Often times, when big Magic: the Gathering tournaments happen, deck lists are posted and players flock to the standings to find new fun decks to play. Well, today Wizards of the Coast posted the standings for the Pauper Preliminary tournament on Magic Online. Let’s just say that the results were interesting.
The Worst and Best Deck
Top tier strategy here, playing 60 basics and NO sideboard! We have seen these cards in multiple top contender decks across multiple formats, so the choices here does make a ton of sense. My one criticism of the deck is the lack of Islands. Island is the most powerful card in all of Magic, so the deck is shooting itself in the foot for this obvious omission.
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How Did This Happen?
Meme’s aside, how could something like this actually happen? Well turns out, this was an organized event. The story goes that since Modern Horizons 2 has completely turned the Pauper format on it’s head, with cards like Chatterstorm, Sojourner’s Companion and the tapped artifact dual lands, combined with what seems like WotC’s lack of desire to regulate and support the format, the players went on a proverbial strike.
What happened was that a bunch of players queued into this preliminary event with all basic lands. One person queued in with a real deck, and then scooped in the finals to the deck we see here. This is a statement from the player base that they’ve had enough of the format that they love being neglected by Wizards. This goes to show the power of Modern Horizons 2. We talked about this at length, but we didn’t really touch Pauper, and this really showcases the impact that the set has.
Apparently the strike hasn’t gone unnoticed, because literally as I’m writing this, Wizards announced on Twitter that there will be a banned and restricted announcement next week that will impact Pauper.
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What are your thoughts on this? Do you think that Wizards should be more active in maintaining the integrity of all formats, regardless of how many players play the format? Or do you think that they should be thinking about all formats when they are designing sets? Let us know in the comments
