Pauper Commander - Odds Against Us
Madness has been one of the most played Pauper EDH archetypes for a long time, mostly due to the fact that half of all madness cards are commons. I've tried playing a madness deck in the past, but the problem is that most of the cards are barely playable. Their normal mana costs are often huge, making them unplayable if you're missing a discard outlet, and the archetype's top commander, Azra Oddsmaker, doesn't do a great job as a way to discard. Because of that, I feel as though Azra Oddsmaker is in the wrong place. It's a pretty lame madness commander, but the design is quite cool, and I think we could make a fun deck out of it.
The first thing I noticed about Azra Oddsmaker is that it's very similar to Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor, a deck I quite enjoy. They both want creatures to deal combat damage to your opponents, so Gix's page is a great place to start. The funny thing about Gix is that, even though he's a $15 card, he wants nothing more than to play a bunch of commons. All he's looking for are flying men, 1/1s with evasion, and most of those creatures are just common draft cards, like Changeling Outcast. Perfect! On no other commander do I see such a stockpile of so many glorious Pauper cards.
Dauthi Slayer, Dauthi Horror, Tormented Soul, and Changeling Outcast are almost completely unblockable and are usually our best attackers, but our standards aren't all that high; we can take cards with merely decent evasion. The flying on Vault Skirge, Stirge, Eye Collector, Nightshade Stinger, and Battlefly Swarm will get through almost every time, and though deathtouch says nothing about blocking, only the token decks will ever put a barrier between Yuan-Ti Fang-Blade and themselves.
That's a long list of flying men already, but wait, there's more. Menace is a fantastic keyword that's often underrated. Goldhound and Ravine Raider will rarely find their pathways restricted. Trample is only effective for bigger creatures, but it sure shines on Rapacious One and Crimson Fleet Commodore, our top end. Creatures in Pauper rarely get much larger than 4/4, and I'm certain that creatures as big as these will get through for damage.
But barring those big guys, our creatures are pretty small, which is why we're running Snarling Gorehound, Unearth, and Raid Bombardment, cards that care about small creatures. The last of those is one of the best cards in our deck, tacking on an extra damage for every little creature we send our opponents way, and like I've illustrated, that's a lot of creatures.
Since an extra point of damage per creature is so good in our deck, why don't we play some anthems to make our creatures just a little bit bigger? Orcish Oriflamme gives us a permanent buff, but unfortunately, other cards like that are rare, so we'll have to go with some less-lasting team boosts: Open the Omenpaths is an anthem that can also be a ritual; Goblin War Party can add some bodies to our board; Hearth Charm is an underrated card with an anthem, evasion, and removal to pick from; and Goblin Bushwhacker is a classic card that's defined Goblin decks since its printing.
So far, all our deck does is make a bunch of tiny creatures that attack and deal damage, nothing spectacular, especially in a format with 90 life for us to crunch through. All that Azra Oddsmaker is doing is drawing an extra card every turn. We're not even taking advantage of the discard like we should be. As I mentioned, I think madness is too inconsistent a means of taking advantage of discard, but other graveyard abilities, like flashback or unearth, don't cut it either. We can take the top cards from each little category, like Faithless Looting, Molten Gatekeeper, and Murderous Compulsion, but they don't take the deck to where I want it. However, I think I have an idea that involves a few 60-card Pauper decks. First is the deck cycle storm. Essentially, you just cycle a ton of cards over and over, use Reaping the Graves to return a ton of cards to hand, use Songs of the Damned to make a ton of mana, and use Drannith Stinger to burn your opponents out. Drannith Stinger doesn't have a place here, but the other two are cards that can be used to great effect in this deck. We'll naturally have a bunch of creatures in the graveyard just from the ebb and flow of combat, fueling those graveyard synergies to their max.
The second deck I want to take inspiration from is Pauper One-Land-Spy. This one's a combo deck that uses Balustrade Spy, and the fact that there's only a single land in the deck, to instantly dump the library into the graveyard. Because there's no Thoracle in Pauper, the win condition is using Dread Return to flashback Lotleth Giant. We can run Dread Return comfortably in this deck, too, with the number of creatures we always have on board, and late enough into the game, Lotleth Giant can kill. We have no means of tutoring it, but it's an extremely solid win-con when we find it. We can't make any of these cards into a game-winning combo for our deck, or a catch-all game-ender, but they're each some of the most powerful cards in Pauper, and really bring up the power level of our deck.
The final pieces of our deck are exactly what you'd expect. A lot of removal, with Feed the Swarm, Tragic Slip, and Dark Withering, and some supplementary card draw. Since we're running so many small creatures, I figured the best way to draw cards was to play Corrupted Conviction, Village Rites, and Demand Answers. Our little 1/1s are no big loss when it comes to drawing more cards.
Uncommanders - Odds against Us
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And that's the deck! I don't know if the flying men theme is much better than the madness theme, but I believe it's much more fitting. Azra Oddsmaker really wants to trigger, and madness cards don't provide much in the way of ensuring a hit every turn. This deck does. The question is, if Azra Oddsmaker isn't the right place for madness cards, what commander is? I guess I'll have to figure that out in next week's Pauper commander article.