One of the defining elements of Magic: The Gathering over the years has been its willingness to contradict its own rules. It doesn’t matter what the 300-page comprehensive rules tome says: if something on a card goes against it, then it works as written. Perhaps the most well-known example of this phenomenon is the “a deck can have any number of cards named…” group, which undermines the four-of restriction that otherwise governs most of Magic.
Most of these cards have devoted fan followings, which, sadly, never really translate into competitive success. This week, however, Persistent Petitioners managed to buck that trend in a big way. In a 123-player MTG Pauper tournament, RaoniOchoa piloted a Simic Persistent Petitioners deck to a stunning top eight finish. With the deck also seeing regular results in recent MTGO events, it may finally be time for this long-running meme card to finally claim a real place in the metagame.
Simic Persistent Petitioners In MTG Pauper
Simic Persistent Petitioners is, essentially, an MTG Pauper Mill deck with a strong typal angle. It relies on the titular card as its primary win condition, and runs a bunch of Advisors to support it.
The main plan here is to use Petitioners’ second ability a few times to completely mill your opponent out. In fact, you only really need to use this ability five times to mill out most players, once you factor in the starting seven and a few turns’ worth of play.
RaoniOchoa runs 12 copies of Petitioners in the deck, which pretty much guarantees they’ll see one or two copies early in the game. The rest of the creatures in the list are all cheap Advisors, to help you get to milling as soon as possible. While Advisor is a niche type, there are a surprising number of creatures with it, that also offer some nice utility to the deck.
Glistener Seer is one of the best, as a one-drop that can filter your draws to help you find Petitioners if your copies get removed. It also has excellent defensive stats, which is crucial in a deck like this. Even with optimal draws, this is a fairly slow strategy, which means you’ll need good blockers to really make it work.
Up in the two-drop slot, Pond Prophet, Bellowing Crier, and Avatar newcomer Forecasting Fortune Teller all provide Advisor bodies with card advantage attached. This helps keep the flow of bodies on board going, which in turn helps you mill as often as possible.
Keeping Things In Order
Since Persistent Petitioners wants four creatures in play regularly, this is a very creature-heavy deck. There are 35 creatures here, in fact, which rivals the likes of Pauper Elves, one of the most single-minded decks in the format. Because of this, RaoniOchoa is able to run Winding Way, one of Pauper’s best niche draw engines, to keep things trundling along.
The really interesting thing about Simic Persistent Petitioners in MTG Pauper is, despite being so stacked with creatures, it’s actually a Control deck at heart. All of the card advantage is a big part of that, but so too is the deck’s considerable suite of answers and lifegain.
Take Masked Vandal, for example. The card has become a bit of a Pauper favorite by this point, since it can exile opposing artifact lands. It also hits threats in Affinity, like Refurbished Familiar. The card is typically played for that utility alone, but here it also adds another Advisor to the mix, thus pulling double duty.
This list also runs the full complement of Gnaw to the Bone, which pairs perfectly with the grindy game plan. You’ll naturally accrue a lot of creatures in your ‘yard as you attempt a Petitioners win, so this can easily gain you double-digit life. It’s also great tech against Burn, since you can use Petitioners on yourself to guarantee a life-saving burst heal from the card.
These tools help you stay alive long enough to make milling your opponent out a real possibility. You might have to endure some waves of removal first, but in the end, Petitioners’ ability, unlikely as it seems, will actually win you the game.
An Unexpected Breakthrough
It’d be easy to dismiss RaoniOchoa’s incredible finish with Simic Persistent Petitioners as a mere anomaly, but recent MTG Pauper data suggests otherwise. Over the last couple of months, according to MTG Decks data, the deck has gone from a niche player to a regular fixture at Pauper events.
The addition of Forecasting Fortune Teller in Avatar can account for some of this success, but things go deeper than that. Put simply, Persistent Petitioners has great matchups against many of the top decks in Pauper right now. Mono-Blue Terror, for example, mills itself regularly to get its threats out for cheap, which does a lot of Petitioners’ work for it. Jund Wildfire is also a solid matchup, since it lacks efficient answers to cheap creatures on board to prevent the milling. It also suffers heavily against the main deck playset of Masked Vandal.
Not every matchup is ideal for Petitioners, of course. Faster decks like Mono-Red Madness and Grixis Affinity are rough since they can just run you over before you really get going. They also rely mainly on Fliers like Sneaky Snacker for combat damage, which are difficult for your largely ground-based Advisors to block. Even with Gnaw to the Bone, it’s hard to hold these decks off.
Overall, Persistent Petitioners is in a pretty solid spot in Pauper right now. It’s not a dominant deck by any means, but the fact that it’s performing well at all is honestly worthy of note. Wacky decks like this are what give Magic its soul, so it’s brilliant to see them succeed.
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