Pauper Commander - Third Path Iconoclast

Third Path Iconoclast

by Manuel Castañón

An Iconic Iconoclast

Alright, we're back with another evaluation of a top Pauper Commander. This time, it's Third Path Iconoclast

Maybe it's because it can make a veritable army in a turn cycle. Perhaps it's due to the fact that it costs two mana. Actually, it's probably all of the above. This is a really powerful Magic card right here, so let's figure out how to get the absolute most out of it. It shouldn't be difficult to make a strong deck, but if we do this carefully, we can create a monster of a Pauper library. 

I've already named the main themes of the deck, but let me recap what this deck wants to do. Our commander looks at every noncreature spell we cast, and makes a little artifact Soldier. So we want to cast spells that aren't creatures (duh), then take advantage of having a bunch of artifacts Soldiers. Okay, makes sense. What noncreature spells are we going to start with?

Why Not to Make a Storm Deck

There's this sort of generic spellslinger build that shows up a lot in EDH that I think should be a bit less prominent. It's a deck based off of old storm decks that would run four copies of Brainstorm

Brainstorm

In EDH, it's much different. You can only run a single copy of those cards in a deck, and after that your options get much worse. You're looking for cards that draw another card, called cantrips. Problem is, Expedite

All you're really doing with those cantrips is paying one mana to replace a card in your hand with a completely random card. It could be a land, and then what do you do? Nothing. The storm gameplan worked great in Modern, but in EDH, and especially in Pauper EDH, it's just too inconsistent, especially when Grapeshot

A Slower Snowball

So I'm going to remove all the little cantrips from this Pauper list. Instead of attempting to cast a ton of cards on one turn, I'm going to focus on consistency. Amassing an army over the course of several turns is much better than fizzling out and reducing our hand size to zero because we rushed the gameplan.

Cards like Big Score

They have slightly higher costs than stuff like Serum Visions

Then, as we're casting all these spells and making all these Soldiers, we have to take advantage of them. The first way we're going to do that is with even more instants and sorceries. There's a surprising amount that care about the amount of creatures or artifacts we have. Take Distant Melody

Distant Melody

Meeting of Minds

Shared Discovery

And on the offensive side, Massive Raid

Creatures

Of course, there are a few creatures we're willing to play, because they can do a ton of work as we cast all our noncreature spells. You know which creatures I'm talking about. Thermo-Alchemist

In addition, we can play even more of them than have been printed by running Reckless Fireweaver

I think this deck is what a peak spellslinger deck looks like, not like one of those messy piles of cantrips and storm cards. Those things never really work the way people want them to. But I know that a slow, progressive gathering of card advantage does spectacularly.

Stay steady, hold your ground, and your opponents will never be able to overcome the summation of your deck's full power. But what do y'all think about storm decks? Have y'all ever seen them go off?