Exploring the Current Pauper Metagame: Insights and Trends

Howdy folks! It's time yet again for another edition of The Power of Pauper! This week we're going to be taking a look at where Pauper is at with the metagame. Currently, we are sitting at around a little over 2,000 decklist entries with an estimated number of 11,179 matches.

Pauper is in a place where much of the format is aggro-centric. There's a lot of various aggro decks in the format, from Madness Burn builds (both Rakdos and Mono Red) to decks like card-ref:Elves and current builds of Affinity being much more aggressive than in the past.

Many of the aggro decks that are popular are also not pushing the format very hard in terms of raw win rates. Madness, Affinity, and card-ref:Elves both sit around between 49-52%, which is very reasonable. The decks that I think are doing the best here are actually a lot of the control/midrange variants. Decks like card-ref:Terror, Gardens, and card-ref:Jund are all very strong.

On the combo side of things, we have seen decks like Spy Combo be very good, and there's a new Inside Out combo deck that's popped up that looks to be great. Overall though, I think Pauper is doing great at the moment. There's a lot going on, but much of the gameplay is still rather good, despite how much aggro persists.

One thing I will probably be doing going forward, however, is establishing some classifications for decks like Naya Gates and Selesnya Gates. These decks have some different things going on but don't currently have raw specifications to separate out those differences.

All in all though, Pauper seems fine, and I don't see a need to make any changes at the moment. Are you having fun with Pauper? Let me know in the comments below.

Weekly MTGO Recap This was a pretty normal week with just the regular events on the docket. Across the week, we had around 167 decklist entries for the whole week. Not too terrible. All of the events had 50+ players, with the highest being 61 players, which isn't too bad.

The most played deck of the week was Mono Red Madness at 22 copies, but its overall win rate wasn't very good. It had a 45.1 non-mirror win rate, and while it had a few results, overall the performance wasn't great. The popularity of this deck is quite high though, and I think mostly it has taken the place as the defacto mono red style burn deck of the format.

Jund Wildfire came in second as the most played deck with 16 copies. Overall, it had a 50.7% non-mirror win rate. This is a deck I feel is reasonable to have in the format where it is. It's good but has its fair share of both good and bad matchups.

card-ref:Elves and Mono Blue Terror were tied each at 12 copies. Both of these decks looked great this past week, with card-ref:Elves having a 55.2% non-mirror win rate and card-ref:Terror having a 54.3% non-mirror win rate. Nyxborn Hydra vastly improved the card-ref:Elves deck a ton.

Overall, I think Pauper looks very reasonable for the week. The first Challenge we are covering is the Thursday event. Elves was the most played deck of the event, and it had a pretty even win rate. Inside Out Combo won the event, showcasing a neat take on the strategy with new card Spirit Mascot.

In the final Challenge, Bant Gates took first place with a strong showing. This is super interesting, especially with the sideboard splash into red for the blast effect.

That's all the time we have this week folks! Thanks for continuing to support the column and join us next week as we continue our journey into Pauper!