Prince of the Paupers

Tuesday night witnessed the first of Olly's deck building challenges; 40 card pauper.
The theme behind a pauper deck is that all cards must be common and all lands must be basic.

I'd like to say well done to Kevin for winning the tournament with his blue/black artifact build.

Other decks used were:

White/Blue Allies
White/Blue levellers
Mono Red Kiln Fiend
White/Green
Mono Black
Mono Red
Mono Green
Goblins
2x Black/Red Infect

Here is what I threw together for the event:

4 Plague Stinger
4 Ichorclaw Myr
4 Cystbearer
3 Corpse Cur
4 Vines of Vastwood
1 Adventuring Gear
1 Cultivate
1 Doom Blade
3 Virulent Wound
8 Forest
7 Swamp

I chose to play an infect deck for two reasons. Firstly, I played Phyrexian at the pre-release and wanted to represent my faction again. Secondly, poison can end games pretty quickly. There were a few games were I was landing 5 poison counters on turn 3.
My reasoning for Virulent Wound was 'ah its pauper most creatures will be 1 toughness therefore I can kill their dude and put them one step closer to Phyresis'. How wrong I was. I also thought more people would play black thus making Doom Blade irrelevant.
Adventuring gear proved pretty solid despite not being able to use fetch lands. Sending a 3/3 Plague Stinger or a 4/5 Cystbearer across the table always felt good.
Corpse Cur also proved itself. I thought most people would opt for a black or red build and the ability to return a creature with infect helped immensely by putting pressure back onto my opponents.

The deck performed reasonably well (finishing 2nd out of 12) although in a few games I either had mana flood or drought but then I suppose most decks can suffer from this problem.
In retrospect, I would replace the virulent wounds for doom blades as the blade always got me out of tight spots.
I would also have added another copy of adventuring gear as bigger infect creatures are always a plus.


John of Team Gambit