Pauper Commander - Riddles With Ethersworn Sphinx

Here's a riddle:

From the top of your deck huge spells I will cast, and little I demand, if much metal you've amassed.

If you're a fan of obscure artifact payoffs (or you've looked at the card in the thumbnail of this article), you probably figured out that the answer is Ethersworn Sphinx

If you manage to gather enough trinkets and baubles, you can abuse the heck out of this card, especially since the affinity reduction works on commander tax. Today our goal is to set up our deck so that we can cast the biggest cards possible for the least amount of mana. If we min-max our mana usage, we can go nuts. 

The first thing this deck needs is very clear: we want to be reducing our commander by seven mana as fast as possible, meaning we need seven artifacts. My first thought was to use tokens. Usually, tokens are easy to mass produce given the abundance of cards that will create them over and over again. If we can find engines that churn out little artifacts, we'll never have to worry about paying more than two mana for our commander.

Unfortunately, these kinds of cards are rare. The best I found was Floodhound

Which brings us to the main way we're gonna get that affinity value: cheap scraps of metal that we can dump onto the board. Mana rocks are our best friends, being naturally good by themselves while also reducing our commander's cost. It's almost like they tap for two.

Arcane Signet

But we're also going to run some one-mana artifacts that will just sit around and reduce costs. They all have some sort of purpose, but for they most part they're just going to wait on our board. Take Aether Spellbomb

That should be enough to consistently get our commander to a low cost; now let's see what big, exciting things we're going to be casting with the cascade trigger.

All the usuals are here, from Ulamog's Crusher

The theme of big creatures that can be used in other ways if we find them in our hand is going to repeat itself. Marauding Brinefang

That's our two important categories sorted, but there's an obvious flaw we need to address. The thing that holds Ethersworn Sphinx

Brainstorm

Sigiled Starfish

Artificer's Assistant

And of course, since we want to use our commander's cast trigger more than once, we're running cards like Kor Skyfisher

This deck's primary gameplan came together as nicely as I expected it to. Artifacts are easy to build in Pauper, there's a ton of them, and they do a lot for you. Getting Ethersworn Sphinx