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. By cascading for a value of eight mana, this card is capable of casting the biggest threats in Pauper, and thanks to affinity, it can be cast for just .

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, a card that can make you a good number of tokens, just very, very slowly. Golem Foundry is a stronger card, but it only makes you tokens if you're already casting artifacts. 

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, Commander's Sphere, and Mind Stone are the most common ones (they're all common, but you get my meaning), but there's some other rocks with special applications that make them quite useful. Everflowing Chalice can be cast for zero if we ever need it, making it akin to a Mox when casting our commander. Springleaf Drum and Moonsnare Prototype turn our other useless artifacts, which we'll have a ton of, into mana. And Ornithopter of Paradise is just handy to have as a blocker. 

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. At any point, we can sacrifice it and use it to bounce a creature, but it's honestly more useful to us as nothing more than a lump of metal. Besides, we can still use it to threaten bouncing a creature, even if we're not going to. This deck is full of cards like that. Yeah, I could gain three life from sacrificing Golden Egg, but I'm not going to unless I'm desperate. The best of these that we have are the ones that have a little value trigger from entering the battlefield, like Witching Well or Carrot Cake. From those, we're certain to get something. 

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 to Maelstrom Colossus. But in addition to just big things, we're looking for big things that will continue to help with the artifact theme and make our commander even cheaper next time. Mirrorshell Crab is a great card to have, either as a counterspell in hand or as a big attacker and artifact on the board. Guardian Naga is a favorite of mine: its large, difficult-to-deal-with body that can block for days, and its adventure can deal with urgent problems.

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, for instance, can be used to find an Island, while Sword Coast Serpent can be used as a bounce spell.

That's our two important categories sorted, but there's an obvious flaw we need to address. The thing that holds Ethersworn Sphinx back is the fact that you want to cheat in big spells with it, but you have to cast a ton of small spells first. Since we have such a density of tiny trinkets, our chances of hitting anything worthwhile are somewhat slim. What's the point of casting our commander if we just get an extra Prophetic Prism? That's why we're gonna give ourselves control over the top of the deck. The obvious card is Brainstorm, which lets us put any card from our hand on top of the deck. Easy enough. But we can also take advantage of scrying, which is plentiful in Pauper. So many cards let us scry over and over again, from a random starfish to an indestructible pendant, and the biggest gem is Artificer's Assistant, a bird that lets us scry every time we cast a historic spell. You know what counts as historic? Artifacts! The card type our deck is built around. That bird can shape the top of our deck to perfection. In fact, it's such a good card that we're running Dizzy Spell specifically to find it. 

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 and Glint Hawk to bounce it to hand and give us another cascade. The more we can do it, the more artifacts we'll get, letting our gameplan snowball. For whatever reason, they've printed about a million of these cards, so we're not short on ways to get our commander back. 

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 down to two mana is never a problem. What this deck is missing, however, is the payoff. Pauper doesn't have a ton of great haymakers, as you may have noticed. Ulamog's Crusher, our strongest creature, doesn't really make a dent in a format with four players and 90 life to get through, and it just gets worse from there. It's bad enough that I almost added Ivory Giant, a borderline unplayable piece of cardboard. I've had this issue in the past, when I tried to build Ley Weaver. The reason that deck relied so heavily on its combo is because it didn't have anything better to do with all the mana it made. Until stronger threats for eight mana are printed at common, this deck will never do a lot. Of course, there is some value in the fact that it's a lot of fun to play!