The Pauper Metagame After Dominaria United, in 1,912 Matches

Disclaimer and General Project Info

You can find clarifications on the naming of archetypes in Appendix 1: Deck Dictionary at the end of the article. There I list the cards normally seen in each deck and discuss some of the naming conventions, things like why Boros instead of R/W.

This data set was crowdsourced via players in the Pauper Leagues of Magic Online from September 1 to September 31, similar to the famous Challenge Projects of Vintage, Legacy, and Pauper. I received everyone's data and was tasked with the merging, organization, and treatment of it. This means removing duplicate entries when both players send their results, dealing with naming conventions, et cetera. After everything was done, we had 1,912 matches to analyze, including win/loss results.

This neither comes from nor has any affiliation with Wizards of the Coast, and it does not offer a full picture of the metagame. Pauper Leagues range from 650 to 720+ players. Despite our sample size, averaging almost 64 matches a day, it is still only part of what happened on Magic Online during this time. Nonetheless, we believe the data may help highlight overall trends in the world of Pauper.

When a deck has little metagame share, we often get comparatively more of its matchup information. If a player runs a league with a less popular deck, we likely have win/loss information on five of its matches, but it constitutes only one entry when it comes to the meta share. As an example: A player runs a white-blue deck and faces a monowhite, monoblue, monoblack, Monored, and monogreen deck. We have one matchup for each of the monocolored decks facing the white-blue deck, so five data points, and we have six data points for meta share analysis. Thus we tend to have more decks than matchups, and less popular decks may generate a relatively high amount of win/loss information because the players using these decks are reporting more data.

There can be duplicate data points of a deck being piloted by the same player in the same League, which shouldn't be treated as if it were two entries of the deck in two different Leagues. The player could have played only one League, thus five matches, on the same day or split them across several days. If said player matched with more than one of the folks tracking their data, we would have at least two data entries instead of one. However, the player may have instead played two Leagues (ten matches) with the same deck in a row, and in this case it makes sense to have multiple data points. I couldn't find a good way to differentiate between these scenarios. Therefore all entries are treated the same, meaning that a deck can unfortunately have extra entries. As we track more matches, it is reasonable to assume the sheer volume deem these situations negligible. As far as the win/loss results, I made sure to remove all the duplicates when they happened: If player A faced player B and both send me their data with that match, I registered it only once.

Introduction and Motivation

For a variety of reasons I decided to try to track the changes in the Pauper League metagame when Double Masters 2022 was released. As it was a successful endeavor, I decided to repeat it for September and will keep doing so until the amount of data sent my way is not enough to warrant an analysis. You can check all of the original motivations behind this project in the first article of this series.

Dominaria United released on Magic Online on September 1. It did not bring as many cards for the format as Double Masters 2022 had. However, the same date saw the release of a handful of cards from Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate that were not yet available on Magic Online but proved extremely impactful in the tabletop metagame. The most impactful were, without a doubt, some of the cards with the initiative mechanic: , , and . All three ended up banned on September 19. They start the dungeon, which at first glance doesn't look that absurd, but it broke Pauper fast.

Those bans did not happen solely due to the mechanic, as it still exists in the format through cards such as and . The reason was rather how oppressive it became to run these now banned cards with the acceleration from , , and , as well as depletion lands such as . Decks would take the initiative as early as turn one. To fight that you either had to have interaction in the form of . Or you needed to run cards like or focus on a go-wide strategy and make risky plays such as plus on turn one and hope it would be good enough to fight for the initiative. Pretty often it wasn't. In short, macro archetypes were phased out and a lot of deck design and mulligan decisions were based on the question: "Can your deck or this hand fight a turn one initiative?" There is more to it, but if you have experience with other formats, this was a similar situation to what and did for Legacy and what did to pretty much every format.

Other cards such as and entered the card pool too and and experienced no small amount of hype. Kenku in particular fit nicely into already existing decks such as Affinity or Jeskai Wildfire. But so far it seems Lantern is too slow and Kenku isn't oppressive, even though it was already incorporated into many builds and poses a threat to be respected.

The most impactful cards from Dominaria United so far have been and . They turned an unpopular deck, U/B Angler, into an absolute powerhouse! In the past, the deck would tend toward a control game plan, using black removal and blue countermagic, with to break parity and push forward and as a big beater. Sometimes the deck could turbo out an Angler, which would prove devastating against a variety of decks. However, this was infrequent enough, and weak to spot removal, that it generally wasn't a good idea to shoot for that angle unless this strategy aligned well with the opposing deck. From experience I can say you won more often on the back of than on Gurmag's! It was a fringe deck and would amount to less than 1% of the aggregate meta in our crowdsourced project.

However, with the addition of Terror, the deck can now focus on the turbo approach and have the more control- or monarch-oriented plans as backup. Players now use together with to fill the graveyard as fast as possible and then cast the 5/5 threats to end the game. Tolarian Terror's built-in protection means you can have insane turbo draws that are also hard to counteract. Two of these Serpents hitting the field are absolutely dominating and can easily overwhelm the opponent's answers.

The was no small addition either. Even though exists, some lists are running up to eight Island/Swamp dual lands to have more ways to enable while keeping blue sources at a maximum. It means you can play with mana open while you play a removal game, and you can also spend that blue mana on and , which further the "deploy the 5/5 threats" game plan.

Other decks that were phased out in the past, such as Walls and Elves, received new cards in and . But so far it doesn't look like that's enough to revitalize either archetype. Although some players are having a medium amount of success with these cards, it is still a meager improvement to what once were strong decks that would often place in the Top 8 of Challenges. There are other small additions to the format in cards like . I did some testing with the card in Leagues and even got a 5-0 with a build of G/U Turbo Fog splashing red, but the list wasn't published that week. Finally, is sometimes seen in builds of Monowhite Aggro, but it is not widely used and the most successful versions seem to do just fine without it.

Overall the impact of the set was pretty high considering it basically just made blue-black more powerful. However, this in turn means all decks have to respect cards like more, and we see that effect for example in a decrease of Monored Blitz. It was one of the most popular decks in the past two months but lost meta share since Dominaria United. I further explore these trends in the metagame breakdown section below.

I'm immensely thankful to everyone who helped, to those that stuck with the project and are still sending their data and to all the new players that joined us! We had an incredible 914 entries for the first ten days of September thanks to the new help. As initiative wreaked havoc in the meta, the following ten days saw a smaller number of entries, 444, but after the bans we kept the pace and went back to registering 911.

Metagame Breakdown for September 2022

I identified 75 unique decks for September. A few of the decks submitted, nine in total, were too hard to classify or looked too experimental and thus received the "Rogue" label. To justify the classification, these included, for example, a five-color pile with , , , and . Another was a combo deck using . These builds are far from what we normally see in the format and don't warrant the creation of another deck label. It is imperative to reduce the number of labels enough to be able to glean useful information.

To track the changes over time, I normally split the data into three periods of ten days each. However, as bans happened on the 19th, I decided to make the second period shorter, thus the division is Days 1 to 10, Days 11 to 19, and Days 20 to 30. I grouped the Top 32 archetypes for September by the aforementioned periods and show them here:

I created all charts in this article with Flourish Studio. This includes the following, which shows metagame trends. It starts with the twelve biggest archetypes, but you can select whichever decks interest you the most from the drop-down menu:

You can find the full table with all the decks as well as their meta share for each period at the end of this section. However, to make the analysis easier to follow, I want to highlight the Top 8 of the most played decks in each split of roughly ten days.

In comparison to last month, we see the usual suspects, Grixis Affinity, Monored Blitz, Rakdos Burn, Caw Gates, and Ponza. But we also see the addition of U/B Initiative and Monoblack Land Destruction, both using initiative cards. Then there's the resurfacing of Monored Burn, which was outclassed previously despite having started as a hugely popular deck in the first week of July, after Double Masters 2022 and its downshift.

This sort of behavior makes some sense as the meta doesn't immediately adapt, and the majority of players stick to past deck choices. Something similar happened with Rakdos Burn in the beginning of July, which I explored in last month's article. Not only that, for a long time it was hard to have access to those cards as they were only available in Treasure Chests.

Despite all of these shortcomings, we see something interesting in September as the initiative decks just took a huge piece of the meta share from the get-go and U/B Initiative became the most popular deck during the first ten days! This was in part due to initiative being already used in Paper for a couple months. The Japanese community in particular had shared their developments and decklists with the mechanic and demonstrated how cards like support an initiative game plan. So although the online community was lagging behind, it had a lot of the deck-building work already done to find the optimal lists. Despite that, some players still tried to combine initiative with a more midrange-oriented plan, and these decks did appear in Leagues, even if they were short-lived. When someone spotted them and sent the data, I joined them all together into the labels Initiative Pile (2 Colors) or Initiative Pile (3 Colors).

If one pays close attention to the beginning of the month, one can see an overabundance of linear and "straight to the point" decks! With the exception of Caw Gates and Grixis Affinity, everyone else just wanted to race or deny the opponent of playing the game (Ponza and Monoblack Land Destruction). Players did not believe in interaction as a good strategy and decided to focus instead on a race. I further explored this period in a Twitter thread where I discussed the deck developments as I was seeing them in Leagues and through lists being shared by the top players both on Twitter and Discord. I also explain there why Monoblack Land Destruction became so popular.

However, by Days 11 to 19 (before the bans) we witnessed an interesting adaptation. U/B Initiative gained more meta share, but a new deck had surfaced too! It was the Kuldotha Burn deck that used , , within the usual Monored Burn shell to go wide and keep pushing damage. The lists were sometimes seen during the end of the first week, yet it wasn't widely adopted until after the first Challenge weekend.

In last month's article I point out how from Day 1 to Day 20 of July Monored Burn went from most to least popular Swiftspear deck while Monored Blitz moved from least to most popular. But there wasn't any mention of a Swiftspear deck using Kuldotha Rebirth, even though all the cards were already available. Is this a sign that the community as a whole should be more willing to explore in terms of deck building? Or did the past meta not give enough room to such a strategy? See the trends of Swiftspear decks from July to September here:

I think most of the reason why Monored Blitz lost in popularity was that became really good again in September. Even though it is not the ideal card against red decks in general, it is a decent answer to the blitz game plan that tends to put a lot of its efforts into one big creature. U/B Initiative also had and and after sideboarding, as well as a good threat, such as or , which all contribute to properly answer Blitz. Not just that, because initiative forces the game to be all about the dungeon and racing game plans, it meant was a pretty good card. If you go into Rebirth you lose a land, but you gain three tokens, which can steal the initiative, and then the first trigger means you get to search for a land, and as long as you keep triggering the Undercity, you win the game.

But some uncertainty remains. Maybe it was a matter of the meta aligning so players were forced into go-wide strategies, or maybe Monored Blitz being so good in the past meant it eclipsed every other red deck, or maybe the Kuldotha deck should've been present since July. The player Lujo86 gave an interesting take that I believe provides a better explanation as to what happened during a Discord discussion. I quote it here verbatim from that group chat:

"I think it took some time to figure out that Kuldotha Burn is a possible competitive thing because it wasn't immediately clear how little support enabling metalcraft (and Kuldotha Rebirth) takes, and, also, how light and low curve you can actually go.

[…] The concept just looks too janky and too 'I can't believe this is actually all it takes' to inspire enough confidence until someone sticks with it and it starts raking in results. It's quite an unintuitive, nebulous deck. Madly powerful, but you need to ask yourself some questions and then go test them, and if the answers are 'no'—and they certainly look like they'll be 'no'—you'll end up losing a lot and probably thinking 'what was I thinking?' and going back to one of the proven variants that make more sense."

In the period from Day 11 to Day 19, it is also interesting to note that U/B Angler-Terror started to creep into the format. It's yet another deck that ran and and could also deploy good threats, albeit not of the initiative variety but rather cheap 5/5s in the form of and . This is basically the same game plan, if less explosive, and works just as well against Monored Blitz and further explains why this red deck lost popularity. During that time the lists often ran : It helped fill the graveyard, answered initiative on turn one, and, thanks to and , the deck had plenty of Islands to discard while not hurting the spread of colors in its mana base.

Another interesting development concerns Caw Gates. I noted last month that it was becoming more relevant, and likely was underplayed, and it started to grow in popularity then. First it proved to have a decent go-wide plan, and it could even run or to challenge the initiative plan while also leveraging not to lose the initiative in combat. Zoohn, the original creator of the deck, played it in the Sunday Challenge on September 11 running three copies of Foil and managed to win the event. He even shared a screenshot in which he had a turn zero Foil against an initiative player who, after an aggressive mulligan, emptied their hand to cast . According to Zoohn, this player conceded the game right there and then.

On the 19th bans happened, targeting initiative cards and only leaving and in the format. This opened up possibilities, that is, you no longer need to play a race deck or run turn zero countermagic or a go-wide deck to survive. We do not yet have a good picture of the post-ban meta as the decks are still adapting and the safer choices (considering the past weeks) are still being made.

I want to show how the most popular decks from Day 20 to Day 30 of September climbed and fell in popularity since the beginning of our data tracking. Again, you can select any of the available decks to explore further trends yourself:

• With the addition of U/B Angler became U/B Angler-Terror and is currently the most popular deck per our crowdsourced data. It has some copies of main to answer the variations of burn decks alongside powerful threats with built-in protection that can consolidate games.

• Kuldotha Burn came out of nowhere, took control of the meta for a while, and made everyone rethink their builds. Now it lost some meta share but still fights for the spot of most popular deck.

• Caw Gates was a complete underdog but now stands as one of the best decks of the format. It even outclassed W/U Familiars and is now the most popular white-blue deck.

• Monored Blitz was an absolutely powerhouse during July. It kept shedding meta share, even though it was still the most popular red deck in August, fighting with Grixis Affinity for the overall top position. But now it sits in sixth position according to our crowdsourced data.

• Ponza exhibits volatile behavior but seems to be gaining in popularity again as Kuldotha Burn becomes less popular.

• Grixis Affinity shows one of the most interesting behaviors. First the deck tends to get amazing results in the big events, frequently having a nonmirror win rate upward of 55%, but it has a cyclical presence in Leagues, with sudden bursts of popularity then quickly losing meta share only to repeat that process again. What appears to happen is that as it becomes popular, everyone warps their decks even more against it and chases the deck away until it adapts and comes back in a slightly different configuration. Notice how Kuldotha Burn and Monored Blitz were the most popular when Grixis Affinity was at its local lows. Walker735, who has been having amazing results with all sorts of variations of Affinity, frequently placing in the Top 8 of big events, including the last Super Qualifier on October 1 and August's Showcase Qualifier with an Affinity variant running Faeries, shared his development process during the Swiftspear frenzy. He noted that he started to lose a lot until he rethought the deck and how to behave in a match. So it seems that although Affinity is an absolute powerhouse, often the most popular and most successful in major tournaments, it requires a good level of knowledge of the format and of the deck to adapt to the necessities of the meta, which means it is prone to this cyclical behavior.

Final Considerations

Initiative took control of the format for a while and restricted deck choices as it made the whole game be about who had the initiative. It also was interesting to see the amount of data contributed to this project from Day 11 to Day 19: It was half of what I got in the other periods! This shows a great dislike, at least among the players contributing to this project, for the state of Pauper with initiative. The quick bannings seems to have opened up the format and allowed new decks to shine, such as U/B Angler-Terror. Not only that, but other new deck popped up with some popularity after the bans, for example the Food Gates deck, which runs , , and alongside the and package. It was created by the player MVanni with further experimentation by Kirblinxy and yours truly. So far it shows some promise, and it aligns well with Caw Gates, but it falls short of beating Grixis Affinity.

The Mardu Synthesizer deck is slowly gaining in relevance as well. It is an evolution of the slower versions of Boros Synthesizer, from the time the deck was called Boros Monarch before existed. Heisen01 managed to get 2nd place in the Super Qualifier on October 1.

The elephant in the room still is Grixis Affinity. It remains a heavily criticized deck. I already discussed its overall performance and showed the meta share chart. I think the deck behaves a lot like Tron (Flicker) did during its heyday by dominating big events while not being as present in Leagues, although Affinity appears there more often than Tron ever did. However, I'm not sure it should suffer the same fate as Tron and have some bans. Arguably is too powerful as it renders the majority of removal game plans obsolete unless the player can also deploy a game-ending threat. All the classic Pauper Dead Guy Ale strategies (removal piles in monoblack and white-black) were pushed out of the format.

Personally I dislike both the play patterns of the bridges from Modern Horizons 2 as well as the play pattern with the artifact lands from Mirrodin. Honestly, though, the new cards added to the format in the past year changed the face of the format so much that Affinity isn't as big of an issue as it used it to be. I absolutely believe banning all artifact lands after was printed (February 2022) would not have been that absurd of a decision as the deck was ridiculous. However, the format changed a lot since then! It is faster, 's downshift was a breath of fresh air for red decks, which are now greatly positioned; pairs off nicely against ; and turns bad creatures into good ones, so it dampens the impact of .

Who could have guessed that would be one of the best Pauper Creatures? Kalikaiz (saidin.raken on Magic Online) was the first to note that the Cat was basically Pauper's version of . You have to face a Sacred Cat buffed with Basilisk Gate to realize how scary the whole situation truly is. When I was fiddling with the Food Gates build, I ultimately decided it had to have Sacred Cat, and these past days I was messing with a green-blue-based Madness Gates build together with Carvs, and we also came to the conclusion we had to run the Cat. In the end I think the best Gates decks will all converge on some variation of Caw Gates mostly due to the Cat. Maybe the future is a Faeries build with that shell. But there will always be weaker and somewhat viable deck possibilities for less cutthroat metas.

I see a lot of Twitter and Discord discussion about the health of the format and nostalgia for other eras. However, things are getting better overall more due to new releases rather than bans—with the exception of the initiative cards. Maybe it is time we all just accept that Pauper is forever changed and this is the new normal and Affinity, and the artifacts lands, will remain the better and more resilient engine.

If you wish to help in any way with this project, feel free to message me, on Magic Online, Twitter, or Cardmarket, I'm PyotrPavel everywhere, or just email me. (My address at Google Mail is pyotrpavelmtg.) You can also find me using the same nickname on the majority of Pauper Discords.

Appendix 1: Deck Dictionary

The whole naming convention tries to follow what the Pauper community uses as a standard. For everything else I tried to make the classifications as broad as possible to avoid pulverizing the data of lesser played decks too much. Three-color combinations are named after the Shards of Alara or Khans of Tarkir, a custom the whole Magic community tends to follow.

The color pairs are named according to what has been used the most by the Pauper community over the years. This means we will always use the guild name for Boros decks instead of R/W. But we get things like U/B Faeries instead of Dimir Faeries, as there isn't an established preference for the other color pairs, and the tendency is to avoid the guild name for them. Some of this may look confusing to newcomers, but I judged it would be better to follow what people have been doing for years. It also makes my life easier when I sift the data, as the names submitted typically match these patterns. The bottom line is: Naming archetypes, and agreeing on those names, is complicated.

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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, not of Cardmarket.