The Pauper Metagame and All Will be One in 1,195 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 February 1 to February 28, 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 1,195 matches to analyze.

This neither comes from nor has any affiliation with Wizards of the Coast, and it does not offer a full picture of the metagame. Despite our sample size, averaging almost 43 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.

There can be duplicate data points of a deck being piloted by the same player in the same League run, which shouldn't be treated as if it were separate entries of the deck. The player could have completed one run, 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 completed two runs (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 for known players paired against each other, I made sure to remove all the duplicates when they happened: If player A faced player B and both sent me the data of that match, I registered it only once.

Changelog for February

New archetypes added:

• Proliferate Storm
• Jeskai Synthesizer

Metadata for February

Introduction and Motivation

For a variety of reasons I decided to try to track the changes in the Pauper League metagame after the release of Double Masters 2022. As it was a successful endeavor, I decided to repeat it for subsequent months 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.

February 10 saw the release of Phyrexia: All Will Be One on Magic Online. So far it seems to have been the least impactful set for Pauper from this last year and a half. Sure, it's been less than 30 days since the release, and players can still come up with new technologies for established decks. But the other sets had almost immediate impact. Their new technologies were widely adopted from the first day of release and, more importantly, forced the top decks of the format to adapt to the changes.

Although nothing earth shattering was discovered yet, some things still changed. One was the addition of a new game plan for control decks, which can now use cards such as and to try to win with poison counters. On that note too, there's a brand-new archetype, Poison Storm, which uses the extra mana from in tandem with the to chain multiple spells per turn that add poison counters until victorious.

The most impactful change may have been the introduction of to Boros Synthesizer strategies, which I covered in another article. The addition may signal a shift toward more aggressive play patterns for the deck. This could spell trouble for Grixis Affinity as Boros also has access to the best anti-Affinity technology in Pauper, and . The deck can rival the fastest starts of Synthesizer Burn, too, and stabilize until it can pivot to a midrange game plan. If that pans out, we may have some pressure on the top decks, after all, and see the shakeup we long for.

Metagame Consolidation

I identified 69 unique decks, plus rogue designs, for February. A few of the decks submitted, twelve in total, were too hard to classify or looked too experimental and thus received the "rogue" label. To further justify the classification, these included Jund Reanimator as well as Mardu- and a Gruul-based tokens decks. These builds are not what we normally see in the format and don't yet warrant the creation of another deck label.

To track the changes over time, I split the data for the month into three periods of ten days each, the last shorter as February only has 28 days. I grouped the Top 18 archetypes for January and show them here:

I created all the charts in this article with Flourish Studio. This includes the following, which shows metagame trends. It starts with the eight biggest archetypes at the beginning of the month of February, 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 most played decks in each split here:

W/B Ephemerate had been a constant presence in Leagues in the previous month, and it also had good results in Challenges during that period, which prompted AdeptoTerra to write an article about it. But it seems the meta quickly adjusted, and the deck kept losing numbers throughout February, settling in at the bottom of the Top 8.

U/B Angler-Terror kept rising in numbers throughout February and ended up the second most played by the end of the month, taking the spot usually reserved for Grixis Affinity. It also had great results in big events, winning the Challenges on February 19, 25, and 26!

There is something worth pointing out for February in relation to decks that use flying creatures. They experienced a noticeable uptick:

• Boros Synthesizer started to gain in popularity with .
• Monoblue Faeries kept roughly the same numbers since the end of January.
• Caw Gates gained significant meta share by the end of February.

I credit this movement to the multiple copies of in Grixis Affinity. The wrath is amazing against decks like Walls and Synthesizer Burn, but it does nothing against flying creatures. The Shaman also steals some slots from cards like /, which are among the best answers to flying creatures in the format.

Interestingly enough, something similar already happened in a past meta. There was a time when people were trying to go above Affinity, and the deck started to be more Rakdos instead of Grixis, which solved some issues but opened players up to be more easily hated postboard. This ended up forcing Affinity to switch back to Grixis. There were even some metas in which decks like Boros Bully were having success because they had both threats, like , as well as the usual hate, and/or . Meanwhile Affinity was too busy needing Krark-Clan Shaman and had at most one copy of or in the sideboard. Today the builds tend to run neither and the anti-air technology is mostly .

Of course we should not dismiss the raw strength of those three highlighted decks. They all have solid game plans against most of the format and can tune, sometimes even overtune, their sideboard to deal with the top decks. However, I wanted to highlight them because of the flying creatures and current lack of Cannonade. I think we are entering a phase with a lot of back and forth on slots in various builds! Many signs point this way: In the past two months I changed the naming of Kuldotha Burn to Synthesizer Burn because some builds started to drop in favor of a more stack-based plan. Now they are back to the board and going wide with Rebirth. For some weeks Affinity was not running in the main deck, or at most one copy with some extras in the sideboard. Then Kuldotha dominated Leagues, and now having two Shamans main seems to be the norm with some builds even running three.

Will these pressure points on Synthesizer Burn and Grixis Affinity be enough to make the Leagues' meta more varied? It seems we are approaching that. Numbers are down for both decks, and in Challenges we see a wider spread.

Challenges

First, thanks to Karl191 for making the head-to-head calculations for the Challenges as well as AdeptoTerra and Kirblinxy for taking time to watch the replays and collect the data. There were two surprises in February's Challenges. One was the resurgence of Monoblue Faeries, which for a long time was creeping on the edges of the Leagues' meta but never managed to make another impression on the Challenge meta.

• It had one or two pilots from the beginning of the month, then became the most played deck in the Challenge on February 18! It amounted to 11.76% of the field, sported a 54.55% nonmirror win rate, and managed to put one player into the Top 8.

• On February 19 it accounted for only 6.85% of the field, the fifth most popular deck choice. Still it retained great results overall, a 58.62% nonmirror win rate, and claimed a tenth place as the best position.

The biggest surprise came at the end of the month when U/B Angler-Terror picked up both in meta share and win rate. The deck started the Leagues with an increase in numbers, as already discussed, but had small representation in the month's first Challenge on February 4.

Then suddenly it was the second most popular for the February 5 Challenge, trailing Synthesizer Burn by just one pilot. The deck maintained decent numbers and reasonable results, but by the 19th really started to unleash its terror:

• February 19: U/B Angler-Terror won, was the fourth most played at 8.22% of the meta, and had an amazing nonmirror win rate of 73.33%.

• February 25: U/B Angler-Terror won, was the most played at 13.73% of the meta, and sported a nonmirror win rate of 58.82%.

• February 26: U/B Angler-Terror won yet again! But unfortunately the Challenge Project did not collect data for that event, thus we do not know the win rates or the meta share of the deck.

The other two big decks, Synthesizer Burn and Grixis Affinity, remained a constant presence throughout, regularly among the most played, albeit with mixed results. Often they would claim Top 8 berths, and Affinity even won a Challenge (on February 11) while Synthesizer Burn placed second twice (on February 18 and February 25).

But sometimes they posted atrocious overall results with win rates below 50%. Affinity went as low as 39% (on February 19) and as high as 63% (on February 25) while putting one pilot into the Top 8 each time. None of this differs much from what we've seen for the last few months. These decks have been a dominant force for a long time, and most of the format is now developed around them.

The Color Distribution

A disclaimer about the classification of colors in each deck as I had to make some concessions: I assigned colors to each deck, counted the times these decks appeared, and made the calculations. I'm not counting the individual cards!

Overall I tried to follow the spirit of the build of each deck and to add a color anytime a deck runs more than four copies of a card of that color. For the evolution of the shares of color per month and period, I ignored the splashes. You can further explore the whole color divisions as well as the values of the meta share in the pie chart at the end of this section to draw your own conclusions.

In total, for the month of February, we saw the following distribution:

The end of January saw a reduction of red's dominance and the beginning of a more balanced distribution of colors. The trend continued in February, and it seems things are moving toward a meta in which more colors, and strategies, have room to shine.

Sadly green still suffers from lack of popularity. It takes most of its representation from Walls (Combo), with some share due to Auras. I questioned apas72, one of the most prolific Walls players, and he pointed out how the deck struggles to find a good plan postboard against a that is also recurred via . On top, the main sources of card advantage for the green deck, and , were outclassed in the past year, and they create constraints in deck building that reduce its adaptability. Thus it is unlikely that the color will increase its participation in the meta anytime soon.

If you want to explore these ratios of decks and colors further, check out the following. I also want to give a shoutout to PProteus from the Castle of Commons Discord, the one who manages the Pauper Challenge Project, for helping me find a faster way to organize the data for this chart:

Meta Comparison

In January there was a lot of discussion about the format and its health. Even players from other formats weighed in. You can see part of the discussion in this thread on Twitter. Because of that I decided to pull all the data since the beginning of this series for a different analysis, one on deck variety.

Keep in mind we are working with crowdsourced data here, thus we only have a fraction of the meta, even if we have thousands of matches. Trends are still visible, though, so I want to focus on these.

February yielded this chart for the Top 16 most played decks:

Per our gathered data, we have three decks in the top third of the meta. Six account for half of the meta and twelve for two thirds of the meta. This is already a better picture than what we had in January. Together with the variety at Challenges, this may signal the meta is getting less narrow.

Final Considerations

February came up with some surprises across both Leagues and Challenges, most notably U/B Angler-Terror and Monoblue Faeries rising in popularity. Phyrexia: All Will Be One, released in the middle of the month, did not play a big role in the meta so far.

Both Synthesizer Burn and Grixis Affinity lost significant meta share according to our crowdsourced data. They no longer hog the spotlight, neither in Leagues nor Challenges. It seems the rest of the meta is pressuring these two well enough to the point where they have to concede deck slots and in turn worsen some matchups.

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.