Locations
If you missed it last week, I wrote an article for MagicTheGathering.com about Pauper Commander. The premise was very straightforward: Make a Commander deck with just commons, your Commander included.
I'm not going to steal too much thunder from my planned follow-up article, as the community response was pretty awesome (thanks again, everyone!). Instead, I want to highlight something that became extremely obvious to anyone playing decks and watching games: At any rarity, certain things always show up in Magic.
Well . . . duh.
I'm not talking about creatures and spells (hurr, hurr!) but some of the concepts and approaches that are common to Commander. There's a certain finesse to wrangling ninety-nine-card singleton decks, and several approaches to gaming the game there hold true regardless of restrictions.
The end result was a little startling.
There's Never Enough
For the record, I created the same type of deck that I love so dearly: a token-making, face-smashing attack deck. At common, this generally means Green and White effects, and thusly my Commander of choice was Sir Shandlar of Eberyn, a mighty force of defensive toughness.
I won't spoil the deck list entirely, but the usual Pauper suspects of Sprout Swarm and Selesnya Evangel were in place along with Pauper creature-pumpers like Parapet and Veteran Armorer. I chose this route for three reasons:
- Token strategies benefit most from global pump effects.
- There is little real mass removal at common.
- Access to a tutoring suite.
Global pump effects are usually permanents in Commander. Things like Eldrazi Monument and Akroma's Memorial make things very tricky for opponents to handle and hasten your own ability to kill. In Pauper, a handful of defensive-boosting permanents exist, but to go offensive requires you to dip into the Glorious Charge family of products.
I ran a combination of "pump" spells, and I counted a few Lure-type effects as pump as well, since the bodies would come blasting through unhindered. The reason I'm highlighting this is that any mass of creatures can quickly turn a game around given the chance.
In one game, I was down on board and life, having worked politically to knock out the first guy to start going off with Sprout Swarm. The other player who had happened into the powerful instant took the calculated risk of knocking out the other remaining player, believing my lack of significant board growth would be cleanly outstripped by Sprout Swarm.
That choice is a common one in multiplayer games: Kill the more dangerous-appearing players, leaving the injured or weakest link behind. The problem with this reasoning is how a handful of token creatures are so often undervalued. With five cards in hand, I dropped three pump effects in one turn and struck across, forcing awkward blocks and putting the follow Green/White player into a tough, defensive position.
That strike made Sprout Swarm insufficient to maintain parity. The following turn, I played my last but most expensive pump effect, and drew the kill.
Just like in every other Commander game.
Universal Lesson 1: Never leave your pants down it you can avoid it.
The reason Akroma's Memorial and Eldrazi Monument are so common in Commander is that taking an easily acquired, abundant resource (token creatures) and converting them into damage-dealers for just a turn or two can end a game quickly.
Sometimes, the correct course is powering out a win quickly. Striking while the pressure is on can let you slip away before defense mount. More often, however, players will reserve a spell that gets them back into a game for as long as they possibly can. Whether it's my fully armed and operational Rhys the Redeemed deck or the rough Pauper approximation thereof, holding my global pump for the right moment to strike is correct.
I had about ten creatures on the board, compared to the opponent's similar number, but the fistful of fire I had hidden took the opposing life total from 32 to 9 in one swing. That's Pauper. I've wiped an entire four-player game up in one combat step with more powerful cards.
While offense isn't often a defense at all, you should at least be mindful of having a defense before you go offensive. And that's a lesson I learned in the first Pauper Commander game I played: If there's a card that does it, odds are good an opponent will hit you with it at some point.
Similar to the second game, I had a handful of creatures on the board but nothing in the way of advancing development. Instead of Red/Green and White/Green decks, two Blue/Black decks were part of the game. Thanks to work on my Pauper Cube, I know that Evincar's Justice would be floating around somewhere in one of those two decks.
Evincar's Justice is pretty unique for a common; there really isn't anything else like it. Unlike Pestilence or Crypt Rats, which have a tendency to fall away on their own, Evincar's Justice is a 2-damage-to-everything spell that comes with Buyback. Unless it's countered outright, it never goes away.
Those effects, specifically the Justice, led me to include every permanent toughness boost I could, but that didn't mean I'd have it at the right time. In another game, Evincar's Justice blew my board away (it actually blew everyone's board away, for that matter) and, thanks to Buyback, I'd remained fairly locked out of the rest of the game.
Universal Lesson 2: If there's a Wrath of God effect, someone will play it.
Card-advantage theories in multiplayer are a bit sketchy. There is less consensus on how important political finesse is, or how many cards certain behaviors are worth. Mass removal is often seen as card advantage: I trade my one card away for your many cards. Simple enough.
But when that one card causes most of the table to turn their resources on you specifically, a quick reset suddenly turns into a prolonged effort to resist incoming attacks. You may end up spending much more in resources trying to stay stable than if you had held the wipe a little longer.
Political maneuvering and timing of plays, and how these two concepts interact, isn't at the top of every player's mind every minute.
While the Evincar's Justice did reset the board, it also caused others to focus fire in return. While there wasn't much for me to do, it didn't take long for the destroyer of boards to crumble. The eventual winner was the other Green/White deck massing an unanswered swarm.
When playing Commander, you must not only account for Wrath splash damage among your permanents, but also for rebuilding quickly and counterattacking after something sweeps things clear. Sometimes, you can predict or foresee that a Wrath is incoming, such as when another player begins extending eagerly, pushing harder than someone else is comfortable with.
Even when dealing with just commons, Wraths will come.
Which led me to the final surprising overlap between Pauper and "normal" Commander: Tutors are still everywhere. While recursion effects, like Scrivener and Anarchist, or Gravedigger and Reclaim, can often be tutors, there aren't any deep effects that will fill up a graveyard.
Most tutors fetch right from the library, netting you exactly what you want. While the most famous tutors (Tinker, Demonic Tutor, Gamble, and others) aren't legal in Pauper, there are some very powerful ones that are.
Universal Lesson 3: Tutors are absurdly powerful in every format.
With Green/White Pauper, you actually have quite a two very potent tutors (among a sea of land-fetching):
Both of these can be leveraged for full effect; getting the biggest, strongest creature in your deck is often all that was needed to crank up the offense (and, in most cases, the retrieved creature was Ulamog's Crusher—Eldrazi also feature in every Commander format). The Hartebeest was what I built around, alternatively grabbing Rancor or Armadillo Cloak power-ups for my little guys, or Cage of Hands or Faith's Fetters as lock-down effects (amid most of the Pacifism family).
This was highly successful for me, and other tutors witnessed did their job well too, such as these standouts:
Every deck I saw seemed to carry as many of these effects as it could, and used them to grab the most powerful things that were eligible. Mystical Teachings could pick up any one of Black's numerous kill spells, Ray of Command for mid-combat shenanigans, or even something as mundane as Frantic Search. Goblin Matron could tutor for Goblins that were removal (Skirk Marauder) or recursion (Warren Pilferers). I've touched on White and Green. Trinket Mage is the classic equipment-grabber of choice. The list could go on much further.
Again, that's all with just commons.
You're Boring
Why even run down some of these obvious features of Commander? Let's look at this another way: Have you ever tried something new? What's the first thing you do while trying it? If you're like me, and most other people, you immediately begin comparing things to something you already know.
Pauper Commander, using only one of the ten Legendary creature commons from Masters Edition III, could have been a very scary prospect. Most of the cards in Commander that are considered "necessities" are uncommon (Sol Ring) and rares (Sword of Fire and Ice). Confined to just commons, almost every player, myself included, responded by translating known strategies into Pauper parlance.
While playing with commons was actually very refreshing (No Sol Ring into tutoring for Darksteel Forge!), it was also frightening how similar cards were applied as functions, mimicking the experience of the core Commander format. Everything was different, yet the same—all at once.
Which brings me to turning things over to you, again.
[poll id="14"]
I'm looking to try something a little different, and Pauper Commander was just another step in playing online without breaking the bank. There are certainly more ways to play without going overboard, and I'd like to hear what you want to see most! Sound off in the comments and I'll catch you next week!
