Pauper: Mono Black Ponza Deck Tech & Sideboard Guide

I'm Tiago Fuguete, and today's deck is the famous guide on how to lose friends, after all, no one likes to lose lands, right? To start talking about our deck, we have to mention the cards responsible for the existence of the deck, the 3 black LD's in Pauper: Choking Sands, Icequake and Rancid Earth. If there's one thing that's annoying when we play Magic, is playing a creature, and it is destroyed or countered. But I'm sure nothing is more annoying than being unable to cast them — and that's precisely what our deck wants to do, pretty much not let our opponent play. A great tool for this to happen right on turn 1 is Dark Ritual, a card that was much considered to be banned due to the Initiative because it sped up the deck and that's what we want here, to cast it on turn 1 or maybe for a Monarch on turn 2. Even though Dark Ritual is an accelerator, it's not just because of this that the deck is "boring" to play against. We also have a creature to torment our opponent when they have no lands: Chittering Rats. Our deck also has some occasional removals like Cast Down and Snuff Out, as well as sacrifice like Chainer's Edict in case our main plan takes a while to happen, in addition to draw cards to avoid running out of breath, like Night's Whisper. Our Mulligan is not the best, although we run 4 Dark Ritual it's not always in the starting hand, and our deck is a bit heavy and slow to develop the game, as an LD on turn 3 doesn't help much anymore, and it's important to know how to pick a good hand. Our approach is to try to cast the first of them on turn 2, then try a Rat or already a Monarch with backup removals. We will, most of the time, take this stance, in addition to trying to disrupt our opponent as much as possible, try to take advantage of every action, leaving them on the defensive. It's not complicated to play with the deck, it's a simple posture: target their lands and play our creatures, but sometimes we have problems like a heavy hand or the lack of LDs and with that, we try to be just a Mono Black Control.

vs. Grixis Affinity

Let's start by talking about a matchup with a small problem: our opponent has indestructible lands! Here, we are going to suffer a bit because we don't have many targets for our LDs, but overall, it's not a bad match because today's Affinity has fewer creatures, and we will stick to the Monarch plan to try to win the game.

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vs. Boros Gates

Since we talked about a deck with lands that we're not going to destroy, let's talk about a deck that has the lands everyone wants to destroy: Basilisk Gate. Basilisk Gate arrived very well in Pauper and gained its space in many decks, but has been very successful in Boros and is a strong staple currently, being a good target for our LDs. In this matchup, we have to be a cautious with the Monarch, since our opponent ends up having many creatures and our removals are all targeted. On the post-side, we have two good cards, Crypt Rats and the recently released Arms of Hadar.

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vs. Burn

As always for a MonoBlack, playing against Burn isn't great, but at Game 1 we will stick to the LD and try to play as many Chittering Rats as possible to delay our opponent. On the sideboard, we have Duress and Unexpected Fangs that can help us by hitting the opponent's hand or gaining life.

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vs. Faeries

Here we have a very complicated game where we either start well or everything goes awry quickly. Some important points here are: be on the play, get an LD as soon as possible and, of course, avoid Spellstutter Sprite. A good tip is to aim the LDs on lands that aren't islands, such as destroying the duals, Mountains or Swamps to avoid their removals.

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vs. Mono Black Ponza

Being on the play in this matchup is the most important part of the game, and it is preferable to cast the first LD. Those two points increases your odds greatly.

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Ending another article, I want to say that it is a very cool deck to play, but also makes people feel bad about playing against you. Any questions or suggestions, just leave it here in the comments, and I'll come back to talk about it! Thank you very much, and I hope you enjoyed the reading.