I think it was blue/white, but yeah, that’d probably be worth changing the deck around for. If I remember correctly Onslaught was the most recent block at the time of the tournament.

Then that deck got a lot better with some Vent Sentinels…..

Perhaps it was Peasant that originally allowed every common. I liked that idea, so when we organized a local All Common tournament I suggested we should just go for everything that ever was a common. I do now keep a build around that has no Un-cards, but the original build with them included was a bit stronger. My friends were no fans of me using Un-cards, though they agreed it fit within the rules. It made little difference as the non-Un version also would’ve won easily.

The one archetype I was aware of was Walls that ping, which was the only deck I lost to in the earlier mentioned 16 player tournament (because the Wall’s were too big to kill with damage and there were too many to handle with Abyssal Gatekeeper alone; some were taught to ping through Hermetic Study). I was warned about that deck beforehand, but the description had not been clear enough so it didn’t help.

As far as I know the Un-sets are NOT allowed in Pauper, I’ve certainly never seen any referenced in decklists I’ve read over. The mono-blue style deck you built is a known pauper archetype, but to be fair you likely built it before Pauper archetypes were really existent (so kudos on that).

* Jerrard

We played pauper EDH with any uncommon creature as general. That didn’t stop me from choosing Gerrard of the Closed Fist as my first general for the format. I also went with only cards from before I started playing, Weatherlight and before, so I was limiting myself pretty severely. Still had fun with the deck though (even if it didn’t win much at least I could admire my Elvish Ranger and Bird Maiden ;)). Unfortunately the group broke apart, otherwise I would have built a deck around The Fallen next.

Does the pauper format as you know it allow Un-sets? Framed! is very strong in Spring Tide if it does. I actually researched which Basics would be least likely to lead to me untapping another player’s cards (turned out Saga Islands were a good choice). If not Snap, Cloud of Faeries and Frantic Research still works very well, my deck aimed to play 4 High Tides, then set up a Snap / Scrivener loop, draw my deck with Train of Thought and Capsize / Scrivener / Sapphire Charm them to death. Tides were found with Merchant Scroll, Dizzy Spell or Muddle the Mixture into Merchant Scroll and brought back with Scriveners so getting to 4 was not very unlikely. I’ve once dropped several Scriveners and Clouds to go into beatdown mode when the combo petered out, but I was able to re-assemble it before I would win through damage.

Of course this was created a while ago, there may be some improvements to be made. Also this was not my first Pauper deck, I realize this has cards released after MTGO got started. The very first tried to loop Spore Frog using Undertaker. It didn’t do very well. The 2nd one had me sacrifice creatures for profit (think saccing Blazing Effigy to Carrion Feeder) and it’s still one of my favorite decks, it came in 2nd at a local all common tournament with 16 players.

Pi,
Fair enough. I had meant it more as hyperbole, but to be fair that’s difficult to convey in text. You are definitely correct. It’s probably closer to 5-7% of the card pool.

1 Rare EDH is a LOT of fun. I’ve heard of Pauper EDH, but our local player base wanted to have a lot of different options for generals (by my count there are only 35 uncommon legends if you don’t count “flip” cards and about 40 if you do, most of them are very lackluster (often being vanilla “gold” creatures with a basic ability or two).

I definitely built a pauper deck or two before knowing it was a format on MTGO (though I built a Mono-black control style deck…not nearly as tuned as the one’s topping MTGO, but still powerful and fun).

1 Rare EDH sounds interesting. I’ve tried Pauper EDH too (with a single uncommon to use as your general) and that was pretty fun, I would imagine this would be too.

I’ve played All Common (Pauper) before MTGO got created. Had a lot of fun with my common decks. My Spring Tide deck is very strong, potentially able to do a turn 2 kill (with turn 4 being very likely).