May 19th Pauper Challenge Winner's Metagame Breakdown

This is going to be a slightly different recap. Considering that Daze, Gitaxian Probe, and Gush have been banned the format of the past four weeks no longer exists. During the last four weeks - the first with War of the Spark - conversation about format health has gotten heated at time. May 20th loomed large and the anticipation this time around was, at least for some, worth the wait. 

The May 19th Challenge was another six round affair. Two of the decks in the Top 32 finished with 2-4 records. The Top 8 had six Delver-Gush decks and two Monarch decks. Out of every deck to finish 4-2 or better, one didn't run Gush, Monarch, or Tron. 

This was not an outlier. Week after week the same decks were putting up results. The same strategies time and time again proved themselves to be better than the rest. 

And the field shrunk. One of the big strikes against looking at Challenge data is that it takes an extremely select subset of players and extrapolates trends. Given one or two events, results are simply pinpoints. Looking over the better part of seven months - that is when the trend appears. 

Many in Magic find joy in playing a deck of their choosing to a positive result. This segment of players may understand they are going  in ad a disadvantage but they do not care because the chance still existed. In Pauper that chance was nowhere to be found. 

With only four weeks of data there is not enough information to really understand what took place during War of the Spark season: Part I. But here's how the Top 8s from the four challenges went down:

Out of 32 Top 8 slots, Dimir Delver took 10. Gush took 17. 

Where do we go from here? The Blue Monday bans show that Wizards is paying attention. The bans also give us another indication of what Wizards wants Pauper to be: a format where people have to spend mana to cast their spells.

Magic as Garfield intended.

2019 is going to be a banner year for Pauper. I want to continue to be at the forefront of the metagame. If you like the work I do, please consider becoming a Patron. Thank you!