Minthara, Merciless Soul - Pauper Commander
Revisiting My First PEDH Deck
When I started playing Pauper EDH, the first deck I tried was Minthara, Merciless Soul. At the time, I wasn't very knowledgeable about the Pauper landscape, and my little deck didn't go far. It was just a hodge podge of cards that I thought would fit well into the deck, and that turned about about as well as you'd expect it to.
There was some gameplay potential there, but next to no synergy. Plus, unlike regular EDH, where you can cram a bunch of busted mythics and rares into a deck and get a cohesive result if you commander is good enough (*cough cough* Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm), in Pauper EDH, the power of your deck is entirely defined by how tight the pieces fit together, so in order to make a good Minthara, Merciless Soul deck, we need to build around a theme and make sure our engines are well oiled.
A Fork in the Road
The problem is, we have a lot of options available to us. Minthara is built around creatures leaving the battlefield. Both conveniently and inconveniently for us, there are a ton of ways to do that. Immediately, I see three ways of building this deck.
The first is by having creatures die. Sacrifice outlets, creatures that send themselves to the graveyard, and just general combat deaths will all do the trick.
Then you have the blink route. Play cards like Ephemerate to repeatedly gain value from ETBs and trigger Minthara. This path is pretty appealing as Blink is already a well established archetype know to be extremely powerful.
The third option is just to play creatures that trigger Minthara entirely on their own, like Wyrm's Crossing Patrol. The upside to this strategy is that every card does something on its own in the deck, making every card drawn extremely reliable. The downside is that your cards are only as powerful as whatever they do on their own. Oh, and it's a lot harder to write an interesting article about that.
What I think we're going to do is combine the first two paths together with a little strategy I've learned from other decks. In Pauper, you have access to ten or so practical copies of Cloudshift. Not a bad amount, but not enough to satisfy a blink deck, so you kind of have to get creative with the blink strategy.
In Azorius, you'd probably want to run cards like Archaeomancer, allowing you to reuse your blink spells multiple times. But we're in Orzhov, meaning we can use Not Dead After All. At first sight, it seems like a completely different card then Cloudshift. It's just made to rescue a creature from death, right? Nope!
What this card is best at is causing a creature to enter the battlefield a second time. Pretty much the only difference between it and Cloudshift is that you have to find a way for your target to leave the battlefield first. However, once you overcome that hurdle, you get the LTB trigger, the ETB trigger, and even the death trigger as a bonus. Sweet!
We'll grab around twenty or so "blink cards" spanning from the likes of Scrollshift to Pegasus Guardian to Graceful Reprieve to Undying Malice. It's a pretty complete blink setup, and we start almost every game with at least one of these cards in hand. Of course, we need to make sure that our revival cards are always effective, so let's complement them with a few sacrifice outlets.
There's the grotesque Carrion Feeder, the somewhat more polite Viscera Seer, and the very handy Dimir House Guard. I guess I'll also include Fleshbag Marauder and Demon's Disciple here, along with all their other brethren, because they're a pretty convenient way to sacrifice creatures.
Sacrifice Outlets
Now that I think about it, there are actually a lot of ways to sacrifice creatures in this deck. Deadly Dispute, Village Rites, and Corrupted Conviction are one-time use, but they give you a lot of value. Fanatical Devotion is a weird little sacrifice outlet that can do loads of work when it comes to keeping important creatures around.
Unfortunately, it won't often trigger Minthara, as you'll most often want to regenerate on opponents' turns. But it's not bad when it comes to combat, especially since Minthara only boosts power and not toughness. Then, you have a few creatures that sacrifice themselves, like Children of Korlis and Kami of False Hope. Pair those two with Feign Death and you're sure see some sour faces across the table.
Stuff to Blink
Now that we've got that all set up, we can focus on some powerful blink targets that will also benefit from Minthara, the real meat of the deck! Gray Merchant of Asphodel is the nasty one, that'll be a kill-on-sight for your opponents. Good thing we made sure it's difficult to kill. Even worse than that is Stonehorn Dignitary. It's not unbeatable in a four-player pod, but if you've ever had the misfortune of playing against one of those in a 1v1, you'll know just how terrible of a card it is. I honestly feel dirty putting it in my own deck, knowing what it's been used for.
The deck's not all evil, though. Naturally, we're running Spirited Companion, for just a bit of card draw, and of course, to have a cute dog. Then, we've got Thraben Inspector, who can trigger Minthara herself, or do it by sacrificing a Clue. We've got Palace Sentinels, who just snatch the monarchy every time they enter the battlefield.
We've got Nested Shambler, who with the help of Minthara's buff, can explode into a million Squirrels. And we've got a bunch of little guys like Martyr for the Cause that can proliferate our experience counters. Finally, there's Soul of Migration, which is expensive, yes, but extremely powerful when we blink it, and if you've played Modern at all recently, you know there's a little trick you can do with evoke...
That's pretty much it y'all. You just play a bunch of creatures, blink them for value, and swing in with a huge army while Minthara's on the board. Not much more to it than that! If I'm just comparing this deck to my original deck, it's a huge improvement, but even compared to some of my newer Pauper decks, this one holds its own. Minthara is a pretty strong commander, and with a strong backbone in the 99, she can do wonders.
