Pauper Staples - Green
- Finn M
- May 4, 2017
- 4 min read
Pauper is a wide and vast format and, while it is a format ripe for brewing, without a feel for what else is out there, it can be challenging to know where to begin. To help those of you looking to brew up your own decks I am going give a brief run down of some common Pauper staple cards to consider. Today we are going to look at Green.
Green is most commonly associated with good cheap creatures and pump spells. The primary weakness of green is ways of dealing with opposing creatures outside of combat damage.
Creatures
This card provides pseudo vigilance making it both aggressive and defensive while also opening up synergies within the dedicated elf deck.
This card is very versatile card which both allows you to untap creatures and pick up lands to replay should you miss a land drop on a turn or want to enable landfall.
These are some powerful creatures which often form the backbone to many midrange and graveyard orientated decks. Nimble Mongoose and Werebear provide cheap sizeable creatures while Golgari Brownscale provides reliable incidental life gain and recursion while also fueling a graveyard to enable your other creatures.
Brindle Shoat, Nest Invader and Young Wolf find a home in pauper due to the prevalence of edict (untargetted sacrifice) removal such as Chainer's Edict. These creatures help to avoid being forced to sacrifice a creature you don't want to or gives you a creature you want to have die.
Moldgraf Scavenger can often be viewed as Werebear 5-8 in a deck. It benefits from being harder to kill before delirium is enabled but, with only 3 power, it gets outclassed by Werebear.
Silkweaver Elite is underrated and underplayed in my opinion. While revolt is often harder to enable in pauper than some other formats, it is extremely powerful for a reason other than the card draw: reach. This creature both replaces itself by drawing a card and can trade with the two most common fliers in the format: a flipped Delver of Secrets and Mulldrifter.
Pump Spells
These are the most common pump spells in the format. Each of them has its own pros and cons which we will look at now.
Pros Protection from removal Large +4/+4 pump
Cons Costs 2 mana to get full value
Pros Cheap at 1 mana Large +4/+4 potential
Cons Requires landfall to be optimal
Pros Doesn't require mana to cast Can be run in non-green decks
Cons Smaller pump at +2/+2
Pros The pump is permanent as they are +1/+1 counters Can reuse persist creatures Can be used to prevent undying on an opponent's undying creature (best used without morbid in this case) Cheap to cast
Cons Requires a creature to die to be optimal as a pump spell Undying creatures only become optimal targets after they have died once already.
Pros Permanent pump Cheap to cast Recursive as it returns to hand when put into a graveyard from the battlefield Provides trample
Cons Small pump and only to power Can only be cast at sorcery speed
Removal
Green is generally lacking when it comes to creature removal but excels at artifact and enchantment removal.
While a bit more expensive than its little sibling Prey Upon, the pump can be significant and turn a trade into a removal spell. I highly recommend this for any green creature based deck out there.
Sideboard Cards
Green has some quite versatile sideboard cards available to deal with specific difficult matchups.
This balances efficiency and cost. While it is sorcery speed, the benefit of being able to destroy two targets with one card is significant.
The instant speed of this reliable old removal spell is what makes some prefer it over gleeful sabotage.
Sometimes you want to be able to tap out while still holding up artifact or enchantment removal. In those cases, Seal of Primordium is the ideal solution in those cases.
Sometimes it is beneficial to have these effects on a creature. In those cases Caustic Caterpillar can fit the mold.
Flying creatures getting you down? This can help remove one or sometimes more.
This is a common choice especially when run in decks alongside Quirion Ranger. It is ideal when looking for a way to remove spirit tokens.
Sometimes the fliers are just too big to deal with permanently. In those cases Matsu-Tribe Sniper is optimal.
This is the most commonly used as green decks have a tendency to be able enable ferocious.
For those decks who have doubts they will enable ferocious, there is Nourish.
If you are a graveyard deck, Gnaw to the Bone can be back breaking to a red deck and can even get cast twice.
If you feel your deck is weak to sweepers, this can give you protection from things like Electrickery and Shrivel.
Stay tuned for other colours over the next few days!
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