August 4th Pauper Challenge Winner's Metagame - Updated

If you look at the deck that won the August 4th Pauper Challenge you'd think all was right in the world of commons. Stompy - a longtime powerhouse - beat a Bogle brew in the finals and took down two midrange decks on the way. Everything looks good above the surface. The rest of the iceberg, well, that isn't so pretty.

Pauper is currently an interesting beast. There is archetype diversity - that is, there are tons of discrete decks that seen play - but when looking at macro-archetypes, we are seeing a serious stratification. Over the five challenges since Core 2020, Jeskai Arcum's Astrolabe-Ephemerate decks have been the best strategy with Arcum's Astrolabe-Ephemerate- Ghostly Flicker Tron decks currently pacing for the silver medal. While aggressive strategies exist at the moment, they have a hard time keeping up with decks that can consistently blank the combat phase, cast Moment's Peace, or undo several turns of attacking thanks to  Weather the Storm. 

This is not the fault of any one card or interaction. Rather it's the cumulative effect of using the common slot to print highly synergistic cards for Limited environments and keeping the slot free from powerful pure offensive threats.

Let's use Modern Horizons as an example. The best creature to come out of the set, to this point, is Faerie Seer. It didn't earn this award on the back of its power in the red zone but rather because of how well it synergizes with both Spellstutter Sprite and Ninja of the Deep Hours. Compare this to other Modern Horizons cards seeded for strategies - Ephemerate and Winding Way. Ephemerate exists to help make the Blink deck work in draft and Winding Way exists to supplement the Golgari graveyard deck and the Gruul "lands in graveyard" archetype. Put them into Pauper and they take on completely different roles. 

Setting aside Winding Way for the moment I want to focus on Ephemerate. All the synergies it had in draft are dialed way past 11 in constructed. It is a two-card engine with Archaeomancer and its kin. That's not a problem in it of itself. Similarly, Arcum's Astrolabe is not a problem on its own but rather when you put it into the context of the existing Pauper environment things look different. 

So what about the creatures? The options for attacking pale in comparison to the reward for delaying the game. Even with an abundance of three-power two-drops available, the creatures get outclassed far too quickly to really matter past the first few turns. This is reflected in the challenge stats.

The minimal threshold for appearing in this chart is either a single Top 8 or three total Top 32 appearances. 

I want to focus on Weighted Volume. This is a newer metric based on this Frank Karsten column. It takes the total accumulated Win+ (an X-2 record is a Win+ of 1, X-1 is a W+ 2, etc) and then takes each individual deck's Win+ to extrapolate a weighted volume - that is, how much of the Top 16 records is a deck taking up (on average). The top two in this metric are Jeskai Trinket (typified by Trinket Mage) and Jeskai Blink (typified by a lack of Trinket Mage and a lack of Spellstutter Sprite). In fact, these two make up the bulk of Jeskai's success. Summing the macro-archetypes, we end up with a Top 10 that looks something like this:

Jeskai Astrolabe-Ephemerate makes up just about 16% of all Top 32s through five Challenges yet has over 25% of wins allocated to the Top 16. Loop Tron - that is any Tron deck that focuses on either an Ephemerate or Ghostly Flicker endgame - has over 14% of all Win+ score, topping it's actual volume by over 6%. 

When looking at the other top decks from this season, they all fall much more in line between their weighted volume and their actual volume. All of this is to say that the Jeskai and Tron decks are not only the best decks but are the best decks by a decently sized margin and that the decks that are trying to come for them are not nearly as strong.

So where does this leave Pauper? Right now, outside of an abundance over strong creatures coming in Throne of Eldraine I'm not sure. The incentive to have a dominating late-game is incredibly high and outside multiple threats on the magnitude of Insectile Aberration I do not see that changing outside of bans.

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!

EDIT: It was brought to my attention yesterday that my math was off. I didn't have a chance to check my calculations until today. Upon review, this is the corrected chart for macro-archetypes (and this time I grouped both Red Deck Wins and Goblins under the Goblins macro).

So what's changed? Quite a bit actually. Instead of seriously out performing their volume, both Jeskai and Loop Tron are merely performing above average. In fact, Loop Tron is punching above it's weight class in a manner similar to Affinity. 

This image of the metagame is far more healthy and diverse, even if concentrated at the top. All that being said, if an archetype is making up almost a quarter of al Top 32 decks and accounts for nearly 30% of wins above 32nd place, then that may be a sign of imbalance.
But imbalance is not the same as unhealthy. So things are not nearly as dire as I thought yesterday. On that note, I do want to leave this update with one more chart.

Blue is the weighted percentage of Win+, red is actual volume. 

What do you think about this chart?