Pauper with awesome mana!

A while back I wrote an article for mtgoacademy.com about why aggressive decks in Pauper are generally mono-colored and control decks usually play 2, potentially 3 cards at absolute most. Recently I’ve been working on my peasant (rareless) cube as well and I’ve noticed that mana fixing goes significantly later than it does when I draft regular cubes because the best fixing available is the karoos, shard lands, vivids, and signets. In a regular cube I’ll snap up a fetchland first pick without hesitation if the pack is only average. In the pauper and peasant cubes I’ve played though I can routinely wheel a shard land because they simply aren’t all that insane. After the third draft or so where I consciously tried to draft the multi-colored good stuff cube deck and failed despite having infinite fixers, I began to seriously contemplate the effects of adding better lands to my cube. Shortly thereafter I thought back to my old article on constructed Pauper and began to wonder even more.

There are myriads of awesome common cards and insane strategies that fall by the wayside due to the lack of mana fixing available in pauper. I briefly discussed the idea on a recent episode of the Pauper to the People podcast that I guest-hosted, and these are some of the cool deck ideas we brewed using Pauper card legality and access to any land:

Boros

Zoo

Uxx Delver Tempo

Big spell control with Urborg/Cabal Coffers

Rock/junk decks with Volraths Stronghold

4/5c Control (likely Teachings)

Goblins adding Wasteland and Port

All of these deck ideas flew out of our minds in about three minutes, and I’m sure there are a plethora of other ideas that people can brew up given some time and thought. In order to encourage brewing for this format, I will be running a league event this summer where all Pauper deck construction rules must be followed, except when it comes to the lands.

Details still have to be worked on but it will happen. This format seems awesome to me and hopefully to lots of you as well. I would like feedback on a few areas though.

First of all, what lands should be allowed? When I discussed the idea on Pauper to the People, the issue was pointed out that people play pauper because it’s cheap, and adding things like duals and wastelands defeats that purpose. This is a valid concern, and depending on feedback from everyone I might consider making only modern-legal lands available to help cut down on the very expensive lands while still allowing great quality of mana-bases. Another option is running the league through a forum where a fixed number of rounds are played with fixed pairings based on record so the competitors could use whatever medium they’d like to play matches.

Any other suggestions on how best to run the event are welcome, and please post in response to this if you’d consider playing so I can gauge potential interest and hopefully get this off the ground!

-          @Grant_champion

-          Pitlord on MTGO

Ps. We need to think of a cool name for this format! Post any naming suggestions you may have too!