Pauper Commander - Sunny Side Up
No card type has shown itself to be more of a menace than artifacts. Lands are the foundation of Magic , but don't do much of anything on their own (unless you're playing Legacy). Creatures are the center of Magic combat, but they never really pop off. Enchantments can be oppressively strong, but only in smothering hordes late game. It's artifacts that I'm most scared of when I look at my opponents' decks simply because of their tendency to throw themselves on the board in clusters of summative value.
That's because artifacts are often designed extremely cheap, costing just two, one, or even zero mana for a little bauble, and while those baubles themselves aren't particularly strong, we can take advantage of their simple existence on the board, which is what we'll be doing today with Enthusiastic Mechanaut. Part A: Cast as many small artifacts as possible. Part B: Profit.
Enthusiastic Mechanaut is extremely simple in concept: every single artifact costs one less. For an artifact that costs two, you get a 50% reduction rate; for an artifact that costs one, you get 100%. Naturally, we're going to try and cram as many one-mana artifacts in here as possible.
To be honest, it doesn't really matter which ones you add. Modern Cheerios decks have no qualms about playing Bone Saw despite that card being pretty much useless. All they care about is that it costs nothing. Still, we have some options, so we can afford to be picky. What we're going to go for first are artifacts that sacrifice themselves and draw a card. Thanks to the cycle from Odyssey , these cards have become known as eggs. Conjurer's Bauble is the perfect example of what I'm talking about: a one-mana artifact that we can tap, sacrifice, and draw a card. Hopefully that card is another egg we can play, which we'll cast, crack, and keep going.
Chromatic Sphere is the classic one, along with Prophetic Prism and Chromatic Star. I'm quite fond of the Spellbombs from the Mirrodin block, the most notable of which are Pyrite Spellbomb and Aether Spellbomb. You can get a powerful effect out of sacrificing them, or you can just send them to the graveyard for a card. That's a handy group of cards to draw from for many decks. For the most part, though, these eggs don't fit into cycles, and we just have to find the good ones that have been printed on their own across the years. Ichor Wellspring can draw us two cards if we find a way to sacrifice it, Sleeper Dart can tranquilize a creature, and Mnemonic Sphere can be cycled from hand. All good effects to have.
But not everything has to draw a card. Prized Statue is useful because it can be mana-neutral or even mana-positive. Relic of Progenitus and Tormod's Crypt both act as strong graveyard hate, something that's always handy to have. Mycosynth Wellspring gets lands into our hand. We're also running Ghoulcaller's Bell, a card that may seem useless, but it's got a hidden purpose in our deck.
With Enthusiastic Mechanaut in our command zone, and maybe a few extra cost-reducers on the board (Foundry Inspector, Etherium Sculptor), we should have no problem casting our cards for nothing at all. That means we'll have no problem casting an absolute ton of artifacts. Now we can start to take advantage of them. Reckless Fireweaver, Ingenious Artillerist and Kessig Flamebreather turn our artifacts into damage. These guys are going to be our main win condition. They'll be a ticking clock for our opponents, erasing life points at a rapid pace. But we can do more for these guys than just casting artifacts regularly. We want to create an engine that triggers them many times in turn.
And that brings me to the next part of this deck, the part I'm most excited about. Reckless Fireweaver and the like do their thing when an artifact enters, simply dealing a damage. But there's a number of cards that do another thing when artifacts enter, and that's untap. Kindlespark Duo, Steelfin Whale, Battered Golem, Nettle Drone, and Zephyr Scribe will all untap whenever we cast an egg, and we can do a lot with that. There's a good number of enchantments and Equipment that will grant a tap ability to a creature. Using these, we can build custom combinations of abilities that trigger whenever we have a little bauble enter the battlefield. Admittedly, most of these are just going to create replicas of Reckless Fireweaver, which is nothing special. Hermetic Study, Psionic Gift, and Fire Whip all turn our creatures into pingers, which we can use to damage our opponents, or mow down creatures . The best of these is easily Quicksilver Dagger, which lets us ping and draw a card. When we can do that two to three times a turn, we're in a very strong position.
But the Johnnys among you will have noticed that, of course, cards like these have the tendency to go infinite, which is absolutely something we're gonna do. I've tried to use Banishing Knack and Retraction Helix before in a weird shell with Chakram Retriever, but I think they'll work better here . All we have to do is get one of them attached to an untapping creature and we can bounce a zero-cost artifact over and over again. Add in a Reckless Fireweaver, and it's game over. There's a few variations of this combo as well. Ghoulcaller's Bell can be used to mill every player out if we can cast and bounce it over and over again. Freed from the Real has a home here, because if we can cast Arcane Signet for zero mana, it can pay for the cost of untapping a creature. The redundancy in the deck is great for consistency, but to maximize our chances of finding these combos, we're running a few tutors for all these cards: Merchant Scroll, Dizzy Spell[/el ], and [el]Muddle the Mixture.
The rest of this deck is just supplemental card draw and some removal in the form of Demand Answers, Unexpected Windfall, and Unsummon or Steam Snag. Nothing snazzy, just what the deck needs to keep the board under control. We can't afford too many slots for utility given the deck's need to cycle through itself in a steady roll.
View this decklist on Archidekt
I'm removing fond of this deck as a home for Retraction Helix, Banishing Knack, and Quicksilver Dagger, three cards I've tried to work with in the past unsuccessfully. This deck is exactly where they need to be, and I think it's where they're reaching their full potential. Of course, you never know, there could be somewhere even better.
Are there any other cool pauper cards with niche applications that I should try and find a home for? Let me know in the comments.
