While there were some expectations going into June 29th’s MTG ban announcement, only one of the eight bans was expected. The dreaded Pauper two-card combo using Hawkeye’s Bow left the format, allowing a new deck to become viable. With a top-eight appearance in a 100-player event and a 5-0 league finish, this new Pauper lifegain combo might be the most boring way to win a game of MTG.
Infinite Life Through Infinite Toughness
This new Abzan deck is a unique take on the Nomads En-Kor combo decks that occasionally appear in Pauper. By targeting a creature with your Kor’s ability infinite times, you can endlessly trigger Daru Spiritualist or Task Force, giving them infinite toughness. With this set up, Sheltering Word and Devour Flesh can both be used to gain infinite life, making you nigh-unkillable.
As strong as this plan is, gaining infinite life isn’t enough to win a game on its own, but this combo deck seems to have found a way around that. Instead of using a combo kill involving something like Inside Out, this deck just waits for your opponent to deck out naturally. To stop you from befalling the same fate, this deck runs a copy of Sagu Wildling‘s Omen that’ll keep shuffling itself back into your library.
While most decks don’t run Omen spells, some of your opponents can also do this, meaning you need a way to get around it. Balustrade Spy is your answer, milling all of an opponent’s Omen spells out near the end of the game. If your opponent tries to do the same, four copies of Lembas can buy you some needed time, while Nihil Spellbomb can exile their Lembas in response to their triggers.
An Extremely Strong Gameplan
All in all, this infinite lifegain Pauper combo deck looks quite strong. Despite it being an extremely boring way to win a game of MTG, it has the tools to beat all of Pauper’s most popular decks. With plenty of protection spells in the maindeck and eight more free ones in the sideboard, this deck is well-prepared for matchups like Mono-Red Madness and Grixis Affinity.
While counterspell tempo decks like Mono-Blue Terror can cause the deck some issues, they also seem like decent matchups. Counterspells can delay the combo long enough for Mono-Blue to cross the finish line, but infinite toughness creatures can block Tolarian Terror for days. If that weren’t enough, Devour Flesh is a clean answer to the Snakes.
That said, this deck does have some more questionable matchups. Interestingly, the ban of Seeker of Skybreak is what made this deck viable, as the Hawkeye’s Bow combo is a direct counter to it. No matter how much life you choose to gain, infinite damage will always beat infinite life, after all. Because of this, if the new Hawkeye’s Bow combo utilizing Tidewater Minion gains popularity, this deck could have an unwinnable matchup.
While rather uncommon, Persistent Petitioners mill is a deck in MTG Pauper, representing another unwinnable matchup. Lembas will buy you four turns of reprieve, but it won’t be enough to outlast the mill deck. Adding a card to the sideboard that could discard Lembas from your hand, however, could fix that.
With everything under consideration, this Pauper lifegain combo deck appears to be extremely well-positioned in the metagame overall. So long as its protection spells are enough to combat the format’s removal, there’s little that many decks can do to stop this lifegain combo. Should this be the case, we’ll likely be seeing a lot more of this combo in the future, but for now, that remains to be seen.
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