The Week of November 6th in Standard Pauper

Welcome back to this week's look at the Standard Pauper metagame, based upon the results of our two weekly Player Run Events. This week we had the unusual result that SPDC had enough players to cut to Top 8, while MPDC did not, leaving us with 12 decks that made the cutoff. So let's take a look at what these decks tell us about how the metagame is shaping up.

Probably the biggest surprise this week was that a MonoRed archetype captured the first place trophy in both events. DrChrisBakerDC's version from SPDC was very burn heavy, playing only twelve creatures, while bibbob's version from MPDC was much more balanced between spells and efficient creatures. But both relied upon a common core of Fiery Temper, Pyre Hound, Renegade Freighter, Self-Assembler, and Tormenting Voice. Congrats to both of them on their wins!

littlefield continued to innovate with his Simic Big Stuff deck, making Top 4 in SPDC and finishing in 2nd place in MPDC. The newest addition to this deck is Byway Courier, which is particularly good in a format with so much removal, since it always replaces itself when it dies. This archetype is proving to be consistently good despite whatever shifts the metagame brings.

Also noteworthy this week was a brand new archetype by reco91 called Bant Tokens, which made Top 4 in SPDC this week. This deck took the Eldrazi creatures from Simic and combined them with Glint-Sleeve Artisan to create a goodly sized swarm of tokens, which then get buffed via Borrowed Grace to enable a back-breaking strike against your opponent. It's always great to see new decks come to light and perform well in our events!

The rest of the field consisted of familiar versions of Izzet Spells, Esper Artifacts, MonoBlack Artifacts, and Gruul Monsters, with double entries for all but the last one. Not surprisingly, Self-Assembler continues to be an auto-include in every deck, which will only continue to fuel calls for it to be banned.

Let me remind you in closing that I am once again producing regular Standard Pauper Deck Techs over at PureMTGO on the winning decklist from each week of MPDC. Definitely check those out and let me know what you think! Thanks for reading.