Since the new year, I’ve been playing Pauper MTG at my FLGS. I’m not a fan of netdecking; I don’t think it’s a moral failure, but half of the fun of the game is trying to design, tweak, and tune a deck yourself, and getting a pre-tuned deck from the internet takes away from that.
The first deck I made was a homebrew Gond Combo list, which was quite slow and unreliable. The second deck I made was a Hotdog Fling deck, which was a lot better.
The third deck I made, however, was Glazed Hams.
The Decklist
Main Deck
4 Glaze Fiend
4 Mandible Justiciar
4 Blacksmith’s Skill
4 Built to Last
4 Toxin Analysis
4 Deadly Dispute
4 Fake Your Own Death
4 Fanatical Offering
4 Blood Fountain
2 Nimblewright Schematic
4 Prized Statue
4 Ancient Den
4 Vault of Whispers
5 Swamp
5 Plains
Sideboard
3 Origin Spellbomb
4 Shelob’s Ambush
4 Myr Retriever
4 Recommission
The Primer
Your goal with this deck is to get a Glaze Fiend or Mandible Justiciar into play, buff it up, and beat the bejesus out of your opponent with it. These creatures are fairly simple; they both get a P/T buff from artifacts entering the battlefield under your control. So, in order to buff them up, you want to get a bunch of artifacts into play at the same time.
The deck relies on many spells that incidentally create predefined artifact tokens. Nimblewright Schematic and Prized Statue only do this. The Schematics giving a few bodies that you can afford to either sacrifice to opponent effects, sacrifice to your own effects, or use as chump blockers. The Statues give you more mana with which to continue to combo.
Given the deck only has 8 creatures, we need ways to protect them. Given all creatures in the deck are artifact creatures, outside of some very strange situations, Blacksmith’s Skill and Built to Last are functionally identical, and protect your Fiends and Justiciars from any targetted removal and most untargetted removal. Fake Your Own Death also acts as a protection from removal, with the added bonus of creating a Treasure.
The deck has 8 sources of card draw outside of its tokens. Deadly Dispute and Fanatical Offering both cost 2 mana, require an sacrificed artifact, and draw you two cards, in addition to making a Treasure and a Map respectively. This means that even refilling your hand buffs up your creatures!
Toxin Analysis is a bit of a defensive include; the addition of deathtouch is a last-gasp removal in the face of a large blocker, and the addition of lifelink lets you last a little longer against aggro decks. The clues that it creates further buffs your creatures, meaning a Toxin Analysis targetting a Glaze Fiend makes a minimum 2/3 flying, deathtouch, lifelink.
Blood Fountain is the protection against overwhelming creature removal. In the situation where you’ve run out of creatures in your hand, and you’ve run out of creature protection, you can activate it in the endgame to get two of those creatures back. Given it represents two artifact ETB triggers for 1 mana, it’s good value to drop in the early game, either T1 as something to fuel artifact sacrificing effects or T3+ to buff your creatures.
The sideboard mostly contains answers to heavy control decks. Origin Spellbomb gives you more bodies if you need to block or sacrifice creatures, and a little bit more draw to allow you to play into control. Myr Retriever is another great sacrifice target or blocker, and is able to retrieve your two-plus-ETBs-for-one-card artifacts if your creatures can stay alive, as can Recommission.
Shelob’s Ambush can give you options into larger creatures (Gurmag Angler, Tolarian Terror) even without meaningfully buffing your creatures, giving both a P/T buff, deathtouch, and a Food token to buff your creaures further and either sac for life, or sac into a casting cost.
Typical Lines of Play
Generally speaking, Turn 1 doesn’t have anything exciting. You may or may not drop a Blood Fountain, depending on your need to have something to sacrifice on Turn 2+.
On T2, ideally, you want to drop a Glaze Fiend or a Mandible Justiciar. If you suspect your opponent is likely to instantly remove it, however, you may want to hold for T3 in order to be able to protect it with Blacksmith’s Skill or Built to Last; if your opponent is running a lot of removal, definitely switch in the Myr Retrievers and Recommissions, so you can be aggressive in playing your creatures.
If you can get a creature out on T2, frankly, just spaff as much of your hand as possible on T3. Ideally, this will include a Prized Statue, but regardless of what happens, you can generally expect 2-4 artifacts to enter the battlefield on T3, occasionally more. This means a swing for 4-8 flying, or 4-6 lifelink.
From here, you want to keep the aggro pressure on, using draw spells and blood tokens to refill your hand. Try not to have more than 2, maybe 3 creatures in play; overextending into removal will mean you don’t have anything to recover with.
Ideally, you’ll want to save the artifact lands (Ancient Den, Vault of Whispers) until you have a creature in play for them to buff, but don’t miss your land drops for that.