Hi folks

So I have been thinking a lot about the 1 mana land-tutor-basic cards, specifically [[Lay of the Land]] et al

You can see the numerous cards I am referring to with this scryfall search:

otag:tutor-land-basic mv=1 f:pdh

By my count, there are 15 cards which allows me to get a basic land to my hand for either 1 mana, or 1 mana + 1 mana activation (such as [[Traveler's Amulet]] and [[Greenseeker]] )

The suite expands to over 20 if you count 2 mana activation costs but I am ignoring those in this initial exploration.

I have always seen potential there for some sort of toolbox/engine involving basic lands, but it doesn't quite click for me as a total package for some reason.

Here are some of my ideas:

1. "Gx domain";

A type of list where you have really flexible fixing for your powerful spells, majority green but splashing for basically extremely powerful stuff. Not explicitly domain per se, maybe stopping at four or three, or even two colors if the Commander matches up nicely.

1. "Lands-in-hand matters";

I forgot the scryfall tag for this one, but it's like a lands or basics in hand matters, cards in hand matters type deck. Something like [[Walking Atlas]] [[Explore]] [[Journey of Discovery]]. My issue here is how do I break parity with these cheaper cards so I have a ton of resources for explosive turns? Some type of recursion, spellslinger, or value angle.

1. "Consistent Land Drop Dot Deck" ;

Control decks are notorious for wanting to hit their land drops to cast their spells on curve, and what better way to do that than to have your fixing cost one mana? Some overlap with the Domain idea, but with a different goal: Domain wants raw power, this deck is focused mainly on curving out and surviving into the late game.

There's been a various number of "strictly better" upgrades to Lay of the Land, but my goal is to build a deck where I am perfectly happy playing the original and/or his pal Traveler's Amulet.

I feel like the core is there but for some reason I am struggling to come up with cards that interact well with them, or for commanders to helm them.

It seems decently flexible enough to suite a variety of strategies, as the goal is extreme consistency.

How would you build this? What PDH commanders come to mind?

Didn't have anyone to play pedh with, so I tried this list against regular commander decks at bracket two and it won its first game 👀👀

I'm making a dimir high tide deck thats mostly blue and will only ever really need one swamp. I figured if I put in a bunch of cards that can fix to get me that one swamp I can keep most of the lands in the deck islands for high tide, but I'm not sure what land count to run.

Would it be reasonable to count each landcycler as half a land for the purposes of land count?

Friend found Sarinth Steelseeker really cool, I did too, so I decided to brew a deck. It uses Sarinth as a solid form of card selection (and a not too shabby form of card advantage) to assemble Altar tron combo, or Evolution witness loops. The primer is a bit rough but gets the point across. I have excluded arcums astrolabe as I do not have snow basics (they are over a dollar apiece right now) and lotus petal both for price reasons, though they would both be very good in this. Mainly for fun and to do a lot of useless game actions. Let me know your thoughts!

I’m trying to put a new deck together by this evening and I don’t want to think too hard, I just want to SMASH! Any tips on how to make this work? I’m assuming some red ramp to get it out, brass knuckles and such to keep it swinging and lots of shock spells to cast on it? Or am I way off base? Thanks for any helpful advice!

Have never played a pedh game but me and my play group all talked about putting together decks. Anyways I've been kind of obsessing over all these commanders. I've seen decks for grixis utilizing madness and other similar effects where the card wants to be in the graveyard but what about the others? How have you built them and how have they worked out for you?

I've been tuning Erinis, Gloom Stalker + Street Urchin and wanted some feedback on an artifact-heavy direction I've been experimenting with.

Rather than leaning heavily into the lvalue package, I'm trying to make this more of a artifact-control/attrition deck.

The artifact package includes cards like Ichor Wellspring, Mycosynth Wellspring, Experimental Synthesizer, Prized Statue, Myr Retriever, Workshop Assistant, Foundry Inspector, Ashnod's Altar, Makeshift Munitions, etc., with Reckless Fireweaver, Impact Tremors, and Hissing Iguanar providing incremental damage.

There's also an incidental infinite involving Foundry Inspector + Ashnod's Altar + Myr Retriever + Workshop Assistant, which generates infinite colorless mana and artifact ETB/death triggers. I like having that as a potential closer, but I'm deliberately not trying to turn the deck into an all-in combo list.

I'm also taking advantage of Erinis with cycling/sacrifice/depletion lands like Tranquil Thicket, Forgotten Cave, Hickory Woodlot, and Sandstone Needle, while Avenging Hunter, Crimson Fleet Commodore, and Staunch Throneguard give the deck Monarch/Initiative engines to help win longer games.

I have also included a monarch/innitiative package that allows me to gain card advantage. Erinis makes it hard to attack me so I can usually have the monarch and initiative for several turns.

I'd love feedback on the deck and whether there are any overlooked commons that fit this style of build. I'm also interested in whether I've pushed the artifact theme too far and cut cards that the more traditional Erinis builds really shouldn't be without (e.g rancor pop up in tons of builds).

Thanks!

Here is the deck list

New to pauper edh, my LGS is thinking fo starting up a league and need help trimming my deck down to 100 cards. Please tell me what you think of the cards I have selected and which ones I should ditch. Thanks yall!

https://archidekt.com/decks/25820340/pauper_league

Im new to the format & looking to build several Pedh decks but card legality has me confused. As far as i know its not a supported or official format but I keep seeing commanders that say they are not legal in pauper commander, for example i want a spider tribal deck probably rotwidow pack, but the deckbuilding websites im looking are conflicting. Some dont have any info about pedh but some have the card tagged as not legal in pedh & there are decklists for it as a commander on the same sites that say its not legal. So i guess im asking other than the handful of cards listed as banned on the pauper edh page is there actually bans? Are the websites just aggregating pauper+commander legality as a double check? Also best commander recommendations for a toad/frog themed deck & decks for teaching commander noobs would be appreciated.

I post a couple times a year about my Rocco deck. This is another one of those.

https://moxfield.com/decks/9iAxIjpjI0-z1CMyzeIrBw

For those not in the loop, traditionally, Rocco has been a sort of weird toolbox combo deck. Playing a lot of different combos and utility using Rocco to fill in gaps.

That isn’t this version of Rocco. This version is a dedicated all-in combo deck using Rocco to assemble one of just 2 combos:

[[Seeker of Skybreak]] + [[Hangar Scrounger]] or [[Pili-Pala]] + [[Careful Cultivation]]. Both of which terminate at a [[Hawkeye’s Bow]] kill.

The real key is that by playing these combos with such high overlap we can save a ton of slots.

The objective of the deck is to be a highly consistent T4 combo deck. On par speedwise with the fastest in the format, but more consistent at hitting that velocity.

The Burn Book Brawl was this past weekend and we managed to talk Puzzlebox into running the list. He took it to 1-1-1, missing top 4 by the skin of his teeth and finishing 5th. A highly respectable result for the only 3+ color deck in the field. Also carried the torch for red decks which had a rough day all around.

The feedback was that we probably want some haste and he really wished he had access to a spore frog a couple times.

To that end, the major updates to be tested following the tournament are:

+ Spore Frog, + Sejirri Steppe, + Torch Courier, + Goblin Motivator

We’re going to try cheap, creature based Haste enabler of probably better overall cards. It’s important that they are tutorable otherwise they’re really just background noise. We’re only going to see 15 cards so any effect that only has 1 or 2 pieces and isn’t tutorable is basically useless unless it’s somehow guaranteed to be good whenever you draw it.

Interesting fact though. Because we’ve added Torch Courier technically speaking the deck does have a T1 draw.

Hello

I was looking at getting a new commander deck and found the mechanics of Gretchen fun.

I explored some decks to get an idea and ended up with wanting to do an hybrid version, using elves for mana boost. Ended up with this :

The Commander: Gretchen Titchwillow

The Win Condition: Secret Door

The Infinite Mana Engines: Freed from the Real, Peregrine Drake, Archaeomancer

The Core Ramp & Untappers: Stone-Seeder Hierophant, Voyaging Satyr, Market Festival

The Tutors: Merchant Scroll, Trinket Mage, Step Through, Dizzy Spell

The Protection: Daze, Foil, Tamiyo's Safekeeping, Dispel

The card list

1 Gretchen Titchwillow

// Creatures (17)
1 Arbor Elf
1 Archaeomancer
1 Cloud of Faeries
1 Drift of Phantasms
1 Elvish Mystic
1 Galvanic Alchemist
1 Krosan Restorer
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Oboro Breezecaller
1 Peregrine Drake
1 Portent Tracker
1 Secret Door
1 Stone-Seeder Hierophant
1 Trinket Mage
1 Vedalken Aethermage
1 Vizier of Tumbling Sands
1 Voyaging Satyr

// Sorceries (4)
1 Gitaxian Probe
1 Lórien Revealed
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Step Through

// Instants (26)
1 Arcane Denial
1 Capsize
1 Cerulean Wisps
1 Counterspell
1 Crop Rotation
1 Daze
1 Deprive
1 Dispel
1 Dizzy Spell
1 Fog
1 Foil
1 Frantic Search
1 Ghostly Flicker
1 Gift of the Viper
1 Gush
1 High Tide
1 Into the Roil
1 Moment's Peace
1 Muddle the Mixture
1 Negate
1 Resculpt
1 Shore Up
1 Snakeskin Veil
1 Snap
1 Spell Pierce
1 Tamiyo's Safekeeping

// Artifacts (1)
1 Lifespark Spellbomb

// Enchantments (17)
1 Dawn's Reflection
1 Fertile Ground
1 Freed from the Real
1 Frogify
1 Glittering Frost
1 Grafted Growth
1 Imprisoned in the Moon
1 Lignify
1 Market Festival
1 Overgrowth
1 Seal of Removal
1 Unable to Scream
1 Urban Burgeoning
1 Utopia Sprawl
1 Verdant Haven
1 Wild Growth
1 Witness Protection

// Lands (34)
1 Ash Barrens
1 Command Tower
1 Lush Oasis
1 Mystic Sanctuary
1 Rimewood Falls
1 Simic Growth Chamber
13 Snow-Covered Forest
13 Snow-Covered Island
1 Tangled Islet
1 Tanglepool Bridge

I tend to wanna add to much stuff or over complicated my decks. Here I’m afraid to have added to much mechanics. I removed sculptor of winter and time tender from my first list cos I was afraid the gain was not worth the sacrifice of protection and tutors, or would alter too much the tempo and draw capacities.

What do you think about this deck ?

TL;DR: Secret Lairs are not legitimate sources of downshifts, so none of the commons or uncommons in SLZ change what is legal in Pauper or Pauper EDH.

Back at the end of 2024, we released this update to how PDH's legality is defined. The goal was to clarify some odd corner cases and strengthen our alignment with how 60-card Pauper defines a card's rarity. At the time, the expectation was that secret lairs should (hypothetically) never print cards at a lower rarity. This new secret lair is the first time that rule has been broken (Baleful Strix and Serra Angel have a C rarity symbol in the bottom left).

Gavin Verhey of the Pauper Format Panel posted on Bluesky that secret lair reprints are not intended to impact pauper legality. So this upholds the stance from our 2024 article. No changes and PDH is still in alignment with 60-card Pauper about what is and isn't common.

As a regular reminder for anyone that didn't already know, if you want to ignore this kind of legality pedantry, Scryfall (and all the sites that use its syntax/data, like Moxfield) has two search terms to make your life easier.

- "f:pdh" or "format:PauperCommander" shows only cards that are legal in the 99. This is very close to f:Pauper, with the only difference being which ban list is relevant.

- "is:PauperCommander" shows only cards legal as pauper commanders.

I know Malcom is the best option but what are some other fun options for partners for [[Breeches, Brazen Plunder]]?

Urza is a mono-blue deck focused on discarding cards to create powerstones and using those powerstones to cast huge creatures like [[Maelstrom Colossus]] or [[Iron Giant]] and simply out-advantage our opponents. While we are a mono-blue deck we certainly dont play like one and are a lot more aggressive!

If you have an [[Urza, Powerstone Prodigy]] list please drop it in the comments!

Building Veteran Explorer, a large amount of fight spells and Ashnod’s Alter to just ramp everyone by killing Veteran Explorer, and just play big mana sinks like [[Elvish Skysweeper]], [[Ivy Elemental]], [[Nyxborn Hydra]], [[Beastrider Vanguard]], [[Deepwood Denizen]], [[Vivien's Grizzly]], [[Brightwood Tracker]], [[Treetop Snarespinner]], [[Wildheart Invoker]], [[Spectral Hunt-Caller]], [[Annoyed Altisaur]], [[Eldrazi Devastator]], [[Maelstrom Colossus]], [[Ulamog's Crusher]], [[Hand of Emrakul]].

So I'm new to this format. Coming from EDH to Pauper is way harder than I thought. And I like that. Not having to rely on the typical cards and pet cards, like rhystic or typical staples. I am also finding it hard to settle on a commander. But I was thinking Kryndle, Zimone Quandrix Prodigy, Mm'menon Uthros Exile, Tidus blitzball star, the emperor of palamecis(I really want to build him and probably will now or after), and Greta Sweettooth scourge. I realize that have a commander that has value is essential, but I just dont know what to build. Im pretty much leaning towards Kryndle and the emperor of palamecia. Anyone have experience with these, did you find them fun? What kind of win cons do people typically go for?

Hello!!! Does anyone have any suggestion of a deck with a non-legendary commander that can use [[Serpentine Ambush]], [[Water Wings]] and similar cards that change the base power/toughness from a creature as a core mechanic? It can be of any color (of course it has to include blue) and strategy (please, briefly explain how the deck would play and try to win). I just find those type of cards so cool that I want to use all of them in a deck. Thanks!

Edit: Thanks for all the suggestions, I'll check the out!!!

I love the art but I wonder if a card this old is still good in Pauper.

[[Underworld Coinsmith]]

Just got a new playmat and wanted to build a deck with a similar theme 😆