Pauper Commander - Spider Spawning
In Pauper EDH, you don't have access to a lot of big numbers. There's no Progenitus, there are no Eldrazi titans, and there's certainly no damage tripling. If you want large sums in Pauper, you have to make them yourself, and that's the idea behind today's deck. Vilespawn Spider lets you make Spider tokens equal to the number of creature cards in your graveyard, meaning our only limit is the number of creatures we're running, so let's shoot for the stars and see how many bugs it takes to win a game.
There's a few things we have to keep in mind while building this deck. Our goal is to get as many creatures in the graveyard as possible, and the best way to do that is with mill. There are plenty of cards that put cards into your graveyard from your library, and many of them do it as a "downside," meaning that the numbers are large, but since we're taking those cards from the top of our deck, we have no control over what's getting milled, and the only way to make sure we get a lot of creatures is to have a high density of them in our deck. In order to get the numbers we want, I'd say we need at least every other card to be a creature. We're not opposed to running other card types, but if we don't have a colossal amount of cards with power and toughness, this deck will never function.
So let's see what the best creatures that mill are. There's some classics, like Satyr Wayfinder, which puts four cards into our graveyard and gets us a land back. Land advantage along with the mill is excellent, so we'll also grab Circle of the Land Druid, Blanchwood Prowler, and Eccentric Farmer. But even better than those are the ones that mill repeatedly, like Sage's Row Denizen, Cathartic Adept, and Deranged Assistant. These will get us a ton of value over the course of the game, and even though their numbers seem insignificant at first, they'll make a big difference if they stick around.
Of course, there are other ways to get cards into the graveyard. One way is simply to play creatures that sacrifice themselves. Sakura-Tribe Elder, Spore Frog, and Caustic Caterpillar are all playable in any deck, but they're especially useful here. Then there are cards that let you discard. Looters are the ones I prefer to play the most just because there are so many good options. Thought Courier, Merfolk Looter, Looter il-Kor, Selhoff Entomber, this list keeps going. Looters give us a fresh card, and they let us discard cards that we wanted in the graveyard anyways. Getting a few of these on the battlefield puts us in an extremely strong position in terms of card advantage. As we shape our hand and graveyard to perfection, our chances of winning just go up and up.
There are some creatures that don't fit into any of those categories but are very strong nonetheless. Dreamscape Artist lets us discard a card to replicate a Harrow, every single turn. Ramp and discard? Exactly what we want. Golgari Brownscale and Greater Mossdog are cards with the iconic mechanic dredge, known for being included in terrifying decks in Legacy and Modern. That keyword lets us choose to mill three and return the dredge creature from our graveyard to our hand rather than draw a card. Unfortunately, we don't have many ways to cast cards from the graveyard, meaning that replacing our draw step with mill isn't always the best choice. Still, when we need it, it'll come in handy, and if they just sit in our graveyard, that's fine too.
I almost attempted to make an "oops all creatures" deck for this build, but we're missing out on a lot if we refuse to play noncreature spells. Mulch, Commune with the Gods, Druidic Ritual, and Vessel of Nascency are all excellent ways to get some cards into the graveyard, and some of them even fetch creatures to hand for us. In addition to those, Curse of the Bloody Tome and Chronic Flooding are two other ways to fill our graveyard. But what the noncreature spells are really best for is the interaction in our deck. We're in blue, so of course we're going to be running Counterspell, Negate, and Unsummon. These cards are just too good to give up. Our creature removal also finds itself in the noncreature slots in the form of fight spells. Obviously, this deck is designed to go wide, but there are several huge monsters in here, like Moldgraf Millipede, Undergrowth Scavenger, and Vigorspore Wurm. With those creatures and a Prey Upon, we can take out almost anything.
The final thing this deck needs are some cards taking advantage of our hoard of Spiders. A copious amount of arachnids is pretty great on its own, but there are some cards that can really power them up. Echoing Courage gives every single one of them +2/+2, which is nuts if you have upwards of ten on the board. Essence Warden can gain you enough time to cast and activate your commander again, and if Ivy Lane Denizen is on the board when our commander gets activated, you'll have at least double the power you would've had. Unfortunately, that's kind of it. Pauper doesn't have many cards that resemble an Overrun, the card we really need.
This is the problem that really holds back the deck. We can make a horde, no problem, and we can attack with said horde, but even if there's twenty Spiders, they can't really close out the game as 1/1s. Without a game-ending swing, we're vulnerable to potent crackbacks, and the deck struggles to deal with opposing attacks thanks to its saturation of utility creatures that are only there to mill. Luckily, I think there's a solution to the problem, and it lies in how you play the game. If you swing out with just ten Spiders from your first activation, all you get is the malice of the table. But if you invest in your Spiders and continue to recast and sacrifice your commander, you can build a winning board state, slowly but surely.
Well, I'd say this deck is pretty successful when it comes to making a ludicrous amount of arachnids. It's not difficult at all to mill yourself in any format. Though the deck doesn't possess the ability to stampede over opponents like most token decks do, it still has plenty of ways to win, as long as the deck is played right. Are there any other decks where the play pattern, rather than the cards, determine victory?
