The Week of June 26th in Standard Pauper

Another week has come and gone in the world of Standard Pauper. While spoilers are being revealed at a fairly good clip for Eldritch Moon, we still have several weeks to go before that set is released on Magic Online. Fortunately, the Standard Pauper metagame has been shaken up somewhat this week, so there's still plenty to talk about before we start looking ahead to how that set will change the format.

This week the top four decks from SPDC and MPDC included five different archetypes between them, with the dreaded GB Control capturing two wins, including another 1st place finish in MPDC 33.10 at the hands of the skilled pilot gotthisforSOI. The other four archetypes included the return of Air Support and BW Allies from the previous week, as well as the resurgence of both RB Madness and Dimir Control. Overall this is a much healthier metagame snapshot, and seems to give support to my suspicion that a variety of archetypes are still viable in Standard Pauper right now.

And like last time, I want to share a few points of interest:

1. Every color was represented among these eight decks (the Top 4 from both events). Blue had only a single representative, whereas Black was present in six out of the eight decks, thanks in large to the excellent removal that Black has at its disposal. With such a pronounced emphasis on removal, a solid deck better have a game plan on how to mitigate this risk to its creatures.
   
2. Pulse of Murasa was down to only eight copies; four each in the two GB Control decks. Instead, this week the most commonly played card was Grasp of Darkness, with 18 copies (including 2 in the Sideboard) among six decks. Second place went to Oblivion Strike (16 copies), and then Dead Weight (15 copies). As I said, that's a lot of removal!
   
3. The metagame seems more balanced this week between Aggro and Control. Air Support is still probably the most aggressive of these archetypes, with Dimir Control probably pushing out GB Control for the most controlling of these archetypes. 

It's been great seeing new players over the past few weeks for MPDC, and I certainly hope that trend continues. You the community are the lifeblood of this great format, and I hope to have the opportunity to continue to write and produce content for Standard Pauper for a long time to come. Thanks for reading!