Turn Three Kill in Standard Pauper

Double strike has always been dangerous in Standard Pauper. Temur Battle Rage nicely illustrates why. With the perfect hand, we now have a Turn 3 kill in Standard Pauper, assuming your opponent doesn't interact with you during those three turns.

Turn 1: cast Akroan Crusader.
Turn 2: cast Rouse the Mob targeting the Crusader; cast Titan's Strength, again targeting the Crusader. This buffs the Crusader up to 6 power and creates 2 1/1 tokens with Haste. They deal 8 damage total.
Turn 3: cast Titan's Strength, targeting the Crusader; cast Temur Battle Rage, targeting the Crusader. This buffs the Crusader up to 4 power and creates 2 more 1/1 tokens with Haste. With the tokens from the previous round, they deal 12 damage total (4 first strike, 4 regular strike, 4 total from the tokens). For those playing along at home, 12 + 8 = 20, or the starting Life total of your opponent.

The same trick also works with Satyr Hoplite. But in this case, it's a 3/3 before buffs on Turn 2, and a 5/5 before buffs on Turn 3. You still deal 8 damage on Turn 2, but on Turn 3 you now deal a whopping 16 damage, bringing your total up to 24 damage.

Granted, either way this takes the perfect hand. You have to draw two copies of Titan's Strength, a copy each of Rouse the Mob and Temur Battle Rage, and three Lands, all of which must come into play untapped and two of which must be Mountains. You also need the Akroan Crusader or Satyr Hoplite in your opening hand, and for your opponent to be unable to interact with you during those three turns. You also get two Scry activations from Titan's Strength, for whatever that's worth.

Unlikely, yes. But certainly not outside the realm of possibility. And even with a slightly less ideal hand, a Turn 4 or 5 kill is even easier, particularly if you can pull off multiple buffs before casting Temur Battle Rage.

I suspect that this card alone will cause more rage than any other in the Standard Pauper cardpool once Fate Reforged is released.

Rakdos Midrange

It seems like the RDW deck is out of control.

Then again, maybe it's just me. While RDW and Boros have managed a few Top 8 finishes over the past few weeks, it appears that the decks simply aren't consistent enough to take home a trophy. On the other hand, they are consistently beating me. Between the MagicGatheringStrat Standard Pauper league and MPDC, I faced three of them almost back-to-back. Frankly, I'm tired of losing to it.

So I decided to see what it would look like to throw as many removal spells into a decklist as possible and see if maybe that could stem the bleeding. Surprisingly, the deck has actually performed fairly well in early testing. Here's the list I'm currently playing:

Rakdos Midrange

by gwyned

Creatures 4 Disowned Ancestor 4 Servant of Tymaret 3 Disciple of Phenax 2 Gray Merchant of Asphodel 13 cards Other Spells 4 Debilitating Injury 2 Flurry of Horns 1 Font of Return 4 Pharika's Cure 3 Read the Bones 4 Lightning Strike 4 Magma Spray 1 Covenant of Blood 23 cards

Lands 4 Bloodfell Caves 4 Evolving Wilds 6 Mountain 10 Swamp 24 cards Sideboard 3 Forge Devil 2 Typhoid Rats 2 Baleful Eidolon 1 Flesh to Dust 1 Rotfeaster Maggot 3 Feast of Dreams 3 Scouring Sands 15 cards

The list ended up having a pretty strong MonoBlack shell, but with a full complement of Debilitating Injury, Lightning Strike, Pharika's Cure, and Magma Spray. Against aggressive archetypes, it can also side in Forge Devil, Feast of Dreams, Scouring Sands, and a 2/2 split of Typhoid Rats and Baleful Eidolon. The concept here is relatively straightforward: remove everything your opponent throws at you and grind out on the back of low Power value creatures like Servant of Tyramet, Disowned Ancestor, Disciple of Phenax, and Gray Merchant. It can refill using Read the Bones, and eventually recycle its creatures using the single copy of Font of Return.

If you've got some suggestions for the deck, I'd love to hear them. I'm usually not the best at brewing decks, so I'm sure there's something obvious I missed. Still, I've enjoying my testing thus far, and I hope that this proves to be viable in the current metagame. We'll see.

Thanks for reading.