Stompy back on top in Pauper

After the banning of Peregrine Drake, people expected midrange decks such as Murasa Tron and MBC to rise to the top again.

Curiously this has not been the case.

This is the metagame today

1. Stompy 12.5% (29 decks)
2. Delver 12.07% (28 decks)
3. Affinity 12.07% (28 decks)
4. Kuldotha Boros 9.05% (21 decks)
5. Elves 6.47% (15 decks)

Five aggro decks! MBC is nowhere to be seen. Tron is at #6.

Why? I believe the metagame is still in flux and that perhaps people are just picking midrange decks that are too slow. For now Pauper seems to be an aggrofest. If you want to play more than one color you better make it Affinity or Boros.

Here is a sample 5-0 Stompy deck. Some choice suprise me. Wild Mongrel and Basking Rootwalla are tested and found to be wanting long ago in the Stompy lists. I don't see what makes them viable now.

Main Deck
2 Basking Rootwalla
1 Bonesplitter
1 Epic Confrontation
16 Forest
2 Garruk's Companion
4 Groundswell
2 Mutagenic Growth
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 Quirion Ranger
4 Rancor
2 River Boa
2 Silhana Ledgewalker
4 Skarrgan Pit-Skulk
2 Vault Skirge
4 Vines of Vastwood
2 Wild Mongrel
4 Young Wolf

Sideboard
3 Epic Confrontation
4 Gleeful Sabotage
2 Gut Shot
2 Natural State
1 Relic of Progenitus
3 Scattershot Archer

Do you have any thoughts on why aggro is dominating a format supposed to be dominated by midrange? How did Drake deal with all this aggression so successfully? Or did it?

Pauper Gauntlet competitor #62 Mono Green Tokens

What if we played Stompy but just had many more creatures? This deck was originally by Deluxeicoff but was requested by patrons of patreon.com/magicgatheringstrat (anyone who contributes get to make video request) and submitted to the Pauper Gauntlet by one such patron.

There is no SB plan and no play instructions, so if anyone want to help out with those I will be most grateful.

Here is a video of the deck made on a patron request.





Deck list

16 Forest
4 Khalni Garden
4 Might of the Masses
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 Tukatongue Thallid
4 Young Wolf
4 Sprout Swarm
4 Scatter the Seeds
2 Safehold Elite
4 Fists of Ironwood
4 Essence Warden
4 Nest Invader
4 Scion of the Wild

Sideboard:
3 Sylvok Lifestaff
3 Moment’s Peace
3 Spidersilk Armor
2 Night Soil
4 Gleeful Sabotage

Pauper Gauntlet Competitor #1 The Green One by Deluxeicoff

The Pauper Gauntlet is returning to mtgolibrary in November.

I will present some of the competing decks here and on magicgatheringstrat.com in preparation.

The Green One earns a spot in the third season of the Pauper Gauntlet by getting a top 10 result last year.

For this year, I managed to get Deluxeicoff to talk about sideboarding. After three years of talking with the Pauper Master Brewer, this is the first time I get him to give me any advice on sideboarding, so that is a milestone :)

The idea behind the The Green One is to make an even more aggressive version of Stompy that goes for the face.

The Green One

2 Uktabi Drake
4 Vines
3 Bogle
4 Bonesplitter
1 Flayer HUsk
4 Vault Skirge
4 Ledgewalker
4 Quirion Ranger
4 Hunger
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 pit-skulk
4 Rancor
16 Forest
2 Khalni Garden

SB
1 Longbow
4 Archer
3 Spore Frog
4 Moment's Peace
3 Faerie Macabre

Sideboarding advice
Delver...add 4 scattershots and 1 bow, lose 1 vines, 1 rancor, 3 ledge
Gobs/aggro...add 3 frogs and all 4 moment's - lose 3 boggle, 2 vault, 1 vine, 1 ranger
Graveyard combo (fae/mill etc) add 3 fae macabre, 3 scattershot, 1 bow, lose husk, 2 rancor, 1 hunger, 1 bonesplit, one ledge
Affinity - board same as gobs, but keep 2 vaults in and take out another vine/ranger
MBC - add scattershots to eat edicts depending on build - losing ranger, rancor, vines (1 each - mbc pretty easy matchup)

Don't discount the drake - often times if the game goes mid-long (rare) topdecking one of these with some bonesplitters laying around can be a quick green-flying ball lightning - VERY often vs. control/teachings styles, they exhaust your critters, and tap out thinking they'll have a turn for answers, nope!

For more details about the Pauper Gauntlet S03 starting on November 8th here on mtgolibrary, check out this video

We have a winner of the Pauper Gauntlet S02

Two decks enter, one deck leave. Stompy and Burn went into the tournaments rounds this week, playing a two-man tournament each.

BURN vs MBC
Burn ran into MBC with Gray Merchants and Corrupt!

Stompy 
Stompy faced its nightmare matchup: Hexproof. Deluxeicoff once said that this match is 97-3 for Hexproof.

The End

As one deck won and the other lost, we now have a winner of the Gauntlet. Congratulations to the deck and to denofbears, who was its champion. He wins two foil paper Shocklands and a MTGO Elspeth, Sun's Champion.


Basic facts
What is the Pauper Gauntlet? 
http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-pauper-gauntlet.html

Full list of the 77 Pauper Gauntlet decks for the second season: 

http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2014/09/the-decks-of-pauper-gauntlet.html

What now?

I will present the final result of the Gauntlet and then we will discuss the Pauper Gauntlet itself and how to improve it for a possible third season in the next article. After that this five month journey is over. Thank you so much for following the Gauntlet. 

The Pauper Gauntlet enters the Tournament Rounds

We started this adventure in August with 77 decks and after a turbulent round 9 we now only have two decks left. One of these will be the winner - maybe even this week!

It is Stompy vs Burn.

The result of round 12 was surprising.

Stompy ran into my Magic mentor, Power_T, playing RB LD Flashback (?).

Burn went up against Affinity. I have played this matchup from both sides several times in the Gauntlet and I feel that Burn is slightly favored. My opponent disagreed. He managed to land the right number of early 4/4s and proceeded to destroy me.

So with both deck losing in round 12 (after they both went 11-0), the Gauntlet goes into the tournament rounds.

Here are the competitors:


Stompy 
Championed by Denofbears
This very aggressive weenie deck has crushed every opponent with cheap green creatures and pump spells.
Deck list here: http://magicgatheringstrat.com/2014/07/pauper-gauntlet-competitor-13-stompy/

Burn 
Championed by jphsnake
Casting 7 lightning bolts to the face is still a viable tactic in magic it seems. Despite having played this deck a lot I only had a 55% winning record before I switched to this build right before the Gauntlet. And it seems to have worked!
Deck list: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/11/the-top-decks-of-pauper-burn.html

Upcoming rounds
Round 13 is the two-man round. Both decks play a two-man tournament. There is about 50% chance that the Gauntlet continues into round 14 after that (if both decks win or both decks lose).

Round 14 is the eight-man round. This should settle things. I sure hope it does because if it doesn't I am going to have to play middle-of-the-night Pauper Daily Events in round 15. More about that next week if it happens, but hopefully we will have a winner to present here.

Which deck do you think will win the Pauper Gauntlet?

Basic facts
What is the Pauper Gauntlet? 
http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-pauper-gauntlet.html

Full list of the 77 Pauper Gauntlet decks for the second season: 

http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2014/09/the-decks-of-pauper-gauntlet.html

How can you follow the Pauper Gauntlet?
The twitter account @MagicGathStrat tweets whenever a video is uploaded to the two YouTube channels that feature the Gauntlet: MagicGatheringStrat and sngprop.

Pauper Gauntlet competitor #5 Green One

The Pauper Gauntlet is coming to mtgolibrary. You can submit your Pauper brews starting August 31st right here. Please do not submit any decks yet.

Some of the deck lists of the competing decks that are pre-qualified by different means will be presented here. This is deck #5.

Earlier blog posts:

Deck #1 Illusory Tricks: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2014/06/pauper-gauntlet-competitor-1-illusory.html
Deck #2: Love Train http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2014/06/pauper-gauntlet-competitor-2-love-train.html

Deck #3: Exhume Control   http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2014/07/pauper-gauntlet-competitor-3-exhume.html
Deck #4: Izzet Control. http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2014/07/pauper-gauntlet-competitor-4-izzet.html

Deluxeicoff has long been a Pauper master with a preference for Green decks (and aggressive quick decks so he can do chores around the house between tournament rounds). He played Stompy for the longest time and wrote an excellent article on the deck here: http://puremtgo.com/articles/pauper-stompy?page=1

At some later point he returned to the Green aggro list and revised it, with the help of David Shaffer, to be even more aggressive. The result was "Green One", an extremely aggressive green deck. 

The basic strategy is just to kill the opponent blindingly fast.

Green One by Deluxeicoff

16 Forest
3 Khalni Garden

4 Slippery Bogle
4 Bonesplitter
4 Silhana Ledgewalker
4 Skarrgan Pit-Skulk
4 Vault Skirge
2 Young Wolf
4 Nettle Sentinel
3 Uktabi Drake

4 Vines of Vastwood
4 Rancor
4 Hunger of the Howlpack

Sideboard
2 Viridian Longbow
2 Young Wolf
4 Hornet Sting
4 Moment's Peace
3 Spore Frog

Bonus video: Me playing the deck against Stompy (!)

You can follow Deluxeicoff's brewing and ask him questions on his facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Deluxeicoff

Learn more about the Pauper Gauntlet here: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2014/06/the-pauper-gauntlet-is-coming-to.html

Contact me
Facebook: facebook.com/magicgatheringstrat
Web: magicgatheringstrat.com
Blog: mtgolibrary.blogspot.com

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