Pauper Vintage - the Grand Experiment

If you haven't played much Pauper, you'd be surprised what kind of cards were printed as commons at some point! I have extended the cube's definition of "Pauper" to include Pauper's banned list, as I'd intended its design to feature a "vintage-lite" flavor, rather than "legacy-lite."

Mechanic density and variety are high, meaning the cube is definitely biased towards experienced drafters, both in terms of overall MTG drafting experience as well as drafting this cube in particular.

Artifact Seed

Originally the cube just had artifact lands in the land bin too. Oddly this caused some confusion and I missed the tension of trying to "draft artifacts." So in an experiment (I'm enjoying it so far), the 540 cube is dealt into 15-card packs like usual, but an extra card is given to each pack from the Artifact Seed pool, making them 16-card packs in total.

Possible contents include:

• a basic artifact land
• a post land (i.e. Cloudpost)
• a Cogwork Librarian

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Drafting Guide

Pauper is, by definition, more grindy than classic Vintage or Legacy type drafts, therefore, look for value plays more than splashy effects. For example, Ephemerate type effects saw a high prevalence in the competitive scene. Another example may come in the draft favorite of Thermo-Alchemist. That said, turn 2 Ulamog's Crusher is perfectly attainable.

Target Experience

Heavy synergistic elements; almost any card can give you value of some kind, but cards like Shrieking Drake are intended to be puzzle pieces to figure out and exploit. And of course there will be power outliers, absolutely - that's part of what I enjoy in "vintage" environments.

Multi-color Support

Yep, loads of that. We've got ~60 lands, 10 signets, and a mess of other artifacts contributing to the multicolor extravaganza with complete cycles of all of these bad boys.

Themes

When I first started the cube, I began with fairly rigid approaches to the dual color themes, however, over time this has seemed less interesting and a little too restrictive of an approach. I have updated the list some to reflect some general themes that hold roughly across the allied color shards. You will find that they encompass very roughly this range:

Spells/Storm

ETB & Flicker Tricks

Voltron Bogles

Tokens / Aggro

Graveyard / Sac Value

Other Notes

• Toughness runs low in the creatures: 166/238 creatures (at time of writing) are less than or equal to 2. Bear this in mind when evaluating cards like Arms of Hadar
• Artifacts have large support across the spectrum, save for green
• Tri-color decks tend to be slow-ish, often more given to control, due to common duals tapping, unless you use signets
• Land counts, in my experience, usually feel better at 13-16 per deck, rather than 16-18
• Cards like Crop Rotation, Expedition Map, and Abundant Harvest do care about non-basic lands, like Thornglint Bridge or Cloudpost
• Farseek and the LOTR Cycling cycle (i.e. Eagles of the North) can fetch Kaldheim duals & Dominaria United duals, like Glacial Floodplain. The Landscape cycle, i.e. Bountiful Landscape, cannot.