleigh and Red Deck Wins. In the realm of Pauper, all of these concepts are available. I chose to go with Burn Deck Wins.

Stage 1: Damage Based on Mana

I began my Burn building by looking for cards that would deal damage to target player. The list is quite extensive. Obviously, you can’t and shouldn’t use all of these cards. So I broke each card down to a basic damage-versus-mana ratio. As an obvious example, Lightning Bolt is better than Shock. The math of the cards would go like this: Lightning Bolt would score a 3 (3 damage divided by 1 mana) while Shock would score a 2 (2 damage divided by 1 mana). Cards like Fireball will never be good within this math structure ( damage divided by +1 mana is <1). So I looked at Gatherer and did the number-crunching and came up with the following list.

Name	Rating
Arc Lightning	1
Barbed Lightning	1
Burn Trail	0.75
Burst Lightning	2
Burst Lightning (kicked)	0.8
Chain Lightning	3
Fiery Temper	1
Fiery Temper (Madness)	3
Fire Ambush	1.5
Firebolt	2
Firebolt (Flashback)	0.67 (total for both)
Flame Burst	1
Flame Burst (#2)	2 (#3 = 3 etc.)
Flame Jab	1
Galvanic Blast	2
Galvanic Blast (Metal)	4!
Incinerate	1.5
Kindle	1 (see Flame Burst)
Lava Axe	1
Lava Spike	3
Lightning Blast	1
Lightning Bolt	3
Needle Drop	1
Quenchable Fire	0.75
Quenchable Fire (no )	1.5
Rhystic Lightning	1.33
Rift Bolt	1
Rift Bolt (Suspend)	3
Saute	1.16
Scent of Cinder	X/2 where X = Red cards in hand
Scorching Missile	1
Seal of Fire	2
Searing Blaze	0.5
Searing Blaze (Landfall)	1.5
Shard Volley	3
Shock	2
Sonic Burst	2
Sonic Seizure	3
Staggershock	1.33
Tarfire	2
Thunderbolt	1.5
Volcanic Hammer	1.5
Zap	0.33

A special card to note at this point is Fireblast. Fireblast is only a 0.67 by this rating when hard-cast, but it does some interesting math when you sac two Mountains for it. Now we are dealing with 4 damage and dividing by 0 mana cost. Now, you can’t actually divide by 0, but if you follow the logic, it’s pretty impressive. 4 / 4 = 1; 4 / 2 = 2; 4 / 1 = 4; 4 / 0.5 = 8; 4 / 0.25 = 16; 4 / 0.1 = 40; 4 / 0.01 = 400, etc. You can see that as we divide by smaller numbers, the rating gets higher and higher. So, theoretically, 4 / 0 is infinitely large.

Stage 2: Finding Your Land Count

So now we need to figure out our land count. We basically need to know for how many turns we need to consistently have a land drop in order to maximize our burning cards. If we go with too little land, we will take extra turns to play enough burn. If we go with too many, we won’t have enough cards to burn with. If we could make an average damage per mana from the above list, we could decide how much mana we would like to see in the early turns. But I can’t figure that out until I know how many cards I’ll take from the list. And I can’t know how many cards I’ll take from that list until I get a number of lands. It’s a vicious circle.

So what I did was look at two generic standards.

First I looked at the Lightning Bolt standard. 3 damage for 1 mana is currently the best card out there. Wizards has made many cards that do the same, but not enough to fill a deck. For our land count estimate, we’ll pretend that there is no four-copies rule and we can have as many Bolts as we want. In an all-Bolt deck, we need to use a cumulative total of 7 mana to win. It doesn’t matter how we play it; we can’t get there before turn four. With a land every turn, we would see these cumulative totals: turn one = 1, turn two = 3, turn three = 6, turn 4 = 10. Since we can’t land 7 before turn four, we can miss land drops and still be okay—meaning we can decrease our land count. We actually only need to see two lands in those first four turns: 1 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 7.

The second card we can standardize for Burn is Shock. I’d guess that Shock has been printed in more ways than any other vanilla card, so we could probably build an all-Shock deck. At the rate of 2 damage per 1 mana, we would need to reach 10 cumulative for the win. This can still happen on turn four, but only with a maximal amount of land in our deck. So I took these two extremes and looked at a chart I use for land count. I feel the need to mention that I did not do the math to make this chart; I made a copy of it years ago from a source I can’t find now.

16 total:

#1: turn one (one)

#2: turn two (four)

#3: turn three (nine)

#4: turn seven (thirteen)

#5: turn eleven (seventeen)

17 total:

#1: turn one (one)

#2: turn two (four)

#3: turn three (eight)

#4: turn six (twelve)

#5: turn ten (sixteen)

18 total:

#1: turn one (one)

#2: turn two (three)

#3: turn three (seven)

#4: turn five (eleven)

#5: turn nine (fourteen)

19 total:

#1: turn one (one)

#2: turn two (two)

#3: turn three (six)

#4: turn five (ten)

#5: turn eight (thirteen)

20 total:

#1: turn one (one)

#2: turn two (two)

#3: turn three (six)

#4: turn four (nine)

#5: turn seven (twelve)

21 total:

#1: turn one (one)

#2: turn two (two)

#3: turn three (five)

#4: turn four (eight)

#5: turn six (eleven)

22 total:

#1: turn one (one)

#2: turn two (two)

#3: turn three (four)

#4: turn four (eight)

#5: turn six (eleven)

23 total:

#1: turn one (one)

#2: turn two (two)

#3: turn three (four)

#4: turn four (seven)

#5: turn five (ten)

24 total:

#1: turn one (one)

#2: turn two (two)

#3: turn three (three)

#4: turn four (six)

#5: turn five (nine)

25 total:

#1: turn one (one)

#2: turn two (two)

#3: turn three (three)

#4: turn four (six)

#5: turn five (eight)

26 total:

#1: turn one (one)

#2: turn two (two)

#3: turn three (three)

#4: turn four (five)

#5: turn five (eight)

27 total:

#1: turn one (one)

#2: turn two (two)

#3: turn three (three)

#4: turn four (five)

#5: turn five (seven)

28 total:

#1: turn one (one)

#2: turn two (two)

#3: turn three (three)

#4: turn four (four)

#5: turn five (seven)

How this chart reads is as follows. The first number tells you how many lands you have in your deck. Under that is a list of what turn you can expect to play land #1, then #2, etc. These numbers are only on average, so I typically avoid using them. The number in parentheses is what you can expect with 85% certainty. The (numbers) are the ones I use.

So for sixteen lands, I stand a good chance of going having only one land for turns one, two, and three, then two lands for turns four through eight. That would mean 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 2 for a turn-five win in the Bolt deck. The Shock deck, of course, would need to go longer—1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2—for a turn-seven win.

As you can see, we need to fall between nineteen and twenty-eight. The lower number represents the amount of land I should have in my deck to be 85% certain of hitting my first two land drops. The larger number shows what it would take to have a land on each of the first four turns. I figure that my average damage per mana will fall in between these two extremes, so I went with twenty lands in my deck. The rest of my deck is comprised of burn cards with the highest damage-to-mana ratios possible.

"Pauper Burn v1.0"

• Spells (40)
• 4 Burst Lightning
• 4 Fireblast
• 4 Lightning Bolt
• 4 Shard Volley
• 4 Sonic Seizure
• 4 Tarfire
• 4 Chain Lightning
• 4 Firebolt
• 4 Lava Spike
• 4 Rift Bolt

• Lands (20)
• 20 Mountain

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This deck played out okay, but I too often found myself deep into turn six or seven when goldfishing it out. The reason why it was still slow is twofold. First I thought it had too much land. But when I replace a land with a burn card, my average damage goes down, which generates a need for more land. I moved my land count up and down, yet still I often lost with an opponent at 3 or fewer life. I don’t know if I have ever had a deck that needed to “top-deck” for the win as much as this one. This leads to the second reason the deck was too slow. It’s not the amount of damage it can do, but the number of cards it has available. Let’s look at the two examples I used above. In the Bolt deck, I can win on turn four but it takes seven spells and two lands to do so. If I’m on the play, that’s nine out of ten cards that need to be just right. In the Shock deck, I need to hit four lands and ten spells. Fourteen cards on turn four is impossible without any draw potential.

Stage 3: Damage Based on Card Count

So I went back to the drawing board and looked instead for cards with the highest damage-to-card-count ratio. That caused a change in my formula. Instead of taking Damage / Mana Cost, I now used Damage / Card Cost. Most burn spells play out rather simply because they only cost the card you’re using, so their damage amount is their only factor. Cards like Shard Volley that require extra sacrifice have to use the whole formula. 3 damage for two cards (card played plus land sacced) yields only 1.5 on my new scale.

I’m not even going to waste your time with the junk deck this formula yielded. When you’re packing cards like Lava Axe, you need tons of mana and tons of time to get there. Tons of mana weakens burn, and slow means dead in a burn deck as well. The most notable thing to come out of Stage 3 was the inclusion of Needle Drop. Like Fireblast that I mentioned above, Needle Drop goes infinite on the Damage / Card formula since it replaces itself as a card. That means we have 1 damage / 0 card cost.

Stage 4: Combining Formulas

I had reverted back to playing the original deck. Still, it nagged at me trying to justify the inclusion of Needle Drop. In terms of my original formula, it was weaker than Shock. But it still played out well enough to warrant its inclusion. So I tried to find some new way to evaluate my burn cards. It turned out rather simple, really. Just multiply both formulas together. So the new rating formula is Damage squared divided by Mana Cost times Card Cost. Here is a list of examples.

Name	Rating
Arc Lightning	3
Barbed Lightning	3
Burn Trail	2.25
Burst Lightning	4
Burst Lightning (kicked)	3.2
Chain Lightning	9
Fiery Temper	3
Fiery Temper (Madness)	9
Fire Ambush	4.5
Firebolt	4
Fireblast	2.67
Fireblast (sacced)	infinite
Firebolt (Flashback)	2.67 (total for both)
Flame Burst	2
Flame Burst (#2)	8 (#3 = 18, #4 = 32)
Flame Jab	1
Galvanic Blast	4
Galvanic Blast (Metal)	16 (4 counting artifacts as needed cards)
Incinerate	4.5
Kindle	2 (see Flame Burst)
Lava Axe	5
Lava Spike	9
Lightning Blast	4
Lightning Bolt	9
Needle Drop	infinite
Quenchable Fire	2.25
Quenchable Fire (no )	9
Rhystic Lightning	5.33 (1.33 if cost paid)
Rift Bolt	3
Rift Bolt (suspend)	9
Saute	4.08
Scorching Missile	4
Seal of Fire	4
Searing Blaze	.5
Searing Blaze (Landfall)	4.5
Shard Volley	4.5
Shock	4
Sonic Burst	4
Sonic Seizure	4.5
Staggershock	5.33
Tarfire	4
Thunderbolt	4.5
Volcanic Hammer	4.5
Zap	infinite

With this new rating system, I just took the best ten and then tweaked the land by a couple.

"Pauper Burn 3.0"

• Spells (38)
• 4 Fireblast
• 4 Lightning Bolt
• 4 Needle Drop
• 4 Staggershock
• 4 Zap
• 2 Lava Axe
• 4 Chain Lightning
• 4 Lava Spike
• 4 Quenchable Fire
• 4 Rift Bolt

• Lands (22)
• 18 Mountain
• 4 Forgotten Cave

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I know what you’re thinking. Zap? What is that? Why the Lava Axe? Quenchable Fire? Didn’t your last article talk about how easy it was to build a counter deck in Pauper?

Both Zap and Lava Axe find a quick chopping block. I totally agree with you. Zap might be able to go infinite because it replaces itself, but it isn’t how I want to spend my entire third land turn. Lava Axe barely made the cut with a rating of 5. Since the feasibility of reaching five land to play it is so low, it’s out of the mix. However, I kept the Quenchable Fire. I just like the idea of getting 6 damage from one card. I am going to decrease its number, though, since its casting cost is so high. The subs coming off the bench for these guys are all 4.5 ratings, so you can just take your pick.

I have six to ten cards to replace—maybe eleven if I decrease the land count.. In place of the Zap, I’ll go Volcanic Hammer (only because I have two foilies online). To replace Lava Axe, I’ll go with Shard Volley. Shard Volley shouldn’t be a four-of because of the drawback, but I am going to up it to three. To make room for the extra, I’ll decrease the Quenchable to three as well. Now my deck looks like this.

"Pauper Burn 3.0"

• Spells (38)
• 3 Shard Volley
• 4 Fireblast
• 4 Lightning Bolt
• 4 Needle Drop
• 4 Staggershock
• 3 Quenchable Fire
• 4 Chain Lightning
• 4 Lava Spike
• 4 Rift Bolt
• 4 Volcanic Hammer

• Lands (22)
• 18 Mountain
• 4 Forgotten Cave

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I really like this deck. Though I haven’t had time to sit down and play in any kind of high-level tournament, this deck has performed really well in the Tournament Practice room. I don’t know if I’m going to play it on a serious level. Ultimately, burn is too “normal” for me to enjoy playing.

I do know this. If you play Pauper, you need either a main-deck or sideboard solution to this deck. Burn decks of all varieties are very prevalent. There are many solutions available: life gain, discard, counter, and straight-up aggro speed are all possible winners.

The Creature Debate

Notice I have no creatures in this deck, and none were mentioned in the list above. Mostly this is because they don’t fit the formulas. But the main reason for me excluding them is the fact that my opponent will have dead cards against me. What good can a Grasp of Darkness do when I play no critters? For the sake of being comprehensive, there are only three creatures I’d consider for the deck.

Spark Elemental – This card is essentially a burn card anyway. What I don’t like about it is the fact that its formula is too variable depending on the game state. With an opponent with no blockers, it evokes a 9 rating, but with a blocker out, it can drop to a 4, 1, or even 0.

Keldon Marauders – The Marauders face the same issue as the Elemental. If unblocked, they chime in with a rating of 12.5. If they are blocked, however, they falter down to a 2 on the final rating. At least Sparky has Haste.

Kiln Fiend – Kiln Fiend is tough to math out. Let’s just go with it being unblocked and safe from destruction for the moment. It basically becomes a multiplier in the formula. Now when I play a Lightning Bolt the unblocked Fiend does 3 extra damage, so the playing of Bolt now does 6 total damage for only 1 mana and one card (6 × 6 / 1 × 1). That makes its rating jump from a meager 9 up to a 36! Of course, if it’s blocked or destroyed, it does nothing for you. I’m tempted to put it in sideboard. That way, if my opponent takes out his removal, I can bash face. However, it only takes a Grizzly Bears to defeat that plan.

So for now, I’m going creatureless.

Class Dismissed

I hope you liked today’s lesson. Next time, I’ll bring you another deck that I’ve been tossing around the Pauper scene. Next week’s deck uses a little less math, but it’s also a little more “outside the box.” Until then, enjoy the spring weather.