Pauper Deck of the Week: Ponza Schemes

Land Destruction, or Ponza as it is widely known, is a deck based on denying lands to your opponents, getting ahead on mana, and casting something of higher mana value to win. As the opponent will be short on mana, you can close the game before they get the resources to fight back. From recent Challenges we can see the deck is establishing itself as one of the best alternatives next to the top dogs of the format.

Your ideal game starts with a turn one or to set up a turn two . If you have both Elf and Aura, you can even cast a on turn two! As you keep destroying lands and getting ahead on mana, you can cast anything from to to progress your game. If the plan ramp into destruction should fail, you use cards like and to create some board presence while you draw and have access to more mana to start casting the big creatures.

There are minor variations in how the deck is built. Most of the time we see the red-green combination, which can access and / for some board control options and to have a hasty creature. It is also fitting that can cascade into the Pirate. However because of the flexibility of Utopia Sprawl and the setup plays all in green, it is common for the deck to include splashes or veer in other combinations, such as green-blue for additions like and or green-white for and an extra set of initiative in .

As a general rule these decks run the two sets of land destruction spells already mentioned, and sometimes they go a bit further and run another set, generally , very rarely or . Blue can use a pseudo-ponza spell in , which will at times be more devastating than any of the others.

Ponza struggles to deal with fast aggro, especially those strategies that go wide. But if you keep the red splash and drop the land destruction plan postboard, you should be able to tackle these with the wraths available. On the other hand the deck is a complete beast against those that require a few turns of setup, such as White-Blue Familiars and any of the Tron variants. Against the midrange piles, Black Gardens and the likes, everything is going to be about how well you can manage the initiative/monarchy, so don't forget you need to develop your board! It is enticing to focus on destroying lands, but against midrange it can be better to cast instead of .

I selected two different versions of the deck to illustrate the approaches mentioned in the article. Even though casting on your opponent is too much fun, for the current meta everything seems to point toward red-green as the superior combination.

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