Pauper: First Impressions of the March 31st Bans

The bans are out. The March 31 update to Magic: The Gathering's competitive formats brought significant changes to three environments: Modern, Legacy, and Pauper.

In the commons format, three pillars of the current Metagame were removed along with a few unbannings:

Basking Broodscale and Kuldotha Rebirth were the main starts of two of the best decks in Pauper, while Deadly Dispute and its interaction with Ichor Wellspring were the backbone that enabled several archetypes, and removing them brings new perspectives to the format.

Meanwhile, Prophetic Prism, a longtime staple of the format, returns after almost three years since its ban, and is accompanied by High Tide, a card that entered the list when Pauper was unified between paper and digital, being one of the preventive interventions of a card that never had its moment on Magic Online.

So, what do these changes mean for Pauper, and how did these cards end up banned from the format? In this article, we evaluate the repercussions that the new banlist can bring to the Metagame!

There's not much to say about Basking Broodscale. In several articles and videos, I've mentioned how its play pattern and the amount of deckbuilding concessions that a two-card combo forced on other archetypes made a ban on Sadistic Glee or Basking Broodscale a matter of when it would happen rather than if it would happen. That "when" has finally come.

There were doubts whether PFP would see the need to ban Deadly Dispute from Pauper due to its interaction with Ichor Wellspring which virtually turns it into Ancestral Recall and has become the best source of card advantage in the format, to the point of homogenizing Pauper's deckbuilding.

While this intervention affects Affinity, it is a hit on the entire format. Without Dispute, decks like recent variants of Pactdoll Terror or Mono Black Aristocrats also become considerably worse, and other strategies that also used this engine for extra value, like the Jund Wildfire that stood out in Paupergeddon, take a huge stab with this intervention.

However, it doesn't kill any of these archetypes. They will need to adapt, some of them won't be as good without the extra mana from Dispute, but at the same time, the format is getting slower, which means it's safer to play with Eviscerator's Insight or Reckoner's Bargain without suffering so much from losing an “extra turn”.

There are several ways to categorize Kuldotha Red in Pauper. Some consider it unpleasant to play against, others consider it the best option in the format because it offers the best cost-benefit in terms of time and rewards in Leagues, and some consider it a very fair deck.

My perspective has always been that, after the banning of Monastery Swiftspear, Kuldotha Red took on two roles in Pauper — the first was to police the Metagame. It was always the archetype who put in check strategies that were too degenerate and/or that tried to go for very long games, such as Tron, Jeskai Ephemerate, among others.

The second was the role of litmus test. For your list to succeed in a Pauper tournament, it needed to be ready to face Kuldotha Red — a fact proven by the Paupergeddon, where it had the best conversion on Day 1, but the worst conversion to the Top 32 among the most played archetypes.

This problem is usually solved by putting more lifegain and/or cheap sweepers in your list to delay your opponent's plans long enough, but there were few lifegain options that were truly versatile in dealing with the deck outside of Weather the Storm.

Unlike Burn, Kuldotha Red had the perfect mix of explosive potential (Rebirth + Goblin Bushwhacker), permanent power with every two-power-for-one mana creature it can play, and tons of gas from the interactions of Experimental Synthesizer, so a Lone Missionary did very little to slow down your opponent's clock.

In theory, this mix would be enough to ban something from Kuldotha Red to facilitate interaction, and Kuldotha Rebirth, while permanently killing the archetype, is the most sensible choice. But that doesn't mean it will only bring benefits.

As mentioned above, Kuldotha Red was the archetype to hold back certain strategies, which can be very taxing to play against, and with the unban of Prophetic Prism, it's only natural that Tron and other strategies trying to go late-game will have more space — and no Pauper player who lived through the days of Flicker Tron would want to revisit the archetype and have it as one of the best decks in the Metagame because its experience, both in MTGO and in tabletop tournaments, is very unpleasant.

Pauper's health will now depend on who will be the next Metagame watchdog and what the new litmus test will be. At first glance, the likely candidates are Gruul Ramp, Affinity — it survives without Deadly Dispute —, Faeries and some variant of Blue Terror.

As for Kuldotha Red, the deck is dead, and it will be necessary to reevaluate lists and possible micro-interactions with artifacts and Experimental Synthesizer in red to continue taking advantage of Goblin Tomb Raider and Goblin Blast-Runner, perhaps with Improvised Club.

Another option involves going full Goblin to take advantage of Goblin Grenade, but it doesn't have the same permanent power that Implement of Combustion and Experimental Synthesizer provide, although it is possible to mix both shells in a single list.

High Tide has a peculiar history in Pauper. Or rather, the lack of a history. It was banned from the format when Wizards merged paper Pauper with Online and never had any chance to prove its potential in the format — one of the biggest criticisms of its ban at the time.

In eternal formats, High Tide has been accompanied by untap land effects, and almost all of them are banned from the format, except for Snap and Twiddle. Technically speaking, both would be enough to, with Archaeomancer and Mnemonic Wall, create some looping combinations that could lead to infinite mana and/or to extract streams of value with several ETB effects from your creatures, and in a color that can carve its hand and protect itself.

It should also not be forgotten that there are two land cycles in Pauper with Island types and tutorable with Lorien Revealed, which opens up a wide possibility of splashes or two-color versions of High Tide showing up in the format for more interactions and/or protections. But the spell only adds an extra for each time it is cast, and not mana of other colors. Therefore, the splash will have to be limited in some way.

The victory conditions don't differ much from what Familiars proposes with Sage's Row Denizen or even the possibility of using spells like Capsize, and the amount of work around interactions with it are, in fact, very similar to Familiars, just in a different color and in a way that requires a one-shot to generate the best value possible from a High Tide, or to end the game.

The Pauper Format Panel made it clear that this unban is a test, and it seems assertive that it is treated in this way. We cannot, however, neglect that High Tide creates click-intensive decks and these tend not to demonstrate as much performance in Challenges since they are more taxing to play with, while their results in tabletop games can be considerably different — it is a nature of these looping archetypes and has occurred similarly with Nadu, Winged Wisdom in Legacy.

That said, using the argument of “there are eight Red Blasts in the format” to unban High Tide while they banned Kuldotha Rebirth because it “demanded too many answers in Games 2 and 3” is very contradictory.

The unban of Prophetic Prism was expected for months, and it was extremely assertive of the committee to bring it back to the format on the same day that they removed Deadly Dispute — it works as a compensatory trade where Pauper gains efficient manafixing, but loses the biggest source of card advantage in the format's recent history.

Archetypes that benefit from Prophetic Prism were also blessed with the banning of both Basking Broodscale and Kuldotha Rebirth. After all, paying two mana on your turn to “do nothing” meant a severe punishment from the faster archetypes, so an artifact’s interaction with the battlefield needed to be a bit more than just a draw.

The obvious winner will be Tron, but the circumstances that seem to be aligning with the format today do not indicate that it will be a predominant archetype in the format: Faeries and Terror remain strong decks and Tron has always been a strategy that Blue Tempo has preyed on while taking on Midrange — a category that today is mainly composed of Affinity, and this one has enough versatility and a fast enough clock to pressure the opponent.

Speaking of Affinity, it is possible that the deck will run a few copies of Prism initially, but it should not remain as a 4-of for long: Affinity’s mana base is solid enough that it only needs two copies of some manafixing now that it has lost Deadly Dispute — if needed, a new version of the archetype may emerge with two colors now that Hydroblast is no longer as mandatory.

The bans on March 31st represent a substantial change in the way Pauper is played in the coming months. Particularly, some of these interventions felt more like playing to the crowd than necessary, but a Pauper Format Panel that remains active and has the courage to make bold decisions is preferable to a committee that is inactive regarding the Metagame's needs.

The lack of further intervention in Affinity is a concern at the moment. Krark-Clan Shaman is still a notoriously strong card with Ichor Wellspring and places too heavy restrictions on go wide decks while generating too much value in the archetype simply by interacting well with artifacts, and without Kuldotha Rebirth to justify having a “one-mana sweeper”, it is difficult to imagine good reasons for it to remain in the format.

Except for these two points, the choices were assertive, bringing a breath of fresh air to Pauper that has partially needed it for some time and removing one of the most troublesome archetypes of the recent Metagame, possibly expanding the space for deckbuilding in the lists — still with the need to prepare Deglamer and Dust to Dust to deal with the "best deck", just like we do for almost four years.

Thanks for reading!