White Adds

Novice Inspector is a functional reprint of one of the best 1 drops in white to ever be printed in pauper, Thraben Inspector. The original inspector already sees play in vintage cubes alongside cards like Time Walk which demonstrates its power.  Both these cards provide an early body to pressure the board without truly going down a card.  Playing well in both aggro go-wide decks and late game flicker decks, this is an easy inclusion as long as we are looking for the strongest options.

Petrify is yet another improvement over the classic Pacifism effect.  While there is a design tension between lower cost and versatility, Petrify seems to hit the sweet spot by both turning off abilities and hitting more than just creatures for only 2 mana. While this still doesn’t interact with Desert and Pestilence, answering a Bonesplitter really improves our options.

Miner's Guidewing has a ton of text for a common. This bird improves the value of one drop options we have by giving you the strong option up front forcing earlier interaction from your opponent.  Outside of aristocrat strategies, it is almost always better to get the better option first.   Even after it dies, an explore trigger is often going to be stronger midgame than a random 1/1 by either moving you forward one draw in your deck or allowing a previously outclassed creature to get back into action.

Recommission has polled well, and it has a flicker, aggro, and +1/+1 counter feel.   The vast majority of the time, this is going to produce an effect worth well over 2 mana, and that it is worth the rare but awkward situation where this is stuck in hand with nothing in your graveyard.  This may not be a staple, but with so many white options under 3 mana, this is a worthy experiment.

Holy Cow brings a lot of upside, being especially strong in control decks that leave mana open.  All these upsides are close to being worth a card in total. There was a bit too much redundancy in white creatures that draw a card, but adding a unique effect over another draw should improve the dynamic decision making in the draft.

Oltec Cloud Guard may be slightly weaker in an all-out flicker deck, but getting 3 evasive power up front is generally going to be an extremely strong play for any white deck.  This card should excel as a top end aggressive threat but could work in nearly all white archetypes including flicker or as a control finisher.

Boros Elite can be the biggest 1 drop on the field if you support it well, which our cube does.  As long as our white has a go-wide theme, Boros Elite finally gives us another 1 drop that will put serious pressure on the board.  While it is extremely deck dependent, it fills a spot that is generally in short supply.

White Cuts

Minimus Containment and Hunted Witness were cut for similar cards that either provide more value or which are a bit more efficient enabling more use in more archetypes.   They are mostly texture changes as the worst card for their type, while we keep getting new toys.

Gather the Townsfolk was a challenging cut, but was generally considered the worst 2 drop in white.  While it had a fantastic upper limit, as long as we are pushing an aggressive go-wide deck for it, this is rarely going to be more than a bad Raise the Alarm.  In contrast, our new 2 drop, Recommission, should duplicate whatever effect a deck has already been trying to draft.  So it should support multiple bodies in a deck trying to go-wide, but will also open up more options for other decks as well.

A number of our cuts impact the flicker archetype with Roving Harper, Knight of the New Coalition, Icewind Stalwart and Basri's Acolyte being clear inclusions. Flicker is doing quite well already, and many times a good flicker might even leave these cards in the sideboard. Many of the new cards we have included have better up-front options which should improve their playability outside flicker, while still being fine support options in it. Lastly, our white curve was getting a bit heavy for a color that is supposed to be an aggressive option, so you will notice a clear culling of 4 drops with cheaper inclusions.

Blue Adds

Prior to Outlaws of Thunder Junction, we had no plans for including new blue cards, but we're going to add Geyser Drake as while we cut Naiad some time ago, we want to give a version with a more useful evasive body a whirl. Phantom Interference is probably one of the best Quenches we’ve seen since Miscalculation and Make Disappear and that alone is reason enough to at least give it some time to prove itself in the cube, especially with its upside being one of the better ways to get shelf life out of it in the late game.

Blue Cuts

These cuts probably aren’t super shocking for folks paying attention to the polling site, these are two cards that are generally fine to ok and rarely wildly exciting. We feel it’s time to bid both Skittering Crustacean and Watcher in the Mist goodbye at least for now.

Black Adds

We already sang the praises of Tithing Blade in the quick hits, I don’t know how many community members who read that will be dreadfully shocked to see it included here. Enjoy your removal turned world’s slowest wincon control decks. Nezumi Linkbreaker is a model of creature we’ve been happy with in the past. At this point we’ve run quite a few options in the 2 drop slot, but we’re figuring if the 1/1 dies in combat, it at least dies into something able to pump up other creatures more likely to attack well and works nicely with pumping evasive threats.

Black Cuts

Our cuts for black this go around are like-for-like cuts. Chainer's Edict was getting a bit long in the tooth and swapping it for another edict with late game utility felt fine. Doomed Dissenter was just the black card that dies into another body we were most ok with losing.

Red Adds

Red Herring represents a sort of aggro card that hasn’t quite stuck around in the cube so far, but we hope that the clue ability will elevate it above the likes of Valley Dasher by being able to cash it in when it’d crash into a bigger blocker and into the mainboards of aggressive red decks. Currently the artifact typing is fairly irrelevant, but perhaps that might change in the future as we get more playable artifact creatures.

Volatile Wanderglyph is another aggressive rummager joining the rest in the cube. While we expect that it’ll be tapping to attack more often than to crew vehicles, the low mana cost and second toughness will probably let it compete with its cousins.

Reckless Lackey is a card that immediately drew everyone’s eyes with its obscenely good body for its cost. The usual flaw of a Raging Goblin is that it becomes useless as soon as a 1/2 hits the board, but the combination of first strike, having an extra toughness, and being able to cash it in for a card <i>and</i> treasure makes it a shoo-in for the cube.

Red Cuts

Rubblebelt Maaka was added in our previous update, but it’s become clear that it’s not making the impact we were hoping for.

Insolent Neonate has been in the cube for a while, but we think that it might finally have been crowded out by all the good one-drop aggro creatures that have been released in the years since.

Famished Foragers is a fun card, but it’s still a red four-drop. We hope that by moving the mana curve lower by a bit, we’ll be able to speed up red ever so slightly.

Green Adds

Farseek is an older card, and has been added to diversify our green ramp slightly. Note that this will still get you all your forest duals, since at common they’re also other land types.

Wild Growth is a response to a comment we’ve heard loud and clear: we need more one-mana ramp that isn’t killed by a Bolt! Currently we don’t have many ways to abuse how this creates a land that taps for two mana (or three, on a bounceland!) short of getting a funny Pestermite rebate, but we hope that this unassuming Enchant Land from Alpha will ramp you into many a turn-two three-drop.

Voracious Varmint is the latest iteration of green creature-based artifact/enchantment removal, and this time the body is actually mildly usable in combat. One recurring issue with previous versions of this cart archetype was that you generally had to choose between getting a vanilla creature on board now or waiting until you could maybe blow something up, and the Varmint handily solves that issue by sitting around as on-board removal.

Blastoderm is a true blast from the past for many of our members. It’s been threatening faces with fifteen damage for over two decades now, and in our cube it’s difficult to avoid that damage without losing three creatures to it. Also, a fun fact for the Johnnies and Jennies among you: Proliferate doesn’t target.

Green Cuts

Three Visits was not only a functional reprint of Nature's Lore at a time when we’ve decided to diversify our ramp slightly, but it’s started to rise back up in price and at time of writing goes for over $4 for a non-foil printing. While we generally don’t take prices in mind when adding or cutting cards unless the card is obscenely expensive (such as Three Visits’ $44 common printing), in this case the cheaper $1 Nature's Lore gets to stay. Also exiting is Rampant Growth, another 2 mana ramp spell, the thinking here is that we’re adding in farseek that does a decent amount of what these 2 cards manage to do, and supplementing that with wild growth to bring the curve down a bit and make this effect a bit less jammed up in the 2 drop slot.

Masked Vandal is not a bad card, but the combination of a 1/3 body, the lack of artifact/enchantment recursion, and an enter-the-battlefield effect that wants both a creature in your graveyard and a target on the board all means that the shapeshifter ended up on the cutting block when a better two-mana option appeared.

Scion Summoner is a card that has been on the chopping block for a long time and has mostly just stuck around because it blocks Guardian of the Guildpact. We’ve decided to no longer worry too much about that though, and thus we’re following its abysmal polling results and saying goodbye to this Eldrazi.

Colorless

Sure to be one that some of the community finds a contentious removal, we are removing Cogwork Librarian, which I don’t think anyone was clamoring to have cut. That said, it is functionally a card that likely has been chosen more times than almost any other card ever in the cube, but has likely also seen the least number of times actually on the stack. For that reason, we’re slotting in Juggernaut as a generically good beatstick that the community has indicated they’re interested in including.

Gold

Dog Walker is, in many ways, exactly what Boros is looking for. Three bodies in one cheap shell plays very nicely with its current strategy of going wide before unleashing a Rally the Peasants, and the frank reality of things is that the card quality for Boros commons generally hasn’t been all that great for us.

Wojek Halberdiers is a card that’s been polling poorly for a long time. While it does play into the go-wide archetype with its Battalion trigger, it’s nonetheless the obvious cut when a new exciting Boros card finally arrives.

Blightning is a card that people have been wanting back for a while, and we figured that we’d let you have it. Why cast Lava Spike and Mind Rot when you could cast both at once on one card?

Spike Jester is a card that’s been unpopular with the community for as long as we’ve been asking for input, and our defense of it has always been that it’s good for aggro when you just want to do three damage to their face. We realize that it doesn’t quite gel with the Aristocrats archetype we’re going for in Rakdos, however, and thus you’re getting those three damage to face with a card that has more of that nebulous Fun Factor.

Lands

Escape Tunnel over Evolving Wilds is one update that is perhaps simple but a general quality of life improvement, it is just a strictly better card and we’re excited to hear your fun stories of managing to pump something for lethal after targeting it with the tunnel’s other ability.

Conduit Pylon over Cave of Temptation is another interesting one. I’m sure that some out there expected that the cut here would likely be the similar Crystal Grotto, but we hope that having two of these generic draw fixing lands will be better on the whole than a single grotto effect that sometimes becomes a counter.

One of the bigger changes for our cube is the inclusion of a broken third land cycle.   Pauper has been getting variations on taplands regularly, and with the most recent printing of dual colored deserts, we believe that Pauper finally has a density of effects to explore giving each archetype something unique.  Prior to this update, we had 10 Bouncelands, 10 Scry/Draw lands, and 10 typed duals which kept things mostly consistent.   In evaluating our existing cycles, there was considerable discussion among the Pauper Cube community and within the committee, but ultimately there seemed a clear consensus that both bouncelands and scry/draw lands were a clear step above other options for providing something near card advantage.  The conclusion was clear then; typed duals were not going to stay as a full cycle.

While typed duals can occasionally allow you to feel extra clever alongside cards like Generous Ent or Farseek, the majority of the time they play like any old guildgate.  In contrast, the gainlands and pinglands impact every game they are in, letting a deck extend or shorten the game by 5%.  While these may have less interesting possibilities, we believe they improve the drafting experience by increasing the valuation of dual lands over other cards.  Plus, while these two new cyclers interact poorly with searchers, they do interact with our bouncelands, ghostly flicker effects, and cards that care about life change such as Skewer the Critics

The overall philosophy was to keep typed duals in the green archetypes when possible as the base with searchers and multicolor decks, gainlands in controlling archetypes which are looking to extend the game, and pinglands in aggressive guilds, especially red, that are trying to speed up the endgame.  As we continue to finetune archetypes and magic introduces new duals, it is our goal to continue to adjust this broken cycle to maximize fun per guild.