Hello and welcome to the Daily MTG, your one stop shop for all of your Magic needs. Not 24 hours ago I had written an article about the Pauper format, and it's inevitable doom. It involved the card Peregrine Drake. This sucker has been a part of a three card combo that is next to impossible to disrupt or out race. This meant that Pauper had become a solved format. The most recently solved format was Tiny Leaders, that faded into nothingness because of the overwhelming power of the deck which had solved it. Some may disagree, but Tiny Leaders is mostly decayed to nothing. This is where my fear for the Pauper format, a format which is close to my heart, came from. So instead saying why it should be banned, I'll go over why it was banned, and reasons that it needed the banning.
The problem that raised the most concern, and the one that WotC used on the official statement, was that it was ruining the meta. The deck was completely unbalanced, and everyone knew it. That's why we were all so surprised that it wasn't banned at the release of Kaladesh. At that point it occupied 11% of the meta. If a super power deck is built in a format, and no plays it, there isn't a problem. That obviously wasn't the case for Pauper, but WotC decided that it wasn't extreme enough to take action against it. Since then, the deck had over doubled it's presence in the meta and was obliterating all of the other competitive decks in the format. So WotC came out yesterday and declared that the card was too broken to be fixed.
That stat is good enough reason to ban any card, but why Peregrine Drake? Why not another part of the combo? The answer is simple. The combo can survive or be revised to survive any of the other pieces to be banned, but when you ban the Drake, the combo falls apart, with no way of fixing it. This is important, because if we ban one version of the drake deck, another will emerge, and will warp the format once again. The problem had gotten so bad that people were putting Pyroblast in the main, which would be a dead card if they didn't match up against a blue player.
Today though, we know that this will no longer be the case, and we can finally put our Pyroblasts, back in the sideboard! It's exciting conclusion to Pauper's version of Combo Winter, there are some questions that we must ask WotC; Why did you print Peregrine Drake at Common level if it was evident how badly it would warp the format? and Why did you wait so long, even when the stats showed an unprecedented number of this deck in the meta? , but probably the most important question, Did you intend to damage Pauper? Was Pauper not making enough money, or attracting more attention to it? If Pauper would cost more then it was making, then a good way to kill it is to print an undeniably powerful card, that is way out of the power range of the competitive meta in the format. Then, suddenly, a large crowd cries out to fix it, which draws in a lot of new players, which makes Pauper popular enough to pay for itself. WotC puts out an emergency ban, and voila! the perfect crime.
Of course this is just one theory, maybe WotC really did think that the meta could keep up with the card, and this was a complete surprise to them. Nobody can really know, but if it were the case, then we would probably see a decline of players in the next 3 years for the format, then Pauper not making enough money, and when this happens, we'll just see another card at Common that can destroy the format. I hope that this never comes true of course, and that Pauper becomes as popular as Legacy or Modern.
There will be another post tomorrow, so follow me and I'll see you tomorrow!
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