In a bizarre twist of fate, I went out to the card shop originally planning for Commander Night - it was The Hobbit Commander Party, even, and the rules for that looked like quite a bit of fun - but I ultimately didn't actually play Commander.
I got to play Pauper, instead. On the card shop's Discord server, somebody had mentioned that they would be bringing some Pauper decks along to play if people were interested. Given that I always bring my two Pauper decks along, I was of course incredibly interested.
So after finding the person in question, the two of us shuffled up to play... a lot of games tonight. They had three different decks with them, and I had my two. Hilariously, though, as I was looking up my Moxfield account, I don't even have one of the two "built" on the site. I even went to dig up my old TappedOut account that I never use anymore, and while I do have the deck list put up there, it was an out of date version of the list. So that's fun! I also just updated said list so I can link it in a moment.
I digress. The list I do have up on my Moxfield is my Monoblue Terror-Delver. The other deck I have is a Monogreen Stompy list (man, linking to TappedOut feels a bit weird).
The decks my opponent had were Tron, a Delver of their own, and "Gruul Ponza" which was largely the same concept as my Stompy, but in Red/Green, running Land Destruction, and with some different Creature choices. I digress.
I didn't even remotely keep any notes on the games we played, as each one went by rather quickly. They were all best-of-3 sets, we Sideboarded in and out between games, and generally had a good 4-ish hours or so playing some good old 60 Card Magic with each other.
I did figure out a few glaring weaknesses in my two Pauper Lists, as an aside. While the Stompy deck's weaknesses aren't as big of a deal to me - until playing today and finding out that "No this is actually a real Pauper Archetype", I thought it was just some goofy monogreen jank, but no, the list I'm running is genuinely incredibly solid as Pauper lists go, it's just that there are a few cards that would serve it rather well - the weaknesses in my Terror-Delver list I do want to iron out.
As an aside, if you're reading this later down the line, the deck list will likely already be modified to reflect the changes I'm planning to make.
Ever since I put the deck together, I knew running a playset of Force Spikes was probably a bad decision. I had the full four-pack in the list because I had actually had it put together for years as a fun little deckbuilding challenge to myself, building a paper Pauper deck long before it was made an actual, official paper format. Then when they did make it one, they banned Daze - understandable, but my deck had been running a playset. So I needed something to take Daze's place, so Force Spike was a quick answer.
Tonight being the first time that I got to properly put the deck through its paces, I finally got to see firsthand exactly how bad a decision that really was. It's great if you can have it in the first couple turns of the game, but against both Tron and Ponza, it was pretty evident how quickly it became a waste of cardboard in my hand. I also ran into entirely too many situations where I was almost out of cards in hand because I have startlingly little card draw, I've now realized. Far less than I thought I had. I need to swap some of my counter magic out to make room for a few pieces, because having answers in the deck doesn't mean anything when I can't find those answers in time to play them.
I could also use some answers for dealing with non-creature threats. We were looking at some Pauper lists after we were done but before we left, and some of the lists were running Boomerang as an option.
So in addition to draw power, I'll be working on my removal suite a little bit, rather than trying to rely on counters.
After nothing but Commander for Magic for so long, it was nice to play something else, and I have a few ideas for how to make my preferred deck a little better to boot. I honestly look forward to the next time I get to shuffle up for Pauper, though I may be playing Commander again the next time I can make it out. Time will tell, of course.
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