Magic Online Prismatic Pauper Deck | MTGO Deck Building Strategies

Prismatic Pauper Deck

One of my favorite casual formats has to be Prismatic Pauper. It is a great format & i highly recommend trying it. The rules for deck construction are the same as regular Prismatic, but you can only play with commons. A format for the masses as the most expensive common is Terminate for $4. Not too shabby. Lets put our commons to work for us! This build is going to be a pretty straight forward Aggro deck with alot of neat tricks & card drawing. I'll cover a Prismatic Pauper control deck next. Ok, for this build i'm going to go with a heavy Green/Blue base. After much debate, i've decided to go with 80 lands (32% mana base) & 32 mana smoothers/acceleration.

32 Mana Fixers:

x4 Wayfarer's Bauble
x4 Diligent Farmhand
x4 Werebear
x4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
x4 Kodama's Reach
x2 Chartooth Cougar
x2 Noble Templar
x2 Shoreline Ranger
x2 Twisted Abomination
x4 Krosan Tusker

This configuration gives us the ability to pull 32 lands out of our deck, draw a few extra cards with Krosan Tusker & the dual ability of mana early game/beater late game in Werebear. So, 80 lands & 32 mana boosters gives us roughly 112 cards (45%) to prevent any mana woes.

80 Lands:

x2 Azorius Chancery
x4 Barren Moor
x2 Dimir Aqueduct
x13 Forest
x4 Forgotten Cave
x2 Golgari Rot Farm
x2 Gruul Turf
x11 Island
x2 Izzet Boilerworks
x4 Lonely Sandbar
x6 Mountain
x6 Plains
x2 Rakdos Carnarium
x2 Secluded Steppe
x2 Selesnya Sanctuary
x2 Simic Growth
x10 Swamp
x4 Tranquil Thicket

Next, I'm going to turn my attention to card drawing. As you can see from the land above i've included 18 Onslaught cycle lands. These can be used for mana early, bounce 'em back later with the Ravnica lands & turn 'em into a extra card. Pretty versatile lands if you ask me. Combo the 18 cycle lands with the extra card we gain from Krosan Tusker & we already have 22 card drawing spells before we even start! I've decided to go with 30 dedicated card drawers on top of all the extra cantrips cards already mentioned above.

30 Card Draw:

x4 Brainstorm
x2 Impulse
x2 Thought Courier
x4 Compulsive Research
x4 Probe
x4 Phyrexian Rager
x4 Deep Analysis
x2 Sift
x4 Ninja of the Deep Hour

With card drawing & mana out of the way we can now start on the ways to handle our opponents creatures. I've dedicated 24 slots to remove anything that gets in your way.

24 Creature Removal

x4 Frostling
x4 Last Gasp
x2 Stinkweed Imp
x4 Agnozing Demise (Kicker cost can be paid for additional direct damage)
x4 Wrecking Ball
x4 Faith's Fetters
x2 Faceless Butcher

**Note** To keep costs down i've decided to not include Terminate. By all means, Terminate is well worthy of 4 slots so feel free to add them if you own 'em.

Of course, 24 creature removal spells alone aren't going to cut it. So i've backed them up with bounce & burn.

10 Bounce:

x2 Jilt (Kicker cost can be paid for additional creature removal)
x4 Man-o'-War
x4 Repulse (Cantrip which replaces itself with an extra card!)

20 Burn Spells:

x4 Firebolt
x2 Pyrite Spellbomb (Can be cycled for a extra card)
x4 Goblin Legionnaire
x4 Volcanic Hammer
x4 Incinerate
x2 Yamabushi's Flame

All told we have 54 cards or 22% of our deck dedicated to clearing a path or throwing burn to the head. The only thing we don't have dedicated removal for is artifacts & enchantments. Let's fix that!

10 Artifact/Enchantment Removal:

x4 Kami of Ancient Law
x4 Tin Street Hooligan
x2 Nantuko Vigilante

**Note** I haven't built a sideboard yet, but i know i want to include more Artifact/Enchantment removal. Possible candidates: Naturalize, Orim's Thunder, Dismantling Blow, Nantuko Vigilante.

Another side strategy i've included in this build is a small discard theme.

6 Discard:

x4 Duress
x2 Okiba-Gang Shinobi

Combo these 6 cards with the x4 Probe we already have for a 10 card discard side strategy.

Believe it or not, but at this point we already have 212 cards with 62 creatures. I can't think of a better time then now to go ahead & round off our creature base. Let's add the "aggro".

24 Beaters:

x4 Basking Rootwalla
x4 Wild Mongrel
x4 River Boa
x4 Patrol Hound
x4 Gaea's Skyfolk
x4 Skyreach Manta

To make our creatures a even bigger threat i've added some power boosts.

10 Power Ups (?):

x3 Bonesplitter
x3 Sinister Strength
x4 Armadillo Cloak

At this point we have only 4 slots remaining. I'm going to use these for removing any recurring nightmares your opponent may have.

Graveyard Removal:

x4 Skullsnatcher

Total Cards - 250

Our Mana Curve looks like this:

1 Drops: 34

2 Drops: 60

3 Drops: 32

4 Drops: 26 - includes x4 Ninja of the Deep Hour which we plan on casting for 1U.

5 Drops: 6 - includes x2 Okiba-Gang Shinobi with a alternate 3B Ninjutsu cost.

6 Drops: 8 - all land cyclers.

7 Drops: 4 - includes x4 Krosan Tusker which can be cycled for 2G.

As you can clearly see, our mana curve favors the early turns. Our decks average casting cost is 2.70 however, drops 5-7 are very deceptive on our curve. Alot of the cards in those slots all have alternate casting costs or can be cycled. Later in the game the same cards can be used to deliver the beats! If you were to re-do our mana curve taking into effect the alternate casting costs of 18 cards it would be more reflective to our strong early early game.

Re-Adjusted Mana Curve:

1 Drops: 34

2 Drops: 72

3 Drops: 36

4 Drops: 24

5 Drops: 4

6 Drops: 0

7 Drops: 0

This gives us a average casting cost of 2.36, which is a little more reflective of the speed of the deck.

Colored Mana Symbols on Spell Cards:

Green: 46

Blue: 42

Black: 39

Red: 32

White: 22

When it comes to mana i have a simple equation. I take the number of colored mana symbols for each color, divide by 2 & add 1.

Colored Mana Symbols on Spell Cards:

Green: 46/2=23+1=24 green mana sources.

Blue: 42/2=21+1=22 blue mana sources.

Black: 39/2=19.5+1=21.50 rounded up to 22 black mana sources.

Red: 32/2=16+1=17 red mana sources.

White: 22/2=11+1=12 white mana sources.

Play Strategy:

The best strategy to employ with this deck is to simply start tossing creatures out ASAP. Most Prismatic decks spend the first 4-5 turns setting up their mana. With this knowledge in hand, we now know that we want to fully exploit this 4-5 turn "grace period". Since we have 58 cards in the deck that allow you to draw cards (23%) we should be able to keep our hand full & the threats a'flowing!

Weakness:

This deck may have to have its lands tweaked a little more. Considering we only have access to commons, our only dual land option are the Ravnica block bounce lands. These lands are great but a handful of them can prove to be taxing.

SideBoard:

Like i said earlier, i haven't built a sideboard yet. I know i want artifact/enchantment removal, after that it's a toss up. I can tell you this--with such a vast cardpool, this deck can be built numerous different ways. It was painful to exclude Seal of Fire, Harrow & Terminate among many others. Another possible sideboard card could be Moment's Peace. This could help versus other fast decks. After that, i would say build it to whatever you are having trouble dealing with.

Building Prismatic decks can be a daunting task, so i hope this helps!

MTGO Prismatic Pauper Deck