Over the years, many combo decks have thrived in Pauper. Balustrade Spy and High Tide combo are both top tier strategies at the moment, showcasing a healthy mix of speed and resiliency.
While these archetypes are near the top of the food chain, sometimes, other sweet combos will pop up unexpectedly. Today, we’re going to feature one such example. Following a surprise 5-0 run in a Pauper League, this combo managed to reappear out of nowhere. One underrated Edge of Eternities discard spell makes it easier to set up your engine. It’s nice to see this shell pop up with some newer tools, so let’s take a closer look at what the deck has going for it.
The Combo
The combo this deck utilizes revolves around two key cards. The first is a Scarecrow from Shadowmoor that utilizes a rather strange mechanic. Rather than using a tap ability, Pili-Pala has an ability that requires you to untap the creature.
The other piece of the puzzle is Careful Cultivation. This common aura allows the enchanted creature to tap to produce two green mana.
The goal is to suit up Pili-Pala with Careful Cultivation. That way you can generate infinite mana by executing the following steps:
- Tap Pili-Pala to float two green mana
- Activate Pili-Pala’s untap ability with the two floating green mana, adding one mana of any color to your mana pool
- Now that Pili-Pala is untapped once again, you may tap it again to float two green mana and repeat this process over and over
Once you generate infinite mana, you just need a way to win the game. A simple card like Engine Rat will suffice, since you can sink your mana into its activated ability and force your opponent to lose infinite life.
Churning Through Your Library
For a deck that relies on two key combo pieces as well as an infinite mana payoff, you need ways to dig for these cards in a timely manner. Luckily, Pauper features elite card advantage elements that make it easy to churn through your library.
First up, Malevolent Rumble is an incredible tool to have access to. Pili-Pala, Careful Cultivation, and Engine Rat are all permanents you can find off of Malevolent Rumble. The 0/1 Eldrazi Spawn is no joke, either, especially when you factor in the wealth of card draw spells that require you to sacrifice a creature or artifact as an additional cost.
That brings us to the next group of cards that help find your combo pieces: Fanatical Offering and Eviscerator’s Insight. Both of these cards are solid card advantage machines that see lots of Pauper play, so their inclusion here isn’t too surprising. With Ichor Wellspring in the mix, these cards only get stronger. Khalni Garden produces fuel for these cards as well.
Resiliency
From there, once you’ve assembled your combo, you need ways to protect it. Pili-Pala is only a 1/1 and it has Summoning Sickness. You need to get it into play and protect it for a turn cycle. If your opponent is ever able to kill it with Careful Cultivation on the stack, you’re in a world of trouble.
With this in mind, you’ll find a healthy mix of disruption and protection spells. Your primary piece of interaction is Temporal Intervention. Temporal Intervention was a card I personally thought would see more Pauper play than it did. Assuming you can trigger Void, you get an awesome discard spell that can strip your opponent of any problematic nonland card.
Between Eviscerator’s Insight, Fanatical Offering, and Eldrazi Spawn tokens from Malevolent Rumble or Writhing Chrysalis that can be sacrificed at will, Temporal Intervention is super reliable in this shell. Unlike Duress, Temporal Intervention takes away creatures from the opponent.
Given how prevalent Spellstutter Sprite is as a piece of counter magic, having a way to pave the way for Pili-Pala against Faeries is nice. Plus, Temporal Intervention messes with Balustrade Spy combo more effectively, helping to buy you time to execute your own combo.
As for protection spells, Tamiyo’s Safekeeping is a decent option. It’s an important card against decks with lots of targeted removal.
Notable Weaknesses
As fun as this combo is, it does have some weaknesses that have held it back in the metagame. One of the biggest ones comes against burn. Burn decks are able to apply lots of early pressure and back up this pressure with cheap burn spells that serve as answers to Pili-Pala. Meanwhile, your removal is limited, so if Kessig Flamebreather or Guttersnipe stick, things get even harder.
Lava Dart is your worst nightmare. It threatens to kill Pili-Pala, and thanks to Flashback, using Temporal Intervention to get rid of it doesn’t really get you anywhere.
What is nice about this combo deck, though, is that some of the best pieces of disruption in the format outside of burn don’t meaningfully interact with you. Your deck successfully dodges all “Blast” effects for the most part. Your Eldrazi Spawn tokens make Tithing Blade much less concerning. Krark-Clan Shaman doesn’t interact with fliers, so it can’t kill Pili-Pala.
Sometimes, landing multiple copies of Writhing Chrysalis will be enough to win you games by themselves, or at least force opponents to burn their removal spells on the big Eldrazi. Remember, Careful Cultivation does have a Channel ability that sets up a turn three Writhing Chrysalis nicely.
All in all, Pili-Pala combo is still vastly overshadowed by other combos, but the addition of Temporal Intervention does give it some hope. Perhaps the archetype will make a bit of a resurgence over time.
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