By Hugh Kramer, Grade 8
So there I was, chilling in my house one day, probably thinking about magical cards and gatherings of all sorts, when suddenly out of nowhere, I get an email from one Zachary Barash regarding his upcoming Standard Pauper tournament. Now if you know anything about me, you know I love to Paup. For goodness sake, my LGS nickname was coined because of an old Standard Pauper deck I brewed up many moons ago (Kramer Control). Kor Skyfisher, aka, the best magical gathering card of all time, was the centerpiece of that masterpiece. Luis Chato (in my view, pronounced “Chateau”) the proprietor of my LGS (Twenty Sided Store) used to run somewhat regular standard pauper tournaments. Now that the store has moved on to bigger and better things, Standard Pauper was a format that was very much lacking in my life until Zach decided to run his tournament (which you can read about in many of his previous posts right here on this website!). The list I used for the swiss was the following, saved into my MTGO folder as “mattjones.dec”:
mattjones.dec
| Creatures (17) 4 Delver of Secrets 4 Cloudfin Raptor 4 Frostburn (gettin’) Weird (with it) 4 Stormbound Geist 1 Stitched Drake Spells (20) 4 Unsummon 4 Thought Scour 4 Think Twice 4 Essence Scatter 3 Bone to Ash 1 Negate Land (23) 22 Island 1 Haunted Fengraf | Sideboard (15) 1 Bone to Ash 4 Dispel 3 Negate 2 Disperse 3 Mizzium Skin 2 Stitched Drake |
I ended up going X-1-1 in the swiss which was good enough for a Top 8 birth! With the Top 8 starting this week, my decklist for the Top 8 is a bit of a secret but I would like to thank my longtime Standard Pauper testing partner and tournament proprietor Zachary Barash for brewing something super spicy and continually allowing me to throw my head against a wall as I tried to defeat him in vain. If you can’t beat em, join em. And I’ll be joining him alright. Time to go win back my Taiga!
Thanks for reading!
Hugh
World-renowned punster Hugh Kramer is also a skilled Limited Magician. He’ll share his thoughts on each format as it rears its ugly head, and continue his analysis well after the format fades into the darkness of rotation. Hugh was able to single handedly drive Matt Jones from the Limited format with his love of the Spider Spawning archetype in Innistrad Limited.