
Commander
Interviewing Paul from PDH committee - the Pauper Commander format
10/07/20 0 comments
Today we are interviewing Paul or Scarecrow1779, one of the Pauper Commander Committee members to better understand this format

By Leon

revised by Tabata Marques

Hi Paul, you have a lot of history in this format, could you tell us how and when it began?
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Let's say you have resources, all Power 9 in your collection. Would you still choose PDH over EDH? Or the two formats can be played and no needs to choose something?
I would still play both, just like I do now. I feel like each one makes me appreciate the other more. When I made my first PDH decks, it was because I was looking for an alternative to budget EDH. My EDH playgroup was full of fetches, duals, cradles, and tabernacles. I never felt like I could properly brew without wasting a lot of time and money before finding out my brew couldn't cut it in my play group. I was also tired spending whole games twiddling my thumbs because of board wipes or stax. In PDH, there are only a few cards over $5, so almost everyone can afford to optimize their decks if they want. There's also very little stax, very few board wipes, and far fewer tutors to enable combos. This forces players to interact and play politics far more consistently, while also decreasing the number of "feels bad" moments. When the Common Knowledge Pauper podcast did an episode on PDH earlier this yearPDH is still not a sanction format. How it works if I want to know the rules and banlist?
PDH Home Base has a rules pageAd
Let's talk about your committee now. How is the process to decided each rule in your committee?
Right now there’s only 4 of us, so we listen to the community a lot to make sure we are not ignoring different reasons and arguments. We then go talk in a private Discord chat until we all agree. Our hardest decision so far was whether the uncommon Planeswalkers from War of the Spark could be legal commanders. In the end, we made the same decision as the EDH rules committee, keeping planeswalkers illegal as official commanders, but encouraging players to talk to their groups about using them as unofficial commanders. I actually wrote a whole articleThe centralization of the rules is, in fact, very important, even for a more serious growth of the format, but country needs to feel safe and represented in your committee. For example, although this is not a problem for Pauper: Secret Lair products are not sold in Latin America neither Africa and some committee in these regions can feel the need to ban those cards in other formats. How your committee represents the plurality of the world we live in?
All of our current committee members are from North America. However, several of us have lived in other countries and many community members on the Home Base Discord from Europe and at least a few from Latin America. Some of them have even translated articles into German and Spanish in the past. If there are issues affecting PDH for players in other countries, we absolutely want to hear about them.How do you see the growth of PDH in the USA?
It’s difficult to estimate the relative size of MtG formats, but reddit community size is at least easy to track. Oathbreaker subreddit had only 1000 subscribers before it exploded in popularity last year. The PauperEDH subredditAd

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