The New Forms of Pauper Tron

Posted on March 30, 2022

Over the last few months, without a doubt the biggest deck everyone's had all eyes on has been Affinity. The deck has put up significant numbers since the release of Modern Horizons 2 and even through a number of bans continues to be a major player in the meta. Despite Affinity being the star of the show over the last year, though, another archetype has loomed in its shadow: Tron.

Tron has long been a boogieman of the format. There have been many versions of the archetype over the years, each with different varieties of themselves as well. This could range from a few card choices to entire color inclusions or removals. For years, it's been one of the most reviled archetypes as it brings about slow, unfun game patterns. The Pauper Format Panel opted to try bringing this archetype back to earth a bit with the removal of a couple key cards: Prophetic Prism and Bonder's Ornament.

The hope here was that it would allow Tron decks to exist still, but not be quite such a five-color soup of whatever good stuff it could find. It seemed to be arguably a bit too effective, though, and Tron ended up dropping out of the meta quite a bit, though it did continue hanging on a tiny bit. And so, the Panel decided it was time to unban Expedition Map to help give it a little extra juice. This seemed reasonable, given it was seen by the Pauper community at large to have been a bad ban originally, with Tron lists simply switching to Crop Rotation instead.

The unbanning of Expedition Map seems to have had the desired effect: improving Tron lists without being too overbearing in the meta thus far. With it comes a whole bunch of new versions of Tron that I'd like to talk about and perhaps introduce to you today! Let's start with a pair of more familiar ones - two Flicker Tron lists that both made it in the 5-0 Magic Online league lists last week:

Flicker Tron | Pauper | RClint21, 5-0 MTGO Pauper League

Sorceries (1)
1 Compulsive Research

Flicker Tron | Pauper | Erostratus, 5-0 MTGO Pauper League

Both of these lists are newer and more current takes on the classic Flicker Tron archetype. There were a number of players who bemoaned the death of the deck with the bannings of Prophetic Prism and Bonder's Ornament. Clearly, the rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated. We got not just one, but two different Flicker Tron lists in the past week's Magic Online league results!

Both lists are pretty similar at their core with each relying on the classic flicker loops of Mnemonic Wall and Ephemerate or Ghostly Flicker to lock down and control games. RClint21's list looks like it's playing with a lot more variety in its options than Erostratus' list. One interesting thing to note about RClint21's list is that despite the recent Expedition Map unban, there are zero copies in their list! Erostratus is running the full four, though, but is notably also running copies of Honored Heirloom and Network Terminal for fixing and some additional abilities.

If you've seen Tron lists at all over the last couple years, those lists won't be too much of a surprise. The biggest surprise for many is that the archetype is still around and doing well, and it wouldn't be much of a stretch to assume that we'll see it more in the future. There has been some awesome spice recently, though, so let's check out some of those lists, starting with a sweet Gruul Tron list!

Gruul Tron | Pauper | Jogandopelado, 5-0 MTGO Pauper League

Sorceries (4)
4 Ancient Stirrings

Now, me calling this Gruul Tron is almost misleading. For all intents and purposes, it's basically a Mono-Green version that just happens to be splashing in a little Red for a couple potent effects. This kind of Tron deck is much more straightforward and is a lot simpler in its approach. It's less of a control deck and is more of a big mana aggro deck than anything else. With this big mana at your disposal, you're able to spit out some of the biggest creatures the format has to offer like Ulamog's Crusher, which not only goes for your opponents' life total but their board as well.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it bears some resemblance to Modern Tron and Legacy Cloudpost decks - both of which bring down giant creatures for cheap. Pauper doesn't have any big eldrazi titans, Wurmcoil Engine, or Karn Liberated so we make do with what we've got. Ulamog's Crusher is obviously the biggest, but the others are no slouches either. Both Maelstrom Colossus and Self-Assembler allow you to find more cards to keep your engine going. Fangren Marauder, on the other hand, gains you a ton of life for simply sacrificing some of your artifacts. It's extra helpful as well against Affinity matchups too where instead of getting killed by your opponents sacrificing artifacts, you can gain a ton of life instead.

If you want a good, simple Tron list to play with, this is your deck. If you want something a little different and more challenging, though, you should see this last Tron variant that's gotten a ton of buzz lately:

Combo Tron | Pauper | SanPop, 5th Place MTGO Pauper Challenge

Enchantments (1)
1 Jace's Erasure

This list is absolutely wild. It's a combo variant of Tron, clearly taking some degree of inspiration from the various Storm lists of the last year or so. The deck utilizes tons of card draw artifacts for a continual engine of card advantage. With a couple copies of Foundry Inspector - a largely unused downshift from Double Masters - these artifacts turn into zero drops that draw you cards and allow you to machine gun through your deck fast. This allows you to do a number of things, such as using Scattershot and Weather the Storm to take out opposing creatures and maxing out your life total, respectfully.

The real way to win, however, is with the cards Golem Foundry and Jace's Erasure. Once you get your deck down to virtually no cards in your deck, you can start looping multiple copies of Conjurer's Bauble. Doing this allows you to get either an infinite number of creatures from Golem Foundry or an infinite number of mill effects from Jace's Erasure. It can also give you infinite life with Fangren Marauder, but by that point in the game, such a thing feels like overkill. If you need to buy a little more time after your combo turn as well, you can use Frantic Salvage to put a bunch of cards back into your deck to allow you time to do things like get in for the kill with your golem tokens.

All of these lists represent a different face of Tron and is exactly the type of variety that was envisioned when the recent Tron-oriented bans and unbans happened. It'll be interesting to see how these decks continue to shape up within the meta over time. For now, though, they provide some cool new ways to play the format and are definitely worth your time to check out. Give them a shot at your next Pauper event and let me know what you think of them!

Paige Smith

Twitter: @TheMaverickGal

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TAGS articles, constructed, tron, analysis, decklist, pauper, paige smith, 03302022