Pauper: We Need to talk about Sneaky Snacker

By now, everyone knows that the Modern Horizons series has had a lasting impact on competitive Magic. Non-rotating formats practically rotate whenever a new set in this category comes out, and times of bans and direct interventions due to issues missed by the design team are common after these sets launch.

Pauper is no exception: Arcum's Astrolabe in Modern Horizons, Chatterstorm, Galvanic Relay and Sojourner's Companion in Modern Horizons II, and Basking Broodscale in Modern Horizons III show how the format's Metagame has been affected in unhealthy ways by these releases.

But not every card that gets attention ends up on the banned list. Writhing Chrysalis, for example, is too strong for the format's standards but remains in the competitive environment. The MH2 Bridges, despite the endless — and by now overreactive — debates about their banning, remain in the competitive Metagame while Affinity is no longer the broken archetype it once was, without needing to touch the mana base.

Modern Horizons can be healthy for Pauper and bring exciting things, but it also puts cards on the radar whose ability to harm the Metagame is sometimes overshadowed by the bigger issue of one or two broken cards — Sneaky Snacker might be that card now.

Although never directly mentioned, it's clear that some cards from these expansions end up being a nod to Pauper, and Snacker fits the category: Faeries is a very prominent deck in the format, and Dimir Delver (now Dimir Terror) strategies with Gurmag Angler also have a competitive history. The new creature — in theory — fit perfectly into these archetypes, which run cantrips and can always cast Brainstorm and the like to return it to the graveyard.

However, the home for Snacker since MH3's release has been far from the Dimir shell for many years. Madness Burn found in it a recurring threat, easy to enable, generating virtual card advantage with looting effects, and you didn't even need to pay its mana cost.

This is still its main home and also the most popular, as Mono Red Madness and its variants post consistent results in Challenges and are great choices for players trying to grind Leagues. Sneaky Snacker in this deck is a complement that offers benefits beyond what the archetype's strategy proposes: Madness doesn't "need" it but works much better with it because it adds another attack angle — and one that's hard to remove permanently.

It's a somewhat different case in Dimir Terror, where Snacker is a key piece for adding a more "go wide" plan alongside the archetype's "go big" side with Tolarian Terror and Gurmag Angler. Although you could cast it and most of the pieces have existed in the format for years, Sneaky Snacker only became a solid pillar after Abandon Attachments, which gives blue decks the same benefits and synergies as red looting effects.

Shortly before, since Melded Moxite came out in Edge of Eternities, lists with Kor Skyfisher / Glint Hawk were already flirting with the idea of including Sneaky Snacker in their lists and extracting from it the same value other archetypes already were.

In recent weeks, these variants have grown in Metagame presence. You could attribute the card's rise to the release of Pursue the Past, but notable results from Boros/Jeskai Moxite were already happening during the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles season — the new spell only served as a complement and booster.

The trend of mixing Pursue the Past and Moxite has even spread from Skyfisher versions to other archetypes that have graveyard interactions beyond Sneaky Snacker, like Sacred Cat or Lunarch Veteran. Gates, for instance, gain the ability to have a constant threat on the board that can grow considerably with Basilisk Gate and demands more aggressive graveyard hate activations.

With Secrets of Strixhaven, a new archetype started adopting the "Snacker package" in its lists: Inside Out became a Boros deck running Pursue the Past and other multicolored spells with Eidolons to have a constant discard source for Tireless Tribe while fueling the new Spirit Mascot. As in other lists, there's no way to cast Sneaky Snacker — you just need to draw enough cards. On top of that, they also trigger Spirit Mascot with separate instances for each copy in the graveyard.

With more space in distinct archetypes, almost always used in decks that don't even need to cast it and as "free value" for effects and synergies that their strategies already promote, maybe Sneaky Snacker is becoming overly homogeneous in Pauper.

Today, it's the most played creature in the format's decklists, with 22% presence and always as a four-of, behind a card that serves both as an answer to it and to other troublesome archetypes in the current Metagame: Faerie Macabre, played for its ability to exile cards from graveyards.

Graveyard hate, by the way, now makes up the most played card category in the format. Nihil Spellbomb is the most played card in Pauper, with 32% presence, and Relic of Progenitus is fifth, with 25%. The blame isn't exclusively on Snacker when Mono Blue Terror and Spy Combo — the latter as another potential threat to the competitive environment's health — are very popular archetypes in the Metagame, and playing against them without access to disruptive tools that slow down their game plan will often mean an easy loss.

On the other hand, Snacker brings a relatively worrying "minigame" to the table: when my opponent doesn't need it to win, how much is it really worth including graveyard hate? Do I want Faerie Macabre against Madness Burn knowing my Sideboard slots are tight in games two and three? How much am I willing to respect it against a Glint Hawk list when it's, theoretically, the only real impactful piece coming from the graveyard in those decks?

In a way, the role of the graveyard in Pauper today recalls a period of Modern in 2019 that culminated in the banning of Faithless Looting. Back then, professionals writing for StarCityGames went so far as to call Looting the "Brainstorm for Modern," due to how many archetypes found ways to adopt the card for their strategies to the point it permeated dozens of different decks: from classic Dredge to Mardu Pyromancer with Lingering Souls and other cards reused from the graveyard; from Death's Shadow lists that adopted Looting to ramp Tasigur, the Golden Fang / Gurmag Angler in the first two turns, to Izzet Phoenix, born from the then-release of Arclight Phoenix and eventually reaching Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis.

Hogaak broke Modern in 2019 like few decks ever have, leading to three bans: Hogaak itself, Bridge from Below, and Faithless Looting — with the justification that, at the time, too many decks relied on synergies with it to execute their game plans, placing it in a space of Metagame homogeneity and, along with its ban, eliminating decks like Phoenix and Mardu Pyromancer in the process.

As back then, you could blame the enablers, which became more efficient and made the synergistic value of the key card grow gradually. In Sneaky Snacker's case, banning one or two of them wouldn't solve the problem, just like banning Deadly Dispute didn't eliminate Affinity or Jund Wildfire.

The number of enablers used from one deck to another varies too much for that kind of intervention. Pursue the Past is the hot card right now, and Faithless Looting is very present in Madness and also in Inside Out, but its presence is relatively null in Melded Moxite lists, and it's not in the color scheme that Dimir Terror can use instead of relying on Abandon Attachments.

Sneaky Snacker is part of the reason these looting effects work so well, and the cost of including it in decklists across varied strategies is decreasing as more archetypes find little to no concessions in adding it beyond just "having four fewer slots." It guarantees a complementary, almost free win condition that's easy to insert for most strategies already taking advantage of looting in some way.

Right now, despite being the most played creature, it doesn't show dominance patterns that would cause concern, but at some point, a deck might emerge where this complementary line proves a bit too much when you already have to deal with other problems the deck presents. If that happens, it'll be necessary to cut it off at the root because there's no way to cut all the existing mechanical redundancies of a generic effect in Pauper that gets reprinted every new set.

It's not hard to imagine that at least some maintenance will occur in Pauper at some point in 2026. Conversations about Tolarian Terror or Spy Combo's role in the Metagame are already very common and sometimes even appear in Wizards of the Coast's announcements. Maybe the time will come when it's necessary to admit that almost no one is using Sneaky Snacker the way it was intended to work and that this ease in breaking the proposed rulesets for it is the reason it's in the position of most-played creature in Pauper today.

If that time comes, it will be necessary to admit a design mistake — whether the ease of circumventing Sneaky Snacker's costs, or the constant increase in efficiency by repeating the same pattern of looting effects set after set instead of focusing on more creative designs.

In either case, Snacker will be the card that finds the hammer.