Pirates have long been a fun favorite in pop culture as far back as I can recall. They were all over children's shows and cartoons growing up, and in the 90s and 2000s you had both multiple renditions of Treasure Island (Muppet Treasure Island and Treasure Planet), as well as the multiple Pirates of the Caribbean films. That doesn't even get into the multitude of pirate-related video games either. In short, it's not very difficult to see why Magic players were so eager to get their hands on a pirate world set.

No one could've expected the madness that was Ixalan - a world where you didn't just have pirates, but dinosaurs and vampires as well. It felt like a truly zany mashup on paper, but weirdly, it worked with a surprising amount of cohesion. Despite a lower power level, it was clear players loved it. As such, it wasn't too much of a shock when they announced a return to this world only six years after the initial block with The Lost Caverns of Ixalan. Naturally, that meant more of everyone's favorite creature type: dinosaurs! No, wait, I mean pirates!

Yes, a lot of the hype seemed to be surrounding the dinosaurs, which are similarly an extremely novel creature type. However, it was clear the pirates were getting a bit of love. I wanted to find some way to cover them, however with a full Commander precon based around the creature type, it felt a little pointless. Instead, I turned to a different medium and settled on Pauper Commander on the back of one of the new uncommon legends: Captain Storm, Cosmium Raider.

The first time around, Captain Lannery Storm was a rare in the original Ixalan, and proved to be quite a force in certain decks. Here she returns once more but as an uncommon. The original iteration made a ton of treasure tokens and it's clear that this new version was made as a way to work in tandem with that effect. Utilizing plenty of artifact generators, you can pump up your pirate army and play a lot of artifact synergy cards in the process. There's plenty of both at common, so that seems like it should work in theory.

Let's check out a decklist and see how things ended up looking!

Captain Storm's Crew | Pauper Commander | Paige Smith

• Commander (1)
• 1 Captain Storm, Cosmium Raider

• Creatures (27)
• 1 Aarakocra Sneak
• 1 Archaeomancer
• 1 Ardent Elementalist
• 1 Azure Fleet Admiral
• 1 Boarding Party
• 1 Brazen Blademaster
• 1 Brazen Freebooter
• 1 Burdened Aerialist
• 1 Crimson Fleet Commodore
• 1 Fathom Fleet Firebrand
• 1 Frostwind Invoker
• 1 Goblin Tomb Raider
• 1 Grabby Giant
• 1 Impulsive Pilferer
• 1 Ingenious Artillerist
• 1 Kitesail Corsair
• 1 Kitesail Skirmisher
• 1 Mistwalker
• 1 Orcish Vandal
• 1 Plundering Pirate
• 1 Prosperous Pirates
• 1 Reckless Fireweaver
• 1 Sailor of Means
• 1 Siren Lookout
• 1 Sunshot Militia
• 1 Talas Lookout
• 1 Trove Tracker

• Instants (11)
• 1 Abrade
• 1 Big Score
• 1 Counterspell
• 1 Displace
• 1 Fiery Cannonade
• 1 Ghostly Flicker
• 1 Gush
• 1 Into the Roil
• 1 Izzet Charm
• 1 Lightning Bolt
• 1 Unexpected Windfall

• Sorceries (8)
• 1 Compulsive Research
• 1 Deep Analysis
• 1 Distant Melody
• 1 Elemental Masterpiece
• 1 Lorien Revealed
• 1 Pirate's Prize
• 1 Preordain
• 1 Treasure Cruise

• Enchantments (2)
• 1 Fall from Favor
• 1 Makeshift Munitions

• Artifacts (12)
• 1 Amorphous Axe
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Beamtown Beatstick
• 1 Experimental Synthesizer
• 1 Fire Diamond
• 1 Goldvein Pick
• 1 Izzet Cluestone
• 1 Izzet Signet
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Pirate Hat
• 1 Runed Stalactite
• 1 Sky Diamond

• Lands (39)
• 10 Mountain
• 11 Island
• 1 Ash Barrens
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Forgotten Cave
• 1 Great Furnace
• 1 Halimar Depths
• 1 Izzet Boilerworks
• 1 Lonely Sandbar
• 1 Molten Tributary
• 1 Mystic Sanctuary
• 1 Prismari Campus
• 1 Remote Isle
• 1 Seat of the Synod
• 1 Silverbluff Bridge
• 1 Smoldering Crater
• 1 Swiftwater Cliffs
• 1 The Autonomous Furnace
• 1 The Surgical Bay
• 1 Volatile Fjord

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Making this deck turned out to be way harder than I expected it to be. My thought when picking up Captain Storm was that there were plenty of good artifact synergies and also that there were a decent number of pirates to be had. Moreover, many pirates did things like make treasures, meaning you could get a lot of value out of them in the process. As it turns out, a lot of the pirates that do that at a serviceable rate are at higher rarities and while there's a lot of artifact synergies in Blue and Red, you miss out on a lot by not having access to other colors as well.

Artifacts are whatever, you can make them work. There's enough decent artifact cards on rate and still a handful of reasonable synergies to make solid plays with them. Unfortunately, the same can't be said when it comes to pirates. Simply put: there aren't very many good pirates at common. This is largely due to the fact that we didn't really see any pirates until Aether Revolt (outside of a handful in early Magic) and then we didn't see a critical mass of them until Ixalan. As it happens, Ixalan block was notoriously weak, and the earliest pirates came from Mercadian Masques and the Portal sets - all of which isn't exactly a high bar in terms of power level.

This problem gets exacerbated by the fact that there are only six pirates that make Treasure tokens. Five of those - Brazen Freebooter, Burdened Aerialist, Pondering Pirate, Prosperous Pirates, and Sailor of Means - all make the tokens when they enter the battlefield. There's also Impulsive Pilferer which makes the token when it dies, which makes it somewhat counterintuitive for what you're trying to accomplish. I was still able to pull in a reasonable number of other pirates and changelings, but most of them are more combat oriented and are somewhat middling on the whole. A couple like Azure Fleet Admiral, Crimson Fleet Commodore, and Boarding Party are decent, but they're more exceptions to the rule from more recent sets (I'll come back to this in a bit).

So, if the pirates weren't able to provide the artifact synergy needed, the next obvious place to look through was the artifacts themselves. Surely there had to be a decent amount of ones that could be utilized for a deck like this. As it turns out, it too was a bit less than you might think. There's a decent handful out of the gate that makes sense enough: mana rocks. Between Arcane Signet, Izzet Signet, Fire and Sky Diamonds, Mind Stone, and even Izzet Cluestone, you get a reasonable amount of hits. Things quickly dry up from there, though.

Beyond the mana rocks, I was only able to pull a grand total of nine artifact spells by a quick head count. Of those, I ended up cutting three: Universal Automaton, Faerie Mechanist, and Myr Enforcer. Universal Automaton was just too weak and Faerie Mechanist lacks the density of artifacts to be worthwhile - even if it triggers Captain Storm. Myr Enforcer was similarly affected by this low artifact density because it would be too difficult to reliably cast it cheaply. Although they're not artifacts, this was also why I cut out cards like Reverse Engineer and Gearseeker Serpent as well. I did keep in a handful of solid choices, though, such as Beamtown Beatstick and Goldvein Pick to make more treasures, as well as Amorphous Axe and Runed Stalactite to make non-pirates into pirates. This does, however, make the artifact count generally feel pretty low, which is unfortunate.

A big issue I had here is how a lot of the artifacts in Pauper are typically approached. When you have a lot of artifact centric decks, you tend to rely on a lot of artifacts that are played in multiples. You can't do that in a 100-card singleton format, which hinders their impact. Something like Chromatic Star and Chromatic Sphere is good there where you have several of them to churn through your deck and fix your mana, but here it doesn't usually get you too deep or allow for very deep synergies. Ichor Wellspring is another great example, being that its power is in how it can draw you a card when you play it and then you bounce it and/or sacrifice it for extra value. In a deck like this where you might have a couple sacrifice effects but it's not the focal point, that becomes extremely hard to achieve, making the card far less useful in a list like this.

What's more, a lot of the big synergistic cards are in other colors. For example, I kept wanting to put Cranial Plating - a card banned in 60-card Pauper but not Pauper Commander - but couldn't because of its Black color identity. This also applies to the various Deadly Dispute-style cards that often get played with these decks, and Blood Fountain. Even going back to Ichor Wellspring, one of the new big cards in The Lost Caverns of Ixalan is Mephitic Draught, which is a very similar ability but in Black. There's also Tithing Blade in the new set which again is a Black artifact. All this is to say that there aren't quite as many useful options as you'd likely think.

Given all this, I also ended up trimming down a good amount of my artifact synergies. I already mentioned cutting down the likes of Reverse Engineer, Gearseeker Serpent, and Myr Enforcer. What I didn't mention was how I also had several ways of sacrificing artifacts like Peregon Strongbuff and Embraal Gear-Smasher that could sacrifice artifacts to chip away at opponents' life totals. I did leave a couple like Orcish Vandal, Makeshift Munitions, and Grabby Giant in the list, but that's because they felt like they did a little more and it was still good to have them around. I did end up cutting out ones like Galvanic Blast and Kuldotha Rebirth for being too inconsistent in their playability, however.

Now, I know what you're probably thinking: "Paige, why would you write about this deck if you're not able to make the core strategies work as well as you'd hoped?" Well, dear reader, there're a few ways to approach this that I think make it a little bit better than it initially looks. First off, let me just put it out there simply: this is basically just a play creatures and swing kind of deck for the most part. It's extremely no frills and you're just going to be going after opponents' life totals. To some people, that's boring, but in the last year or so I've found some of the most enjoyable games come about when playing a deck like this when you usually try playing a Johnny/Jenny style deck most of the time. People like to be creative and flashy, but sometimes, it really pays to just get back to basics a little bit.

The second area is that I was able to put together something that Pauper players might find a little bit, well, familiar. That is to say, we're getting up to some good old flickering nonsense. I included in this list the likes of Archaeomancer and Ardent Elementalist. Both of these are great for picking up certain cards like Counterspell, Big Score, and Distant Melody for some rock solid value plays. The real fun begins when you start using Ghostly Flicker and Displace. The usual play is to cast the flicker spell on, say, Archaeomancer, and then use it on some other value card like Stonehorn Dignitary or Mulldrifter. I tried avoiding most of the usual suspects and instead opted for a simpler solution: targeting artifacts or else targeting your pirates that make Treasure tokens. Doing this, you can often get lots of extra incremental value while also pumping your pirates, thereby making the weak little pirates into much more formidable forces.

The last area is more a general and long-term aspect. The simple fact of the matter is that up until now, we haven't seen very many pirates. They only showed up as major players in weak early sets, a weak block (original Ixalan), and small-to-decent players in sets like Commander Legends, Modern Horizons 2, and The Lost Caverns of Ixalan. In short, they really just haven't had as much chance to shine as many other creature types. Despite this, they're clearly a fan favorite, and I'd bet strong money we'll see many more pirates in the years to come. That means while the options here may seem weak at face value, it provides plenty of opportunities to build upon what's here as time goes on.

Even if the deck does "seem weak," the reality is you'll still be able to beat peoples' faces in with all the piracy you've got going on here. That goes back to what I said earlier: just because you're not doing anything particularly flashy doesn't mean you still can't have a great time with it. What's more, you can take a lot of these cards and work up to a more expensive non-Pauper Pirate deck if you so choose. Give it a shot, I'm sure you'll have a wonderful time piloting it at your next Commander night.

Paige Smith

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