Despite being a format made up entirely of commons, Pauper is chock full of powerful combo decks. Whether you’re a fan of closing games with reanimation effects or generating infinite mana, there are plenty of unique combos to take advantage of.
To this day, players continue to come up with new combo brews, too. Over the last few days, a sweet Golgari Food combo deck emerged and has started to gain some traction. Following a top eight finish in a Pauper Challenge, it appears that this intriguing build has a lot going in its favor.
Working Towards a Combo Kill
As you might expect, the main engine behind Golgari Food Combo is none other than Cauldron Familiar. Since its printing, this pesky cat has seen tons of Constructed play, mostly in Standard (when it was legal) and Pioneer sacrifice shells. While Witch’s Oven may not be Pauper legal, Cauldron Familiar eventually emerged as a powerful grindy tool thanks to Lembas from MTG Lord of the Rings. Now that Nutrient Block and Instant Ramen have both joined the party in 2025, there are finally enough cheap, colorless Food cantrips to enable a more consistent combo-centric build.
The goal here is to find and stick a copy of Ashnod’s Altar to pair with Cauldron Familiar. From there, you can sacrifice Cauldron Familiar to net two colorless mana, which you can use to cast one of your 16 Food cantrips or Myr Retriever and try to churn through your library. Any excess mana can be funneled into Clockwork Fox, which draws you multiple cards when you sacrifice it to Ashnod’s Altar. All the while, Cauldron Familiar’s enters effect continues to whittle away at your opponent’s life total.
As you continue to prolong the game, eventually, you can set up a spot where all you have left in your deck are your copies of Lembas that you shuffled back into your library. At this point, you can continue casting, sacrificing, and redrawing Lembas over and over, draining your opponent of all their life.
As powerful as this combo deck is, though, it is very reliant on finding Ashnod’s Altar and Cauldron Familiar in a timely manner. Obviously, your Food cantrips play an important role in getting you closer to your combo cards, but decks like Burn won’t give you a ton of time to spin your wheels. Luckily, this deck features some key elements that help find your missing pieces in swift fashion.
Consistency and Speed
To accelerate your search for Ashnod’s Altar, both Malevolent Rumble and Cache Grab dig four cards deep for the low price of two mana. Rumble even comes with an Eldrazi Spawn token to boot, which can always be sacrificed to Altar for additional mana on your combo turns.
What makes these two options so strong is that any cards you don’t select to put into your hand go directly to your graveyard. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a copy of Ashnod’s Altar into your hand and a copy of Cauldron Familiar into your graveyard, ready to be resurrected on command. Meanwhile, in sideboarded games, being able to Mill over Coffin Purge or Moment’s Peace is a big bonus.
Although it can be a bit awkward drawing too many of these colored spells during your combo turns, it’s important to remember that Golden Egg‘s color-filtering ability will sometimes come in clutch. Alongside the playset of Many Partings, you shouldn’t have any problems casting Cauldron Familiar or Duress out of the sideboard when needed.
Strengths and Weaknesses
As a whole, Golgari Food Combo has a lot going in its favor. First and foremost, unlike some other dedicated combo decks, Golgari Food Combo is well set up to fight against both aggressive archetypes and grindy midrange strategies.
Any assertive deck that is looking to attack on the ground with small creatures is going to struggle against the Cauldron Familiar army. The life gain Cauldron Familiar and Weather the Storm provide is the cherry on top, making it much harder to get burnt out. At the same time, though, the combo kill excels against slower decks like Glintblade and Golgari Gardens that fail to apply pressure.
Additionally, Golgari Food Combo is more resilient to hate cards such as Relic of Progenitus than you might think. As long as you build up a board with multiple Food sources to sacrifice, it’s tough for the opponent to break up your Cauldron Familiar synergies in a meaningful way.
Of course, this doesn’t mean there aren’t weaknesses to worry about, as your matchup against Tempo shells like Mono-Blue Faeries can be a bit tough. Unfortunately, most of Mono-Blue Faeries’ threats attack through the air, reducing Cauldron Familiar’s effectiveness as a blocker. Furthermore, landing Ashnod’s Altar against an array of counter magic isn’t easy, especially since Spellstutter Sprite is completely immune to Duress.
Fast starts out of Elves can also be problematic, since the combination of Timberwatch Elf and a wide battlefield can be tough to overcome given your lack of removal. The presence of Nyxborn Hydra as a way to turn any creature into a huge Trampler only makes things worse. In this sense, Golgari Food Combo looks far from being the next broken breakout Pauper deck. Regardless, the reliable gameplan the deck presents makes it a formidable foe, so don’t be surprised if you see it pop up more and more moving forward.
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