Pauper Staples - Red
- Finn M
- May 5, 2017
- 4 min read
Continuing in the same vein as the previous article, I bring you Red Pauper staples!
So what is Red best known for? Well it is best associated with versatile damage based spells which can act as removal or provide the last few points of damage to an opponent. Red also has excellent artifact removal and a number of aggressive cheap creatures.
Creatures
These are the red equivalents to Nettle Sentinel. They are undercosted and so have a downside. Decks that run these tend to try to run many creatures to negate the downside.
These three fill similar roles to the previous red creatures but have haste allowing you to be more aggressive.
This creature is not found too often given the drawback of goblin cohort encouraging a player not to cast all their creatures as fast as possible. In the right deck however, it can be extremely strong.
This creature is best suited against decks with predominantly sorcery speed removal such as Chainer's Edict. It can excel at getting in damage and provides additional utility in preventing blockers.
If you want to protect yourself from sacrifice based removal, this is the best red has to offer.
A pump spell when needed and a creature and a pump spell at other times. Given it's versatility it is fairly common to see this card appearing.
The Bushwhacker ability is extremely power especially in decks which go wide. The power of Bushwhacker is equally as strong in pauper as it is in modern.
A creature which fills a very different role. This creature is best suited to spell slinging decks and adds an additional point of damage to each spell you cast.
Removal and Burn
Yes, the 3 damage spell we all know is alive and well in pauper. It is as good as it is in every other format.
This is generally a pure downgrade of Lightning Bolt but often gets run as Lightning Bolts 5-8.
Scry 2 is extremely powerful especially in a colour which doesn't have much card manipulation available to it in the first place. Magma Jet also kills many creatures in the format and hence is frequently as good and, in some instances, better than Lightning Bolt.
Some creatures are run and do well because they have 4 toughness instead of 3 or less which means they don't die to Lightning Bolt. Flame Slash is efficiently costed and is run to deal with these threats.
Often red aggressive decks want some way of dealing the last points of damage. Fireblast is often run for exactly this reason. It lets you cast a free burn spell at the cost of two lands but the downside is generally irrelevant as this frequently is the last damage needed to win the game.
For any deck looking to go big with mana, these are the spells you want. Rolling Thunder can act as both a board clear if you need it to earlier on or a win condition when you have enough mana to kill your opponent in one shot. Kaervek's Torch (uncommon printing depicted above due to errata-ed oracle text) is often used as it is the closest thing to a spell which can't be countered in pauper. Two more mana is often two mana too much for your opponent. Fireball (Paper pauper legal only - uncommon printing depicted above due to errata-ed oracle text) is a final option which offers a slightly cheaper version of Rolling Thunder with less versatility.
Sideboard cards
Some matches require specific answers out of the sideboard. Some common ones to be aware of are listed below.
This helps you deal with decks which go wide with creatures with 1 toughness. A common powerful one sided sweeper.
This helps deal with fog effects and also circle of protection effects. Some see this as a vital sideboard card for red while others prefer to try out race and go wide against a circle of protection red.
Tron is a deck that appears in pauper. Sometimes all you need is to buy a little bit of time by delaying them from assembling tron for a turn or two so you can out race them.
The one thing red really hates is blue. For all those blue permanents and blue spells, there is a cheap and efficient answer for it in red.
With a flashback for green, this is only really suited to decks which produce both colours. It is extremely powerful vs affinity and any other predominantly artifact based decks.
This doesn't appear to be a particularly powerful card on first glance until you see how prevalent artifact lands are in pauper. This is able to repeatedly stone rain your opponent for 1 mana and in turn win games through this.
That's all for this time. Catch another article in the next few days here on Particularly Pauper!
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