The Week of August 7th in Standard Pauper

A brand new season of Standard Pauper weekly events has begun, bringing Eldritch Moon into Standard and already shaking up the metagame considerably. And at least for MPDC, this also meant a small surge of interest in the format, bringing in 18 players for this week's event and giving us our first Top 8 playoff in quite some time. With that, of course, comes four more decks to evaluate for this week, bringing the total up to 12 decks that made the playoffs between SPDC and MPDC. Let's take a look at that first snapshot of the new Standard Pauper metagame:

First off, as should have been expected, several players chose simply to run the pre-Eldritch Moon favorite Sultai Control without making any changes, which accounted for three of the twelve winning decks. Similarly, both PauperRBust and cRUMMYdUMMY took the GB Control shell and tweaked it in slightly different ways, but both took advantage of the mana ramp from Ulvenwald Captive and the new powerful Emerge creatures.

Second, we also had one other returning deck in the case of AEFabricio, running the GW Fliers deck that enjoyed moderate success last season.

Third, both DrChrisBaker and littlefield went with Izzet instead, choosing to run few creatures (but including the new Thermo-Alchemist) and instead focus on powerful spells, including Galvanic Bombardment and Take Inventory.

Fourth, we saw two brand new archetypes from both rremedio1 and Paranoid_Android. Rremedio1 ran a four color Tokens build, combining synergies from Impact Tremors, a mass of Black removal, Pulse of Murasa, and the new Emerge creatures. Paranoid_Android's build was a much simpler Azorius Fliers utilizing Displace in order to gain some incremental advantage off of his creatures' enters-the-battlefield effects.

Finally, as I mentioned yesterday, the first place trophies both went to Simic Emerge decks run by amnaremotoas and JogandoPelado respectively. This new archetype looks to be quite strong, and will certainly be a force to be reckoned with going forward.

The biggest takeaway from this week is that Sultai colors look to continue their dominance in the format. This is perhaps not surprising given the relative weakness of both White and Red at Common in Eldritch Moon. While all five colors were represented in the finalists' decks, Blue, Black, and Green seem to by far have the most important cards in the format right now. Of course, there's still plenty of room for innovation and change in the metagame, so it will be interesting to see what next week brings!

Thanks for reading.