Evolution of Theros Standard Pauper and what I think about it

Hello everyone, I am MundisV, the winner of the most recent MPDC and, since the Deck Tech for Dimir Mill is already done, I would love to share my observations about Standard Pauper metagame. Please be aware that I am nowhere good enough to tell you what is definitely true and correct. Everything below is just my personal opinion, which can be (and probably is) flawed.

At the begininning of Theros Standard, our format, of course, was not defined yet and everyone was brewing something desirable according to person's favourite colour combination or part of major archetypes. In my opinon, in the very first event people just tried to jam the most powerful cards to their decks, and big creatures seemed great then, because there was next to no good removal. We saw Junk Extort take down the very first Casual MPDC event. Top 4 also featured an early version of Monoblack, as well as much different from now creature-based Dimir Control deck and my BUG big stuff deck. While this was a small tournament, at the earliest stages of the format, black proved to be very popular and powerful colour, also then I personally learned that Perilous Shadow, Pacifism and Grisly Spectacle were good (what might not be true today) and format was not as removal-light as I thought. Also, a great number of midrange decks with life gain (in Gary, Seruli and maybe Centaur Healer) made aggro a poor choice for the first week.

The second week of our format featured MPDC 23.01, which was dominated by Extort and Monoblack, although some intersting deck showed up: Boros Aggro, Hexproof Auras and Orzhov deck based on a synergy between Bestow creatures and Ethereal Armor. This event showed us much more synergistic decks, while midrange and control decks were left behind. I failed to achieve anything in this tournament with my Junk Midrange, which was a mix of my previous deck and the latest winning decklist.

I did not have time to prepare for the MPDC 23.02 and played my outdated Junk deck, which luckily made Top 4 even if I felt bad about it. Once again, meta was very diverse, although Monoblack and Extort decks kept their consistency. The finals featured two very powerful additions to our metagame: beautiful Gamelen's Golgari deck and Adner's masterpiece Dimir Mill deck, which won the whole thing. After losing to it, I quickly (once again) picked up the winning decklist and started to test with it.

As unbeatable Dimir deck can look from the other side of the table, it can be beaten. I had some bad draws and made some poor decisions, which led me up to a 2-2 finish in MPDC 23.03. It seems that similar fate occured to three other Dimir players, while Boros Aggro took down the event. The Top 8 contained some Orzhov Extort and Monoblack like usually, but in addition, we saw some strong new decks: Monoblue built by Kriss and Selesnya Aggro Auras built by FabioS. I believe, the addition of Adner's Control deck to Standard Pauper metagame made it even more diverse. Now big midrange decks and slow Monoblack deck could not reign supreme because Control beats them badly, this allows aggro decks to join the format, which makes midrange once again better. The existence of all major archetypes should be a proof that the format is still healthy and interesting.

If you got bored by this wall of text, I will leave you with my Dimir decklist, which is basically a rip-off from Adner baring a few cards:

 4 Archaeomancer

4 Read the Bones
3 Pilfered Plans
4 Devour Flesh
4 Grisly Spectacle
4 Essence Scatter
4 Cancel
4 Psychic Strike
2 Crypt Incursion
3 Thassa's Bounty

1 Unknown Shores
10 Swamp
9 Island
4 Dimir Guildgate

Sideboard
3 Pharika's Cure
3 Duress
1 Crypt Incursion
4 Razortip Whip
4 Dispel


It would have been great to add a match-to-match report of my tournament, but unfortunately I am bad at remembering details from the past and the PDCMagic page shows the event is still unfinished. Despite that, I remember some funny things from this event. First of all, I milled myself out  in the very first game of the tournament. My opponent learned a cute tactic from gwyned's article and stopped playing any cards when my library was smaller. Since I am a new Magic player , and I had played other TCG with different rules before, I thought the player looses only when he cannot draw a card during his Draw Step, unfortunately for me that was not true and when I tried to mill the last 5 cards from my opponent deck with Thassa's Bounties, I was unable to draw cards from my library and lost on-the-spot. This have happened to me once again, in the fourth round against FabioS, who also caught me with my pants down again, when I had a smaller library. I apologise, if waiting to draw the very last card seemed to be disrespectful, because I still was not certain, how some things would work out for me...  Also, I won with Archeomancers against an opponent who added his sideboard to the deck and mulled to 0 because I could counter all his removal against them (I believe this tactic isn't the best). I could tell you that my win in the finals against blightningly fast mono-red was due to amazingly lucky draws on my side and power of Pharika's Cure against that deck. At this moment, I would like to add the fourth copy to my 75 and probably move some of them to the main.
Also, I would reconsider Read the Bones, since I was siding them out almost all the time, it hurts against aggro and your library shrinks after casting it, which allows our opponents to abuse it and stop playing anything. The Sideboard part against control decks is almost  untested and I am not sure anymore if Razortip Whip is necessary.

To conclude, I want to say a big thank you for Adner, who takes of our clan, gwyned , who runs all these great events and, especially, MyGalaxy, who was the man, who intoduced me to this amazing Standard Pauper community.

MundisV