The Wanderer is here! And ready to ruin all of the decks who love to ping and focus on non-combat damage, while this isn’t relevant against a ton of decks, being able to protect our creatures from damage-based effects allows us to be decently strong against a lot of red decks since a lot of them rely on non-combat damage to whittle us down and to hit our creatures, I brewed a ton of different versions of this deck including a blink and cycling themed deck, but after exhaustive testing, I found that the best version of this deck is a token strategy where we do what mono-white does best with the benefits of the Wanderer on top. I had a lot of fun with this deck, but I don’t think it’s that great of an option! Without further ado, let’s get it!
The Deck:
Click here to copy full decklist to your clipboard!
The Wanderer is a decent piece of removal, especially for bigger creatures,s and the non-combat damage protection for us and our permanents can be quite relevant against some decks but doesn’t do very much against some; it really is deck dependent, which makes this card quite tough because we are dependent on our opponents to get a lot of value out of it, Luckily because there is quite a bit of non-combat damage floating throughout the format it can be relevant against decks you wouldn’t expect. The deck functions perfectly fine without the Wanderer but they do provide a decent amount of utility for the deck.
Deck Matchups:
Since this is Pauper EDH, there are an absolute ton of things that can tip a game in your favor or out of it. While an archetype may seem favorable, there are absolutely good and bad commanders for our deck to go up against; I have included both these, which were all played among my testing groups using various decks, and I have included the sample size for clarity purposes. This is just meant to be a guide after testing a bunch of games with this deck!
The information below is notes about specific decks that were featured in our testing pods and how we fared against them. Naturally, Pauper EDH is a multiplayer game, so these are just a summary of my notes against different commanders and strategies. When we test these decks we try to test to its strengths and weaknesses to give a full spectrum of what the deck has to offer. Various commanders and archetypes/strategies are used to get the most accurate information.
This deck really likes non-combat damage, and this is very good for us, with cards like Erebor Flamesmith and Guttersnipe being their primary points of damage, we are in a really good position, once The Wanderer is out they struggle to hit us all while we build up our board.
Another commander and deck that really likes to deal non-combat damage, which is amazing for us; this is another matchup where once I had The Wanderer out, they couldn’t do a ton against me, and I was just able to run them over.
In an article vs article topic battle, I found this one to be great for us; they don’t do much in the form of non-combat damage, but since these lists don’t run a ton of creatures and their commander basically does the same thing as The Wanderer we can easily go wide and dominate the game.
In a true token v token matchup, Hammers of Moradin gets the edge mostly because of their commander, we run a lot of the same cards so it is a lot of the same cards bumping into each other because of their commander, they get the edge in this one, this matchup typically comes down to card advantage (which we both have a small amount of) and if their commander swings super hard. This is a winnable but tough one.
A lot of removal and board wipes in this deck make this matchup really hard, them dropping a card like Arms of Hadar can absolutely devastate us, even if we have a good hand and decent board presence cards like that stop us hard.
Even though Balmor is a deck that has a decent amount of non-combat damage they are also really good at combat, which spells disaster for us, they are a lot quicker, and The Wanderer doesn’t help a ton in this matchup, in my testing games I got ran over in multiple times and without many ways to stop flyers I was dead by turn six or seven in the testing games.
Strategy Overview:
Fill the whole board:
We are a token deck, so swinging wide and blocking wide is really helpful to our overall gameplan, and keeping the board full is key to our game plan.
Chump block the best of the best:
Since we have so many tokens in our deck, if an opponent’s creature doesn’t have trample, we want to chump block their biggest creature to keep our life total decently high and keep us in games longer.
Pump and Dump:
And no TNT is not starting a crypto coin! Our pump and dump is filling our board to the brim and using finishers like Silverflame Ritual and Inspiring Roar to close out the game. We have true strength in numbers within this deck, and a bunch of 2/2’s and 3/3’s swinging can be quite effective.
Deck Overview:
This section contains information about cards in the deck and how they function within the deck! I also highlighted some of my favorite cards in the deck!
Creatures:
Even though we have a lot of tokens and mostly token production we have some big swingers as well! some of my favorites are Squad Captain and Celebrity Fencer. Both of these can get huge super quickly and are really strong attackers/blockers for the deck; these both can also help us end games quickly. While not token-related, I really like Ballynock Trapper. It can be a great way to clear the way for our attackers and allow us to get in for some damage in some of the later game turns. We can untap this four or five times! Court Street Denizen is also a really great option for this, and with these two together, we can usually attack opponents unblocked, which is very nice. Charismatic Vanguard is another late-game card that can really help us to ramp up the damage and put a lot of pressure on our opponents, and even help us contend a lot better with some decks in combat. We do have a little bit of card draw within our creature package from cards like Inspiring Overseer and Priest of Ancient Lore white depsaretnly needs card draw,and some extra attackers/blockers are always nice for our deck!
Instants:
Before building this deck I did not know that Hobbit's Sting was in the format! While we don’t get much value out of the food because of the high amount of creatures we really have on the board, we can easily kill even the biggest creatures our opponents have to offer with this. The removal doesn’t stop there as we also have Generous Gift since we have such a low amount of removal in the deck, I like to save this for some of the late-game things our opponents bring out, while that’s not always feasible that is what I typically like to do and had success with. Our token production at instant speed allows us to be quite efficient when blocking and surprising opponents, and we get good value for our mana, especially with cards like Raise the Alarm and You're Confronted by Robbers.
Sorceries:
We have a lot of token production at sorcery speed with some really strong cards like Battle Screech, which can produce a ton of tokens very quickly, I also really like Triplicate Spirits while it does cost six it can be cast really easy with Convoke and fill up the board quite quickly. Since we have so much token production, we need ways to close out games, which is why we have cards like Kytheon's Tactics, Silverflame Ritual, and Marshaling Cry all of these are cheap and easy ways for us to buff up our board and with how many creatures we usually have on the board its often really easy to take out opponents with our buffed up board.
Artifacts:
Being in mono-white can be quite tough, especially when it comes to card draw because of that, we need Spare Supplies as a cheap and easy way to get some supplemental card draw for the deck. We also have Greatsword of Tyr, which is pretty much an auto-include in white decks that it builds on a token or one of our normal creatures. It is just such good value and board control. I also have been loving Ancestral Blade, which provides some cheap token production and a small buff for very little mana investment.
Enchantments:
Omen of the Sun is cheap, and a really strong card for the deck, cheap and decent token production with scry and life gain attached is pretty valuable to our deck, the scry especially since we don’t draw a lot of cards so being able to look ahead and put away bad draws is awesome. We finish off our enchantment package with Oblivion Ring and Reprobation, which are both cheap and easy ways to take commander’s and opponent’s important creatures out of the picture, these are both super valuable, and I typically wait until a real big problem arises as we are not super heavy on these effects.
Strengths of the Deck:
We are quite good at blocking, especially against other aggressive strategies.
We have a few buffs, and since we almost always have a high amount of creatures, we can go wide pretty easily.
Our commander can really be effective against red decks or really any deck that doesn’t care about combat damage and only damages through non-combat damage.
Weaknesses of the Deck:
We can be pretty weak to creature hate and don’t have a ton of ways to protect against it.
Stompy decks are really tough matchups for us, creatures with trample and huge creatures in general can be rough.
Thanks so much for reading to the end! I like this deck a lot, but like a lot of the legalized for January, Planeswalkers feels like there are just a lot of better options in the format, our commander focusing on what our opponents do can be pretty rough for the deck as well. I had a lot of fun with this deck, but I don’t know if it’s one I will be returning to through rule zero after January. Stay tuned and TAP IN!
By clicking confirm you agree that Tuesdaynighttakeover.com can store cookies on your device and collect user data (Links visited, Time spent on page)
This is fully detailed in our Privacy Policy
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. Like Time Spent on Page, Post ViewsThe technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.