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Infinite via Pauper- Goblins, Part I

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I’ve been posting positive records in the Dailies with UR Delver over the past week, but I’ve also been noticing some recurring problems with the deck. Namely, the aggressive matchups seem to be worse for this deck than MUC. This is due to the fact that it usually takes a couple turns to produce red mana, and even at that sometimes you only have access to one red mana per turn. The slowness makes you weak to Goblin Cohort/Nettle Sentinel and the shortage makes you weak to Vines of the Vastwood. The general lack of bounce spells also makes Atog rather problematic, as he’s pretty immune to damage-based removal.

Oddly enough, I’ve found that the inclusion of red has greatly benefitted the more grindy matchups. Having access to some reach allows you to use your counterspells against their proactive spells rather than needing to protect threats, and then when the time is right you can just kill them out of nowhere.
At any rate, that’s not the deck I want to talk about this week. I want to talk about Pauper Goblins. It’s not generally the type of deck you would find me playing, but after losing to it at 3-0 in round four of a Daily I started pondering the deck’s position in the metagame. At first thought it seemed like Goblins was probably fast enough to beat Fissure Post… which has basically been my criteria for what I want to do in Pauper right now. If that’s true, I feel the rest is easy to figure out.

After playing a handful of Dailies with Goblins the deck paid for itself three times over. This led me to an interesting idea. For the foreseeable future, I’ll be dedicating my column to breaking down Pauper decks- decklists, how they play- and what they cost to build. Then I will document a few Daily Events with each deck and come to a conclusion about whether the deck is worth the investment. For the most part my writing on Pauper has been about decks specifically catered to my style of play, but if my goal is to enlighten the community at large on the format and to spark interest in archetypes befitting any manner of player, then this will be a pretty awesome project. Seeing as Pauper is the cheapest format to get into when it comes to MTGO, doing well with Pauper is really the best way to go about “going infinite”- that is, playing online for “free”.

This week will be a bit unusual as from the get-go I already have a list that is a few cards different from “stock”, which I will go over below the list:


This deck is somewhat straightforward- try to play guys every turn, attack, play burn spells. That said, the synergies are not to be understated. Goblin Sledder and Mogg War Marshal play exceptionally well together, and Foundry Street Denizen makes for even more explosive Goblin Bushwhacker turns.

The playstyle of Goblins caters to players who love attacking, are good at managing on-board tricks and enjoy playing aggressive decks with a reasonable amount of reach. Naturally, the deck will not attract many stereotypical control players.

As I said, my list varies somewhat from what is stock, so let’s go over what I’ve changed:

Notable Absences

The biggest different in my list from most is the absence of Sparksmith and Fireblast in the main and Arboreal Grazer in the sideboard.

Sparksmith and Fireblast were tested as far too high of liabilities. Sparksmith was not only slow, but in matchups where I wanted to be able to activate more than once it basically killed me. It’s really strong against decks with very low creature counts and absolutely zero reach, but that’s a very, very small percentage of the metagame. It can steal games against Stompy, but you really need it and Sylvok Lifestaff for it to really matter. Your odds just aren’t very good.

Fireblast just didn’t feel good at all. It’s a burn spell that most of the time can’t be used to remove blockers in a deck chock full of creatures. I tried anywhere between one and three and was underwhelmed at all times by it. It’s especially bad against blue decks, as Dispel is fairly popular.

I haven’t tested Arboreal Grazer extensively, but it leads to an inconsistency in the deck’s gameplan against Cloudpost and Esper Fissure. The idea behind Raze is that you can hinder these decks before they get off the ground but Arboreal Grazer has some pretty awkward implications. For starters, Goblins doesn’t play many lands, and having a spare one for Arboreal Grazer can sometimes slow you down enough so that you can’t kill them before they stabilize on lands again. Additionally, it’s only good at all if you draw it VERY early in the game, and it’s your only card that interacts on the resource-denial front. It seems to be in the vast majority of 3-1 or better lists, so maybe I’m just wrong, but I’m not sold on the card.

The Replacements

The cards that I’m playing that don’t show up terribly often are Goblin Matron, Tarfire and Kruin Striker, as well as Flame Slash on the sideboard.
Goblin Matron gets the honor of being the best and worst card in the deck. On the one hand, it provides at least two turns of attacking with Mogg Conscripts if it resolves and also functions as additional copies of basically every spell in the deck. On the other hand, it’s very mana-intensive in a 17 land deck. I’ve mostly seen zero or three in decklists, and more zeroes than threes, but I’ve been happy with two. An important aspect of playing Matron is that it tends to be a lot more on the “worst card” side of things against blue decks, and siding it out when it can get countered seems like the right play to me.

I haven’t really seen Tarfire in any other decklists, which is strange considering that the deck has a lot of slots for burn spells. Your first burn spell almost always is aimed at a creature, and Tarfire kills most of the ones that bother you. Goblin Matron. Mise.

Kruin Striker has the weakness of dying to literally everything, but when he’s on, he’s on. Having a Striker and a Goblin Sledder in play when you play a Mogg War Marshall leads to very profitable combat steps. The only reason that I don’t play more than two is because this deck has to keep a lot of one-land hands.

Cost of the Deck

If you were to purchase my list as is, it would cost approximately 35 tickets. The bulk of this, 20 tickets, comes from the Pryoblasts. These aren’t in every list, and are often not included in favor of Arboreal Grazer. Buying Arboreal Grazer over Pyro will save you 8-10 tickets, but will be less useful in terms of building other Pauper decks (Arboreal Grazer is only in Goblins, whereas Pryoblast is in a number of other Red decks) and has more narrow applications in practice with the Goblins deck itself. Arboreal Grazer basically only comes in against the Temporal Fissure decks, and even there they often have access to Fade Away and they always have access to Ghostly Flicker- both of which Pyroblast matches up much better against. There is also a non-zero chance that Temporal Fissure, or some component of the deck, is banned in the near-future. Just some food for thought.

Other than that, Goblin Matron, Smash to Smithereens, Chain Lightning, Mogg Conscripts, and Mogg Raider are the only cards that cost more than .1 ticket, all ranging from .5-1.5 tickets. Of these, Chain Lightning and maybe Smash to Smithereens are the only cards that are likely to end up in a different deck, but the cost of all of these combined is pretty low.

Next time I’ll do a brief play by play of a few dailies and talk about the specific matches and matchups that I play. I anticipate doing at least three dailies for every deck, as this will showcase a good amount of games as well as the fact that cashing one out of three dailies is generally the minimum you’ll need to do to stay positive on entry fees.

Thanks for reading.
-Ryan Overturf
@RyanOverdrive on Twitter

52 thoughts on “Infinite via Pauper- Goblins, Part I

  1. Great ! go go good soldier. Great column coming.

    Regarding your previous deck, I reached basically the same conclusions and was sometimes a little worried by the low number of creatures (first time I had to count the number of my creatures in the graveyard). But the deck cashed me some dailys as well.

    Keep up the good work.

  2. Sick deck. I will build a couple of them irl to sell in my shop. Thanks for the updated list!

    Personally I’m more a fan of the green stompy better. But that is just my taste.

    1. Green Stompy is definitely coming up! Not really my style, but I’m going to be trying everything.

      Though I should tell you that as of now I’m trying out the heavy Kruin-Striker build. Updated list will be coming next week along with some Daily reports!

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  4. » a-t-il avoué à L’Équipe avant de poursuivre. c’est bien trop tôt.On connaît les compositions officielles de l’OL et de la Real Sociedad pour ce choc des barrages de Ligue des Champions Je préfère ne pas vous le dire,5): avec trois buts dans sa besace,Champion de France en 2012 au nez et à la barbe du Paris Saint-Germain version QSI il a obtenu satisfaction Enfin,Une situation qui relance irrémédiablement les rumeurs vers Newcastle qui salive d’avance d’évoluer aux côtés de son compatriote Radamel Falcao et des autres stars recrutées par les Rouge-et-Blanc.95 M?Total arriv?s : 7, Sur un déboulé de Matuidi, Toutefois, «Comme je l’ai déjà dit.

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The Dulles, Va.-based aerospace contractor conducted two test flights in 2013 before launching operational cargo service on the Orb-1 mission in January. File photo of a Cygnus cargo spacecraft at the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA”Every flight is critical,” said Frank Culbertson, executive vice president of Orbital’s advanced programs group and a former space shuttle and space station commander. “We carry a variety of types of cargo on-board, which includes food and basic supplies for the crew, and also the research.”Sunday’s launch was delayed from early May after a bottleneck in the space station’s busy manifest of visiting cargo and crew vehicles. 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Controllers will guide the cargo carrier to a destructive re-entry over the Pacific Ocean a few days later, disposing the space station’s trash and other excess hardware.”Our plan is to keep Cygnus on-board for about a month, stow it with disposable cargo, and then prepare ourselves for the next mission, which will be the ATV in late July,” Hartman said.The European ATV cargo vehicle is set for liftoff from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket July 24, with docking planned Aug. 12.Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: .John Glenn Mission PatchFree shipping to U.S. addresses!The historic first orbital flight by an American is marked by this commemorative patch for John Glenn and Friendship 7.Final Shuttle Mission PatchFree shipping to U.S. addresses!The crew emblem for the final space shuttle mission is available in our store. 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Three launches carrying satellites for NASA will occur in 2011, but whether the program flies beyond next year depends whether five additional vehicles in inventory can be sold.”We are actively trying to market those. We have a lot of customer interest in the Delta 2,” says Hieu Lam, Friday’s mission director and Boeing Launch Services’ Delta commercial program manager.”We have five left and we’re working really hard to sell the last five. We’ll know within the next year or two how successful we’ll be in selling the last five.”Over its 148 flights since debuting in 1989, the Delta 2 has carried a wide mix of payloads and achieved a remarkable 98.6 percent success record. 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ULA was formed in December 2006 to merge Boeing’s Delta and Lockheed Martin’s Atlas rocket families under one joint venture to perform U.S. government space launches. The parent companies, however, retained the ability to sell the rockets on the commercial market, such as the COSMO flights. An artist’s concept of COSMO-SkyMed. Credit: TelespazioSince COSMO 4 was the last commercial Delta contract that it held, the outlook for Boeing Launch Services depends on selling the remaining five Delta 2’s or inserting the Delta 4 vehicle back into the non-government marketplace.”Boeing Launch Services will be around in one form or another as long as Boeing has the responsibility to market the Delta launch vehicle. What it looks like will very much depend on the Delta 2 commercial sales, we have five left, and then the commercial viability of Delta 4,” Lam said.In the broader sense of history, Friday’s launch also represented the 350th flight in the Delta program’s distinguished legacy stretching back to 1960 and the earliest days of America’s efforts to reach space. Originally born from the Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile, Delta became a lifter of satellites for the nation and the world.”When you look back at the accomplishments of Delta 1, Delta 2 and now Delta 4, it’s amazing,” said Walsh.Evolutionary steps brought more power and capability as the rocket’s family grew to newer versions, ultimately creating the Delta 2 that assembled the Global Positioning System constellation, launched inspiring science projects like the Mars rovers and supported many commercial efforts. The family name lives on with Delta 4, the modular line of rockets conceived as part of the Air Force’s Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle that today carry the country’s largest and most important military satellites.”It’s special, 350 is special,” Lam said.”I started with Delta 178, so it’s been 172 Delta’s that I’ve been involved with in one way or another. I’ve been an engineer, mission manager or program manager. I’ve seen everything from the first Delta 2 to Delta 3 to Delta 4, and I’m very, very happy to have a career here with Delta.”The purpose of Friday’s launch was hauling the COSMO-SkyMed 4 satellite into its desired orbital perch, joining three sister-craft deployed by previous Delta 2 rockets in 2007 and 2008. An artist’s concept of COSMO-SkyMed. Credit: TelespazioIt is Italy’s home-grown Earth observing system, a constellation of radar satellites built for civil and military reconnaissance in a flagship program carrying a 1 billion euro price tag.Developed by Thales Alenia Space Italia for the Italian Space Agency and the Italian Ministry of Defence, the COSMO-SkyMed system is the country’s largest space project.Each satellite is equipped with an X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument for environmental monitoring, resource management and territorial security surveillance. They are capable of seeing the ground in daylight or darkness, with clear skies or cloudy ones.The craft can produce 450 images per day and the picture-collecting time between civil and military uses is proportional to the financial contributions made during development of the system. The Italian Space Agency funded about 70 percent and the Ministry of Defence provided about 30 percent.Imagery released for civilian purposes have a resolution of 1 meter, meaning objects as small as that size can be seen. The military capability is even sharper, though its exact resolution is classified.The satellites have proved themselves beneficial to humanitarian organizations responding to natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes.The constellation of four satellites enables any specific region of the planet to be observed by COSMO-SkyMed every six hours. That allow authorities to assess and begin responding when a crisis strikes.STS-134 PatchFree shipping to U.S. addresses!The final planned flight of space shuttle Endeavour is symbolized in the official embroidered crew patch for STS-134. Available in our store!Final Shuttle Mission PatchFree shipping to U.S. addresses!The crew emblem for the final space shuttle mission is now available in our store. Get this piece of history!Apollo CollageThis beautiful one piece set features the Apollo program emblem surrounded by the individual mission logos.STS-133 PatchFree shipping to U.S. addresses!The final planned flight of space shuttle Discovery is symbolized in the official embroidered crew patch for STS-133. Available in our store!Anniversary Shuttle PatchFree shipping to U.S. addresses!This embroidered patch commemorates the 30th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Program. The design features the space shuttle Columbia’s historic maiden flight of April 12, 1981.Mercury anniversaryFree shipping to U.S. addresses!Celebrate the 50th anniversary of Alan Shephard’s historic Mercury mission with this collectors’ item, the official commemorative embroidered patch. | | | | 2014 Spaceflight Now Inc.Vandenberg’s space shuttle hangarSPACEFLIGHT NOW

  6. STORY WRITTEN FOR & USED WITH PERMISSIONPosted: January 14, 2005NASA’s Cassini Saturn orbiter has turned back toward Earth and startedtransmitting stored data from Europe’s Huygens probe, which was stillbroadcasting a faint carrier signal from the surface of the moon Titan morethan two hours after touching down and well after Cassini had turned away.The carrier signal, detected by an Earth-based radio telescope network,confirmed the spacecraft survived atmospheric entry and reached the surfaceof Titan around 7:45 a.m. EST (1245 GMT), within 11 minutes or so of the predicted impacttime.At Saturn’s distance of 751 million miles, the carrier was 50 quadrilliontimes weaker than the FM radio signal picked up by a car radio, according toan engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The signalcontinued until well after Cassini dropped below Titan’s horizon two hoursafter touchdown, surprising scientists at the European Space Agency’s SpaceOperations Center in Germany.The Cassini orbiter spent the morning out of contact with Earth, aimingits high gain antenna at the Huygens landing site to collect the entryprobe’s priceless science data. The orbiter was programmed to turn backtoward Earth a few minutes before 10 a.m. EST and officials confirmed theCassini started transmitting stored data as expected. But the first actualscience data from Huygens’ suit of instruments was not expected to show upon the ground until around 11:15 a.m.”This is clearly an engineering success,” said ESA project scientistJean-Pierre Lebreton. “But at this moment, we cannot say more. … We havenot seen any real data yet.”Titan is the sixth world in the solar system, after the moon, Venus,Mars, Jupiter and an asteroid, that has been visited by a robotic emissaryfrom Earth. But Titan is by far the most distant such planetary outpost.”This whole thing of approaching Titan, descending down through itsatmosphere and landing on its surface to me is like out of Jules Verne,”said Carolyn Porco, the Cassini imaging team leader. “It’s like acombination of ‘Journey to the Moon’ and ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,’ allwrapped up together, it’s that kind of adventure in my mind.”We’ve just extended our reach twice as far as we had before when we talkabout physically making contact. … This is a big moment and because ofthis, we can now look in the sky and when we see Saturn, we can say we’vebeen there and we’ve made our mark. In that sense, the solar system, withthis one event today, has become a very much smaller place. And that is verybig.”Video coverage for subscribers only:VIDEO:STATUS REPORT DURING DESCENT AUDIO:TODAY’S STATUS REPORT DURING DESCENT VIDEO:HUYGENS PRE-ARRIVAL NEWS BRIEFING AUDIO:HUYGENS PRE-ARRIVAL NEWS BRIEFING VIDEO:OVERVIEW OF HUYGENS PROBE’S SCIENCE OBJECTIVES VIDEO:JULY NEWS BRIEFING ON CASSINI’S PICTURES OF TITAN VIDEO:PICTURES SHOWING TITAN SURFACE FROM OCT. FLYBY VIDEO:WHAT’S KNOWN ABOUT TITAN BEFORE THE FIRST FLYBY VIDEO:NARRATED MOVIE OF CLOUDS MOVING NEAR SOUTH POLE VIDEO:OCT. BRIEFING ON RADAR IMAGES OF TITAN SURFACE Ares 1-X PatchThe official embroidered patch for the Ares 1-X rocket test flight, is available for purchase.Apollo CollageThis beautiful one piece set features the Apollo program emblem surrounded by the individual mission logos.Expedition 21The official embroidered patch for the International Space Station Expedition 21 crew is now available from our stores.Hubble PatchThe official embroidered patch for mission STS-125, the space shuttle’s last planned service call to the Hubble Space Telescope, is available for purchase. | | | | 2014 Spaceflight Now Inc.Huygens science data received; one channel out BY WILLIAM HARWOOD

  7. Our national debt is over 16.8 trillion dollars! We pay off our debt with more debt! That is like putting gas on the fire! They tell the U.S. citizens it is their fault because they don’t live within their means! They fail to mention it has everything to do with corrupt business and political leaders and the Federal Reserve and their fractional reserve banking system! In the U.S. we are injecting 85 billion of monopoly money a month in the economy via QE3 (40 billion a month), Operation Twist (45 billion a month) with no end date and guess who is on the hook for this irresponsible fiscal monetary policy?

  8. MR. GREGORY:? But that’s a point of fact.? But nobody–but that’s not in dispute, Congresswoman.? That’s never been in dispute.? Of course Congress can pass laws.? The issue here is sort of an attack on the judiciary that do you believe that Supreme Court justices should be elected?? Would that solve the problem?

  9. No doubt about that. You’ve got a lot of groups out there running ads, telling young people not to sign up. You have efforts to interfere with the navigators, people who are trying to get more Americans to sign up. When we had the prescription drug bill, there were lots of problems. We didn’t think it was the greatest bill the way it was originally designed. But Democrats worked with Republicans–

  10. What’s more, the prosecutor had not directly tied Bart Corbin to the gun used in his wife’s death, a major weakness in the case against him. All of this, the defense contended, added up to reasonable doubt for a jury.

  11. Mereka berdua dari dua dunia berbeza tetapi memiliki cerita yang hampir serupa. Pertemuan pertama yang tidak dirancang, pertemuan kedua juga tidak disengajakan, adakah pertemuan ketiga layak digelar sebagai takdir?

  12. Haslina yang baru sahaja keluar dari bilik tidurnya setelah selesai mandi dan menunaikan solat Subuh dengan lengkap berpakaian terus menuju ke arah remote controller yang berada di atas rak televisyen lalu menukar kepada siaran yang diminatinya setiap pagi.Apalagi kalau bukan motivasi pagi yang selalu disiarkan di TV3 pada waktu-waktu sebegini.Tidak kurang juga rancangan ??Tanyalah Ustaz?? yang bersiaran di TV9.

  13. “Aku kenal dia bukan baru hari ini, tapi aku kenal dia dah lama, dan dia dah berubah. Kalau kau orang terus pulaukan dia, macam mana dia nak tunjukkan perubahan dia pada kau orang? Cikgu Zilla pun bantu dia, sebab tu dia semakin meningkat. Kau orang, bila lagi?” Amri benar-benar marah, dia tercabar. Pantas aku pujuk Amri, Cikgu Zilla turut mengusap belakang Amri.

  14. Bel masuk sudah berbunyi dan aku pun melangkahkan kakiku dengan tidak sepenuh hati. Entah mengapa kejadian tadi malam benar-benar membuat pikiranku kacau. Rangga, cowok yang selama ini menjadi tambatan hatiku. Ah???mengapa dia tidak bisa lekat dari ingatanku?

  15. trong Ha? a ra la?ng phat m?ng hi?Everton have confirmed that Ivory Coast forward Lacina Traore has joined the club on loan from Monaco for the remainder of the season But his mention of kangkung (or water spinach) tickled the Malaysians’ sense of humour, ki? ghi la? cho doanh nghi?i khu v? Le candidat modéré était donné grand vainqueur dans ces ?

  16. 38 apieceWorst: Cincinnati,Belichick’s Cleveland Browns finished first in the NFL in special teams in 1994,But those statistics ought to come with a few asterisks. Eiserer and colleague Steve Thompson authored a series of stories that showed that Dallas police intentionally don’t follow federal crime reporting guidelines.They showed that in 2007 the department beganaggressivelyconforming to those guidelines that brought the stats down (changes that they made public) while deviating from guidelines that would push the stats up (changes that they kept quiet)The stories highlighted problems with the way police reportand.000 in the second year to help launch the incubator, Idea Works officially opens on Feb.and he said that’s likely to continue.59 in 2000 and 2. Benn is the hard-driving leader who has put in 344 games in Dallas to help rebuild this franchise. the young center was pushed into the middle of the trade block.

  17. defender; Kevin Nicholl, midfielder (East Stirlingshire); Gavin Stokes, 45:59 Foul by Ewan Moyes (Brechin City). Steven Jackson (Brechin City) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the centre of the goal. “At the end of the day it’s each person to themselves. but there are no firm plans in place. The frame of the goal was again struck by the visitors when forward Calvin Zola cut in from the right and curled a 20-yard effort off the angle of post and bar. Former Burton Albion striker Zola had another chance to show why he had been brought to Pittodrie immediately after the restart, 78:49 Kaká (Milan) wins a free kick in the attacking half. Carlos TĂ©vez (Juventus) left footed shot from outside the box is saved in the centre of the goal.

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