Pauper: The 2025 Metagame and June 30th Banlist

We’re coming up on three months since Pauper’s last ban wave. After a long period of polarized play, the format has finally shaken off the dominance of Broodscale Combo, while also reducing the consistency and speed of the other oppressive archetypes in the Metagame.

In that time, Pauper has transformed while remaining virtually in the same place: Kuldotha Red has been replaced by Synthesizer Burn and Madness Burn, Mono Blue Terror has taken advantage of a slower environment and the popularity of red decks to stay on top, and overall, there’s a greater diversity of viable strategies that are making it into the Top 8 of Challenges and showing up regularly in Leagues.

With the next Magic Banned and Restricted announcement coming on June 30, it seems like an opportune time to assess how Pauper has adapted in that time and to do a health checkup on the format. It's worth emphasizing my point from the vert beginning: nothing needs to be banned from the format now, and it's much better than it was before March.

There has been a lot of discussion in Standard and Pioneer about the possibility of banning red cards from the formats because Monstrous Rage archetypes have been dominating the Metagame considerably. Proof of this was the Pro Tour Final Fantasy, where two archetypes — Mono Red Mice and Izzet Prowess — completely dominated the tournament and both constituted the entire Top 8.

We can say that Pauper does have a thing for red decks too. In theory, we have approximately four different “Red Aggro” variants in the format today.

The most traditional of these, which was a direct replacement for Kuldotha Red, was Synthesizer Burn, which traded the go wide from Kuldotha Rebirth + Goblin Bushwhacker for more reach outside of combat with Kessig Flamebreather and Thermo-Alchemist. This is technically the most played version of Mono Red today.

Other versions try to replicate the explosive plays of Kuldotha Rebirth with a combination of Goblin Bushwhacker and Burning-Tree Emissary. In these variants, Rally at the Hornburg has proven to be an effective follow-up to Burning-Tree that is comparable to having a part of both Kuldotha Rebirth and Goblin Bushwhacker on the same card. These are technically more explosive, but more vulnerable to board interaction.

Next up, we have Madness Burn. The deck has been around in Pauper since Kitchen Imp in Modern Horizons 2 and gained more competitive space with Sneaky Snacker in MH3. While less explosive, this version offers more resilience and attacks from multiple angles, which makes it harder for opponents to interact with it.

For practical purposes, this is the most successful version of Red Aggro in Pauper today, being popular in Leagues while also producing great results in Challenges.

For the past few weeks, players have been looking for a more aggressive version of Madness Burn, with a mostly red shell and running only basic mountains to increase the archetype's speed while taking advantage of Sneaky Snacker as a recurring threat. These versions also run Guttersnipe, which has not been in competitive lists since its downshift.

Despite being the most present archetype in Pauper with approximately 23% of the Metagame in the last three months, red decks do not necessarily pose a risk to its health today.

Aggressive, fast archetypes have a technical advantage in Magic Online: they win or lose games faster, which means more time to run Leagues for those who farm rewards and trophies in them, and they are also noticeably less stressful to play than attrition strategies that force a lot of trading and careful decision-making. Furthermore, Burn decks are the strategy of choice for most “tourist” players—those who don’t necessarily dedicate themselves to Pauper, but play some tournaments.

It’s not dominant today, just popular. For a long time, this was the case with Kuldotha Red until it reached the point where it was the only viable thing in the Metagame to counter another dominant strategy, invalidating any aggro's diversity that existed in the format.

In a way, this situation is no different from what we have in Standard today. For many months, I was against the idea of ​​banning Monstrous Rage since the reason seemed a huge “players don’t like it,” but two factors changed the format and, consequently, limited the scope of answers against a pump spell: the rise of Omniscience as a turn-four combo deck that invalidated strategies that couldn’t interact or “play under,” and Cori-Steel Cutter in Tarkir: Dragonstorm, which solidified a red Aggro that was even more efficient than Mono Red itself.

These factors combined made it practically impossible to combat the Red Aggro clock and go for the long game: what works well against Mono Red doesn't work against Prowess, and what works against Prowess doesn't do anything against Omniscience.

A similar problem occurred in the relationship between Basking Broodscale, Kuldotha Rebirth and the various Deadly Dispute decks. They all attacked from such different angles that there was no room for anything between them to grow, that didn't have to bend too much to deal with one of them and lose to the others, or that tried to amplify its range of answers too much — the only exceptions were Mono Blue Terror and Writhing Chrysalis.

If we ever get to a point where Red Aggro needs to be looked at more closely, that look would probably fall on Sneaky Snacker, the recurring threat that, despite not even fitting into the archetype's color combination, gives them an alternative way to win games that require responses that you wouldn't normally use against red decks: Nihil Spellbomb and the like.

That's not the case right now, and maybe not until Modern Horizons IV. But Sneaky Snacker is the only universal card among most Red Aggro decks that really stands out from what they've historically been about.

The king of fair games in Pauper remains the artifact-based archetypes.

Jund Wildfire has taken over Affinity's place as the best Midrange. Today, it is the closest thing to a Goodstuff deck in Pauper, as it is an amalgamation of the best cards available in that color combination in a single list, while being more resilient to Dust to Dust than traditional Affinity.

This does not make Grixis Affinity a dead deck. On the contrary: it has many enthusiasts, produces diverse results, and gains new tools with each set. The most recent was Black Mage's Rod, which has not yet become common sense in the archetype, but has been growing both inside and outside its lists.

Golgari Gardens evolved into Golgari Pactdoll shortly before the bans, and gained another step to improve with Black Mage’s Rod which complements the Pactdoll and Refurbished Familiar plan while taking advantage of the archetype’s wide array of non-creature spells.

In general, all of these decks are based on the interaction between Ichor Wellspring with effects that sacrifice artifacts to draw three cards for two mana. While this move seemed absurd with Deadly Dispute for emulating an Ancestral Recall that still corrected its mana, the additional cost to extract the same value seems to have served as a brake on them — there is still a homogeneous nature among Midranges where they rely too much on the same artifacts and cards, but these do not necessarily represent diversity issues in tournaments today.

Blue-Based Decks are Pioneer's longest-running strength and have been the subject of almost as many bans as Affinity, but they remain a solid choice in Pauper to this day, where we have left the era of two-color variants in favor of pure Tempo lists with Mono Blue.

The Mono Blue Terror seemed unbeatable after the bans, but the Metagame has adapted, and today it is just another one of Pauper's main competitors. Its slot represents a response to the red decks that are always very present in the Metagame and also a police against the non-interactive strategies present in the lower tiers of the format — Dredge, Bogles, High Tide, Eggs Tron — and the most mana-hungry archetypes, such as Ephemerate Tron and Gruul Ramp.

We sometimes find the Dimir variants performing well in Leagues and Challenges, and there may be a time when, with a slower format, it is better to increase the number of answers in the lists and this puts the two-color versions back on the radar, but the common sense today is that delaying the opponent's turns while putting several 5/5s on the board is the most assertive passport to victory.

Faeries has become universally Mono Blue, and you need to go very low in the tiers or percentages to find Dimir or Izzet versions today. The “grind game” they proposed in the past with Thorn of the Black Rose has become obsolete in the face of the card advantage bombs of the current Midranges, giving space only to versions who prioritize mana efficiency over value, where it excels against several archetypes on the play, and also keeps several non-interactive strategies in check, and can always “play under” opponents who run a lot of tapped lands.

That these three branches would become the best decks in the format is no surprise — they already were before the bans and have only adapted to the changes in recent months to maintain their position. What has really changed in Pauper since March is the wide diversity in archetypes present in Tiers 1.5 and Tiers 2, ranging from the least interactive to strategies that were once efficient meta calls.

Bogles, Dredge, and even Elves — which I once branded as a “dead” deck — can make good results in both Leagues and Challenges, while most of them struggled to deal with the Broodscale-Kuldotha-Affinity format from earlier this year.

The most controversial unban of the year so far, High Tide created its own deck and has occasional results as well. But, between the difficulty of mastering the archetype’s play lines, the potential for interaction with your opponents, and the challenges of “playing alone” in an environment with a single player clock and no shortcuts, it becomes considerably challenging to pilot on Magic Online.

Prophetic Prism brought Tron back onto the radar, and it was another archetype graced with Pactdoll Terror, now blending in with the Combo variants with Myr Retriever and Ashnod’s Altar and the classic versions with Ephemerate, Ghostly Flicker and recursion and lock pieces.

Established strategies like Mono White Aggro and Gruul Ramp/Ponza remain viable, but they have lost ground with the changes after the bans, where they can no longer take over as well against some of the best decks in the format.

In addition to these, there are other strategies which makes occasional results: Familiars, Reanimator, Walls Combo and even, for a while, Mono Green Infect appeared in Challenges and made or make Top 32 with some recurrence.

Overall, Pauper in June 2025 seems much healthier and more diverse than the one we started the year with. Therefore, it seems unlikely that we will have interventions or bans on June 30th — not even unbans seem possible as things are balanced enough to the point that taking risks seems unnecessary, besides the fact that many of the cards that are currently on the banlist do not have a good reason to leave it.

High Tide never had its chance to prove what it would do in Pauper, and it indicated that there is, indeed, room to take risks and see what happens. However, these actions need to be considered carefully, and the format seems so stable at the moment after long periods of miserable Metagames that changing it just for the sake of it seems like a terrible idea.

Enjoy the game. Enjoy Pauper. Keep exploring new ideas.

Thanks for reading!