Howdy, folks! I’ve been consumed by Pokémon Y and Ace Attorney—Dual Destinies lately. They’re fantastic! I’ve dearly missed the Ace Attorney series (and would love to see Investigations 2 be translated) and Pokémon Y has been the most entertaining game in the series since SoulSilver. Don’t worry, there’s been plenty of Magic happening as well. Plus, I just got my computer back and after almost four months of hiatus, I’ll be returning to regular streaming!
But enough about me. Let’s hear about our talented Standard Pauper players! All of them went X-1-1 or better in eight rounds of swiss, which is quite the accomplishment in and of itself. The top eight is ongoing and I’ll be posting their decklists soon. Soon enough, one of them will win my Taiga!
Andrzej “Onion” K
What is your name?
Andrzej Korytkowski (pronounced Ann-Jay Core-It-Cow-Ski) or just Andrew 😉
Where are you from?
Szczecin, Poland
When did you start playing Magic?
I first encountered Magic many years ago via Shandalar: Duels of the Planeswalkers, but my serious playing started with Magic 2010 Prerelease.
What deck did you play for the swiss portion? Why did you choose it?
It was a BUG Flickergate/Gatekeepers Deck with white splash – mostly for Ray of Revelation (against Mill) and one Sunspire Gatekeepers (the white gatekeeper create nice pressure). I also had Curse of Bloody Tome in sideboard for mirror match-up and Mill match-up.
What is your experience with Standard Pauper?
This was my first real tournament with Standard Pauper.
What is your favorite Magic format?
I really enjoy playing Legacy and Casual Constructed.
What is your favorite card?
Oh boy, that’s a tough question. I have soft spot for many cards: Prodigal Sorcerer, Venser the Sojourner, Lone Missionary, Royal Assasin, Dragon Broodmother, Kazandu Blademaster, Terror … I could write 20 more cards and it wouldn’t be enough.
What’s something unusual about you?
I am coordinator of many events in my group – I organized many Manga&Anime conventions and meetings – sometimes I enjoy doing it more than attending to it. As for MTG unusualities: I played Mono White Control during ZEN-SOM Standard and I really enjoy playing competitive Magic, but also casual Magic.
What would you like me to have asked you? Do I want to know the answer?
Oh you could ask me a few question:
1) Card I most don’t like (Hero’s Downfall, Tooth and Nail)
2) To whom I want send my greeting and regards (Hamar Playgroup from Norway and Szczecin Playgroup)
3) What’s the name of my dog (Odie)
Charlie S
What is your name?
Charlie Seidell
Where are you from?
Originally New York, but I’m at school in Baltimore, MD studying mathematics and computer science (and classics).
When did you start playing Magic?
I started playing again with the release of m10 after playing casually as a kid back around Odyssey block. I keep having to take breaks for school, notably missing the entirety of DGM and Gatecrash 🙁
What deck did you play for the swiss portion? Why did you choose it?
I chose to play a BUG-Gatekeepers deck because Saruli Gatekeepers is a HOUSE and I love combo-control decks.
What is your experience with Standard Pauper?
Until the beginning of this tournament, none.
What is your favorite Magic format?
I like to play EDH, pauper, standard, and limited.
What is your favorite card?
Lurking Predators!
What’s something unusual about you?
I can lick my elbow!
Conor Moran
Where are you from?
Baltimore, MD. Home of the Super Bowl champion Ravens!!!
When did you start playing Magic?
I started playing Magic when I was 10 years old. I think my first booster pack was Odyssey and I opened a Bloodcurdler! Thankfully, I bought the monoblack 7th edition precon. How lucky! Unfortunately, I was no match for my friend who combined multiple monogreen 7th edition precons. Those Thorn Elementals were such a beating!
What deck did you play for the swiss portion? Why did you choose it?
I played U/B Mill. I posted the list on my facebook page (Standard Pauper MTG). It plays like a full-on control deck. The deck has zero creatures! This mucks up my opponents’ hands over the course of a long game. Curse of the Bloody Tome is the only real win condition since nobody uses enchantment removal maindeck. Crypt Incursion is broken in this deck since everybody runs so many creatures in this format. I would consider BUG flickergate, Monoblue Flyers, and Izzet Variations to be extremely good matchups as long as they’re unprepared. That’s was a very good reason to play this deck.
What is your experience with Standard Pauper?
I occasionally run Standard Pauper tournaments on a local level. I also have a facebook page that was originally intended for organizing and reporting about the events. It’s turned into more of a forum for Standard Pauper that anybody can join.
What is your favorite Magic format? (Draft, Legacy, Standard, Pauper, Standard Pauper, etc.)
As much as I love drafting and regular Standard, Standard Pauper combines aspects that I enjoy from both formats. I think Standard Pauper has a lot of really great things going for it that WotC should pay attention to. I think that the lack of serious tournaments and testing makes the format very accessible to rogue strategies which is great for players who love brewing their own decks. I also like that there’s essentially no barrier of entry and anybody can play Standard Pauper regardless of their financial situation. This levels the playing field and also allows for a proper metagame to flourish since each player has access to every possible deck for any given tournament.
What is your favorite card?
My favorite card is Balance. I love the irony of a card that’s named balance being on the Banned and Restricted list for… wait for it… BEING UNBALANCED!
What’s something unusual about you?
I watch a lot more reality TV than I’d like to admit…
What would you like me to have asked you? Do I want to know the answer?
What starting pokemon did you pick for X/Y?
Froakie, have you seen Greninja HATERS?!?
Froakie, have you seen Greninja HATERS?!?
P. Dalton
What is your name? (This can be your full name or just your first name)
Peter Dalton (giving just my first name at this point wouldn’t achieve much, heh :D)
Where are you from?
I was born in England originally, but have lived most of my life in Brussels, Belgium
When did you start playing Magic?
Around M13. I had been watching a particular middlingly popular league of legends streamer who started streaming his m13 drafts. I had played the shandalar pc game when younger and thought to myself “That looks easy, I can do that!” Many 0-1s later, I’ve grown to respect the game a little more, heh. I still draft pretty poorly.
What deck did you play for the swiss portion? Why did you choose it?
I played a u/r control deck I brewed up myself, with some reference to a few similar lists but a lot of changes. I really, really liked the deck. There were about 4 or 5 of us from a website who had decided to play the tournament and we practiced together. We rapidly identified that the decks to beat were delver, flickergates and mono-red. None of those really appealed to me, for various reasons (I’m not really a tempo player and I found the inconsistency of my delvers frustrating, flickergates seemed like a clunky deck and mono red felt fairly limited in its play decisions.) So I started brewing!
My first attempt was a g/b morbid deck with young wolves, hunger of the howlpacks, the 4 mana 2/2 morbid bear that gives counters, undying evil, blood bairns – it was super sweet! Unfortunately, although it sported even matchups against red and delver, it could barely win a game against flickergates, as by the time you got your combos online, they were probably a turn or so from going off – assuming the big fatties you’d been assembling hadn’t already been hit by tragic slips and the like. So I went back to the drawing board.
The u/r deck was my very next attempt to break the format. Browsing the card pool, I came to the conclusion that red had a plethora of cheap, efficient removal spells – shock, pillar, searing spear… and what’s more, I’d also come to believe that the only way to go long against flickergates was to have a number of counterspells. Add the card draw and the deck just started coming together – you got access, almost as a bonus, to great little synergies and combos, like harvest pyre+thought scour, thought scour+haunted fengraf – and then just te natural synergy that comes from playing infinite instants with counterspells!
Despite what I said earlier, the discovery of how to play and board against flickergate was not obvious. Through extensive solo games I finally worked out a plan to deal with the menacing deck. The issue was that despite being able to slow them down, you could not actually kill them ever, because they gained too much life from their saruli gatekeepers. Also, despite a deck built deliberately to de-emphasise creatures (running only 8 – 4 weirds, 2 archaeomancers and 2 gryff vanguard as finishers) their gatekeepers were a real issue – on the basis that my deck struggled against pillarfield ox, despite chandra’s outrage and harvest pyre picking up the slack.
So I developed a very specific plan for the deck. Firstly, I would as much as possible counter their archaeomancers. Without an archaeomancer on the board, ghostly flicker was significantly less scary. Attempting to counter just the flickers meant that every archaeomancer and every subsequent copy of flicker was another must answer threat, whereas targeting just the mancer reduced the count of justkillyou spells to 4. Then, all my burn could point at the pillarfield oxes causing me so much grief. Finally, in order to actually kill them, I had to use my thought scours – targeting them! Yes, my game plan game 1 was to play a 40 odd turn game. It was much more effective than it sounds! Then, postboard I would bring in curse of the bloody tome, and at that point I felt the matchup was pretty favoured for me. With good to even matchups against both delver and red (electrickery a hard working sideboard card, as was pillar of flame), I felt very prepared for the field.
I love brewing, because each time I brew it teaches me something new about the game. This time, particularly, I learnt something valuable about the speed of a control deck. My experiences with control had been largely with the standard u/w/x decks that frankly are glacially slow, but rely on powerful expensive spells like supreme verdict and sphinx’s revelation to catch up lost ground. You couldn’t do that in a format like this – the spells don’t exist! So you had to be fast. And being fast brought its own benefits, because suddenly you didn’t need to rely on your powerful spells, and you could rapidly get to the position where you didn’t need to deal with threats any more or could deal with them efficiently and start using spells like divination to get ahead instead of playing catchup every turn. Essentially, being fast is always a good thing – whether a control deck or an aggro deck – and the faster the better is a maxim for all decks – which is obvious really, cause you’d never play a three mana spell if a two mana spell did the same thing, but thinking about it in those terms really helped me grasp the concept.
So that was my 30 instants/sorceries u/r no delvers no nivix cyclops deck 😀
What is your experience with Standard Pauper?
None! This was my first taste of the format. I had played a lot of pauper, which had taught me some things about pauperesque formats in general (like, be suspicious of multicolour aggro in a setting where guildgates are premium fixing). I definitely enjoyed my foray into the unknown (winning a lot helps!)
What is your favorite Magic format?
As I mentioned, it’s got to be pauper. You can play established decks, you can play rogue decks. It’s cheap to get into, so you can switch decks easily. The level of competition is nevertheless pretty fierce. The vast card pool leaves room to brew. It’s a great format! Even the aggro decks, like my favourite deck stompy, can be very complex to play (people don’t respect pump spells, but trying to play them in a competitive setting and they are so versatile that they give you infinite lines of play. Like, a giant growth can be alternately a doom blade (winning creature combat), a lava spike (to the face!) or a negate (sorry bout that lightning bolt), and working out how to use each one at any given time is a real challenge – and trying to not get yourself 2 for 1ed!
I love looking at fringe or niche archetypes in the format and seeing if I can build something sweet.
What is your favorite card?
Young wolf. It’s unassuming, but it’s a great, fair, grindy card. I have a passion for breakable cards that when you break them don’t just win you the game – they just give you value. It’s no fun just winning a game with a kikijiki resto angel – you don’t get to savour the powerful things you’re doing, cause the opponent just dies. Like evoke mulldrifter, undying evil.
The aristocrats was the deck I wanted to play in standard if I could ever afford to buy a standard deck 😛
What’s something unusual about you?
I was educated bilingually, with some lessons taught in french and some in english.
What would you like me to have asked you? Do I want to know the answer?
Gosh, is there anything left to say? I feel like I’ve already typed at least three novels.
Jason Gray
What is your name?
Jason Gray
Where are you from?
Massachusetts, USA
When did you start playing Magic?
Between MBS and NPH
What deck did you play for the swiss portion? Why did you choose it?
Mono blue fliers. Friend of mine suggested it, I had never played standard pauper before then.
What is your experience with Standard Pauper?
Seems like a fun format, I’m planning to play some PDCs in the coming weeks.
What is your favorite Magic format?
Draft/EDH
What is your favorite card?
Anything people hate, notably Necropotence, Ya
What’s something unusual about you?
I’m a Podcaster, Streamer, and huge fan of the game!
Hugh Kramer
Where are you from?
Brooklyn, NY
When did you start playing Magic?
I owned a Rabid Wombat and a Shivan Dragon in junior high school then didn’t play again until Alara block.
What deck did you play for the swiss portion? Why did you choose it?
Mono-blue Delver, I felt it was the best deck.
What is your experience with Standard Pauper?
Quite extensive. I’ve played the format casually for the past few years on and off.
What is your favorite Magic format?
Draft not close.
What is your favorite card?
Matt Jones Token
What’s something unusual about you?
My first word was “Dog” (unusual). In a related note, I love dogs (not unusual)
Justin Beckert
Where are you from?
NYC.
When did you start playing Magic?
1994, my father got me into the game from a young age as one of his good freinds owned a card shop, i played pretty consistently, with a small break after Masques block returning with IPA, then played right up until Mirrodin. then took a good hiatus from the game until WWK and have been playing since
What deck did you play for the swiss portion? Why did you choose it?
I played UR delver, its what I play in regular pauper and i frequent the deck in legacy so it just felt right, o yea and that card is unfair, that too
What is your experience with Standard Pauper?
None
What is your favorite Magic format?
Legacy and Cube, I’ll vintage here and there but not that often
What is your favorite card?
It’s a toss up between two of my favorite creatures ever, Goblin Welder and Wild Mongrel
What’s something unusual about you?
Although i have attended three GPs since i have rejoined the game i have had to leave all of them due to random reasons, including my thesis review with X-2 records or better
aceracerff
What is your name?
Jordan Welzbacher
Where are you from?
Toledo, Ohio
When did you start playing Magic?
2003
What deck did you play for the swiss portion? Why did you choose it?
Izzet. Delver of Secrets, Nivix Cyclops, and Stormbound Geist are the best creatures in the format. Red’s removal deals with all of the creatures while at the same time providing reach. Think Twice and Amass the Components provide the necessary card advantage for the attrition battle.
What is your experience with Standard Pauper?
I have never played a game before, but I am an experienced Pauper player. I have played (and even streamed) plenty of Pauper on MODO and also own a Pauper Cube.
What is your favorite Magic format? (Draft, Legacy, Standard, Pauper, Standard Pauper, etc.)
Legacy, though I haven’t played in many years.
What is your favorite card?
Ever: Survival of the Fittest
Pauper: Sea Gate Oracle
Pauper: Sea Gate Oracle
That I have played in Standard: Bloodbraid Elf
What’s something unusual about you?
My other hobby is autocross – driving a car as fast as possible through a course laid out by cones in a big parking lot. I currently own a Mazda Miata, and have previously owned a Subaru WRX, Nissan 300ZX, and Honda Civic Si.
What would you like me to have asked you? Do I want to know the answer?
Q: What did you do last weekend?
A: Won the TCGPlayer Fall States Championships in Michigan with homebrew Jund!
Ladies and gentlemen, congratulations to our top eight players! It’s been a pleasure getting to know them and I hope that you’ve enjoyed our putting a more human face on these names you’ve seen over the past three months. I’ll see you next week, likely for the return of Flashback Drafts!
—Zachary Barash
twitch.tv/ZennithGP — Join the livestream!
Magic Online username: Zennith
Zachary Barash has been playing Magic on and off since 1994. He loves Limited and drafts every available format (including several that aren’t entirely meant to be drafted). He’s a proud Cube owner and performer, improvising entire musicals every week with his team, Petting Zoo. Zach has an obsession with Indian food that borders on being unhealthy.