I’ve been trying out some Pauper on Magic Online between draft rounds, and mostly sucking. It’s a format where you absolutely have to be doing something unfair with your deck to be in with a chance, even if it’s a 3/2 flyer on turn 1. I’ve also not met a huge variety of decks – the vast majority of players are on Mono-Blue, and there are spatterings of Mono-Black disruption, Storm, Mono-Green Cloudpost, UR Cloudpost, some graveyard decks and some aggro. Okay, so it sounds pretty varied now I write it down, clearly I’m lying.
Most of my first attempts were Cloudpost and Urzatron variants. I tried a UW version that landed Rhystic Circle to prevent all damage ever, in the vague hope that an Ulamog’s Crusher would later win the game (hint: it didn’t), and experimented with UB to see if the extra mana made Mystical Teachings at all useful (hint: there’s nothing worth teachings for in the format). I then tried a deck I dubbed MEGATRON, which had the full set of Urza lands and all 8 loci, hoping there was something to do with all that mana (hint: see previous hints). So, many casual games later, very little fun had.
However, trawling through Pauper-legal card listings, today I discovered a card I hadn’t yet seen anyone playing, or even heard of: Presence of Gond. I originally thought this would combo with Nettle Sentinel, but obviously that doesn’t work, at which point I turned to Innistrad limited stalwart Midnight Guard. Looking for unfair things to do? Infinite creatures on Turn 3 ought to work:
| Midnight Gond (60) 4 Preordain 4 Ponder 4 Avacyn’s Pilgrim 4 Quirion Elves 4 Presence of Gond 4 Midnight Guard 4 Drift of Phantasms 4 Totem-Guide Hartebeest 1 Faith’s Fetters 1 Guard Duty 1 Shielding Plax 4 Spell Pierce 4 Evolving Wilds 8 Island 7 Forest 2 Plains | Sideboard (15) 1 Faith’s Fetters 2 Guard Duty 4 Dispel 4 Ranger’s Guile 4 Turn Aside |
Plenty of library manipulation, and after boarding surprisingly resilient against counters and instant removal. You even get to have a nice Totem-Guide Hartebeest package as a side-effect of wanting to tutor up Gond’s presence, whom the flavour text reliably informs me is dead. But at least we know his grave is well guarded at night, I guess.
You can probably come up with a better counter package if you have the cards, and the mana could do with some work, but it actually works. One thing I’d quite like to incorporate is Sigil of the Nayan Gods, which would in some cases make you a turn faster as you could just attack with an infinitely large guard.
At the very least, this deck has allowed me to upgrade from the Casual Play room to the Tournament Practice room, and that’s great for my ego.
Update: yeah, so everyone’s had this idea, apparently. SO MUCH FOR BEING EXCITED ABOUT MY SHINY NEW DECK. THANKS, INTERNET.
