What Has Emerged in Standard Pauper

I am, at usual, running behind on my blog posts. I had a fantastic time at GenCon, and I will plan on recapping some of my experiences in a later post. But for today, I wanted to briefly write about how the Commons from Eldritch Moon fared in the first week of Standard Pauper events.

If you read Part One and Part Two of my Standard Pauper review of Eldritch Moon, you already know what I believe were the most important cards from the set. And the results from this first week were right in line with my expectations. While cards like Displace, Galvanic Bombardment, Take Inventory, and Thermo-Alchemist all made appearances in a variety of decks, the big winners of the set appear to be the two Emerge creatures It of the Horrid Swarm and Wretched Gryff.

These creatures not only immediately give you great value, but as it turns out their Emerge costs are actually cheap enough that you can get them into play fairly easily, sometimes as early as turn four or five. And provided you are running enough other creatures, it is also somewhat routine to be able to dump them into play back-to-back, quickly making the game revolve around who can keep the greatest number alive the longest. Based on all of that, it should come as no surprise that the 1st place trophy for both SPDC and MPDC was captured by a Simic colored deck built around these two creatures.

Even with all the removal in the format, I expect we'll see plenty of these two creatures for some time to come.