Pauper Needs Reprints, Here's Why

This article is a bit different from the content I usually translate for the site. It addresses a recent issue in the Brazilian Magic market that directly affects the prices of Pauper staples in the country.

It's a regional problem, but one that impacts how the format is perceived in one of the largest Pauper communities in the world. Other countries with devalued currencies are already facing, or may soon face, similar effects, and it matters for what the format represents that we look for solutions. The best one depends entirely on Wizards of the Coast.

March 2026 was an eventful month for the Pauper community in Brazil. In less than two weeks, the format saw two sudden price spikes—out of step with the global market—for staples with low print runs and little to no reprint availability in local marketplaces.

Mental Note more than doubled in price. It went from R$ 50 to R$ 110 (US$ 9 to US$ 21) and became the first format staple to reach the three-digit price tag in the country. More recently, Prismatic Strands, a White Weenie staple—an archetype that surged in popularity with the release of Leonardo, Big Brother—jumped from R$ 20 to R$ 40 (US$ 4 to US$ 8). By the end of the month, it had settled at R$ 75 (US$ 14), with the average price creeping toward R$ 100 (US$ 19). As I write this, Perilous Research is sold out across marketplaces. Holy Light went from R$ 6 to R$ 100 (US$ 1.14 to US$ 19), and Avenging Hunter went from R$ 12 to R$ 30 (US$ 2.30 to US$ 5.70).

The Brazilian market diverges so much from the global scene that comparing dollar prices is almost naive (Mental Note at $10, Prismatic Strands at $6). Some cards will be more expensive here, others cheaper, because supply and demand reflect not only international trends but also localized demand—Pauper is incredibly popular in Brazil. By far, it's the most played competitive format in the country.

Anyone with half a brain can say this is just supply and demand at work in a free market. They wouldn't be wrong: Pauper is popular, more people are playing, and there's a tournament with R$ 30,000 (US$ 5,700) in prizes announced for LigaFest mid-year. All of these can affect player perception and market behavior around the format's prices.

My internal question over these two weeks isn't "why did it get more expensive?" The reasons are obvious, but they're not really the point. Pauper is a gateway format. People get into Magic through it; they stay in Magic because of it. It's a gateway because it's cheap, and it works because the local environment—and the profile of players in countries with devalued economies—involves not sinking huge amounts of money into hobbies like card games at the expense of monthly bills.

So my real question is: what happens to a format—and to Magic in a country—when its core appeal of affordability disappears? And how do we prevent this from becoming a tragedy?

Let me repeat: Pauper is incredibly popular in Brazil. It's popular because it's cheap.

The format gained traction in Brazil around 2014. That timing coincides with the price hike in Standard caused by Fetch Land reprints in Khans of Tarkir, combined with Brazil entering a long, persistent period of economic and political instability. Pauper became a refuge, a way to play Magic without burning through cash as the real devalued against the dollar (in 2014, R$ 1 was US$ 0.45; Today, R$ 1 is equivalent to US$ 0.19). At the same time, it was a great entry point for people discovering Magic: The Gathering.

It's a format that fits within a Brazilian player's budget, regardless of their other expenses. In 2016, a hotheaded twenty-something Romeu—living on his own for the first time, jumping between jobs more often than he should—still managed, despite low wages, to scrape together enough to build Mono Black Control, win a qualifier, and play in that year's Pauper Nationals. And he did it without cutting corners on his other bills.

To some extent, the format's popularity in Brazil is a testament to our resilience, our ability to compete despite the obstacles. Brazilian Pauper grew out of a community that built its own competitive ecosystem for years without institutional support, running independent tournaments, including a National Championship with qualifiers. Now, it's the country's biggest competitive scene in raw numbers, and it keeps growing whenever other formats become less accessible.

At the end of last year, the LigaFest finals—currently Latin America's largest TCG event—had 847 participants. Of those, 243 were Pauper players, more than the combined totals for Standard, Pioneer, Modern, and Legacy. It's no surprise that the first 2026 edition, scheduled for July, has Pauper as the format with the biggest prize pool of the entire circuit, R$ 30,000—more than double Modern's.

The LigaFest numbers by format also shows a pattern: except for Modern, which has its own culture of dedicated players going back over a decade, the most popular tournaments at the event were budget formats. Commander 500, where decks can't cost more than R$ 500 (US$ 95), had more participants than Standard and was just slightly below Modern. And then there are more accessible games like Pokémon, which had 113 players, more than Modern's 91 but less than half of Pauper's quorum.

Since we ran those numbers, I've been arguing there is a distinct profile for Brazilian players. They like to compete, but they need good entry points to join tournaments. They're willing to invest time and money into the game, but not so much that spending a month's minimum wage or more on cardboard feels normal—which is what Standard, Modern, and Legacy demand today. They're middle-class adults with bills to pay and other priorities, and most see card games as fun first, investment second, even if they enjoy the thrill of profiting from the game.

In part, this is also the profile of the new player. The one who'll discover Magic through friends, get interested, and eventually buy, build, and upgrade decks. Entry price is a huge factor for them. If you present Standard, where the cheapest deck is pushing R$ 1,000 (US$ 190), they'll be intimidated. After all, spending four figures on pieces of colored cardboard feels absurd to the average person.

Both types end up in Pauper or build a Commander 500 deck. Based on this reasoning, the LigaFest numbers, and the popularity of budget formats in Brazil, we can conclude that the ideal average cost for a Magic player in the country right now is around R$ 500. They can stretch a bit, but the higher you go above that, the more intimidated they feel about spending money on cards, as it gets harder to justify.

In January this year, Raphael de Souza Pereira published an article outlining a psychographic profile for this player, which he called "Silva." It's the player who loves the game, wants to compete, wants to improve, but can't afford to drop an amount that would compromise their monthly bills on colored cardboard.

Silva represents 81% of Brazil's population in classes C, D, and E. He's among the 243 Pauper competitors at LigaFest. He's at the local store tournaments every week. He's the one who makes the circuit viable enough that R$ 30,000 in prizes makes sense as an organizer's investment. He plays Pauper because it's the only competitive format that fits his financial reality—and when staples or decks stop fitting in his budget, he stops playing.

For this player, even if they've been part of the Magic community and played Modern for the last ten years, the accessibility concerns are more serious now than they were a decade ago due to the context they live in. At the end of 2024, over 75% of respondents in a global survey from AlixPartners said they expected to reduce or maintain their spending in the following year, with inflation on essentials squeezing entertainment budgets.

Card games are extremely vulnerable to this kind of contraction, especially in countries like Brazil. Building a competitive deck requires a massive outlay compared to other forms of entertainment, and it's hard to justify when your margins are tight. If this player is older now—and the current average age of a Magic player is 35—their responsibilities with rent, bills, and other living costs may be squeezing their income even more than a decade ago.

When four copies of Mental Note hit R$ 400 (US$ 76), the deck that used to cost R$ 500 just jumped to R$ 700, maybe R$ 800. If this trend continues, soon that list could hit R$ 1,000 in a format whose whole pitch to players is that it doesn't get there. Pauper might still be cheaper than Standard and Modern in this reality, but the comparison isn't between formats; it's between the actual cost of a deck and the psychological ceiling of a player whose shrinking purchasing power is already weighing on them before the debate over Mental Note even starts.

Without them, the 243 LigaFest players will never reach 300 or more. Maybe they become 150. Then 100. Without accessibility, the structure the community spent years building—the foundation and gateway for Magic in Brazil—starts rotting from the inside because some people decided immediate profit was more important than the long-term health of the game that sustains hundreds of stores across the country.

Without affordable Pauper, Silva—whether new or old—loses interest in playing. Without Silva, there is no Magic in Brazil.

Mental Note and Prismatic Strands were both cards with low available quantities in Brazil and obvious windows of opportunity. Dimir Terror is rising as a complement to Mono Blue with four copies of the blue cantrip, and White Weenie is surging after TMNT with Leonardo, Big Brother. You could justify it as the market adjusting to a new reality, but it's also ripe for speculation on scarcity and artificial manipulation.

The pattern is always the same: a card has too few or no reprints since its first printing, becomes a Pauper staple for some reason, more people look for it, and the price goes up. Any store—or player—who spots a demand increase and low marketplace availability can trigger a buyout and inflate prices when they're one of the few left with stock. Once prices go up, they never come back down without direct intervention.

Pauper is fertile ground for this kind of practice as there are so many playable cards or staples that have seen few or no reprints, combined with the low likelihood that Wizards of the Coast—which has indefinitely discontinued Masters Sets—will ever reprint them.

Dust to Dust has only had two print runs in its entire existence and is in the sideboard of several relevant archetypes. Krark-Clan Shaman was only printed in Mirrodin, the same issue with Standard Bearer and Sunscape Familiar if you don't count The List, whose frequency is too low to matter.

If the pattern of buyouts and spikes continues over the next few months, we could end 2026 with Pauper being significantly more expensive in Brazil than it was at the start of the year.

It doesn't help to point fingers and say stores are evil or that players who buy are, as some comments on our YouTube channel video about Utrom Monitor put it, "suckers." Fighting about it won't fix inflated prices, and the market won't drop them even if a hundred Pauper players banded together to refuse buying staples at high prices. There will always be someone elsewhere, a little more desperate or haunted by FOMO, who will buy.

The only solution, then, comes down to a policy that Wizards of the Coast seems to have abandoned this year: reprints. If there are no more Masters Sets (and the idea of a "Pauper Masters," which many Brazilian players have floated, is terrible from a commercial product standpoint), they need to show up more frequently in other accessible slots—Commander precons, Horizons sets, Mystical Archives, thematic slots, and so on. A reprint in a Dandân Secret Lair does nothing when that product is limited print and targeted by scalpers from launch.

It's almost predictable that Wizards "killed" Masters Sets a few years after that infamous Bank of America report accused the company of harming Magic's long-term value by printing too many cards. But the devaluation and investment arguments ring hollow for Pauper. We're not talking about the Reserved List. We're talking about cards that were mostly designed to support Limited environments and sit at the lowest rarities in the game.

The issue with this solution is that it depends on Wizards paying attention to the margins of its business interests. They've shown, since cutting Portuguese localization after Modern Horizons 3, that the Brazilian market isn't a priority. These recent spikes are a purely Brazilian problem. It's a country where Magic has become relentlessly more expensive and harder to keep up with every year, with the breaking point coming during the pandemic. The end of localization, regional support, and other factors that made the Brazilian community feel like they were part of the game came out of these crises.

However, I'm not suggesting Wizards should treat Brazil with some special privilege. I'm saying that without affordable formats and wide card availability, Magic's longevity in economically disadvantaged countries is at risk. That's why the company needs to look at Pauper as an environment that needs targeted support and an active reprint policy, because it's an efficient gateway for growing the game in those countries.

Wizards has its share of responsibility, but the market is also to blame. Buyouts and price spikes are nothing new, and the option to profit from potential scarcity exists in any market. But too much Greed comes with a long-term cost.

Pauper in Brazil grew before Wizards even recognized the format as official outside Magic Online. It was built by independent organizers in regional communities who believed in the format until it became the country's most popular competitive scene. If the Pauper market is moving that much product in Brazil and reaching the point of offering a five-digit prize pool at Latin America's biggest event, it's because plenty of people believed in it a decade ago, and many still believe it's the best format to play in the country.

If the format loses its main appeal—affordability—then not just Pauper, but the entire Magic ecosystem in Brazil risks stagnating. Every Pauper card that moves out of reach for the average player is one more reason for them not to come back for the weekly store tournament or build a new deck. It's one more ticket not sold, one more empty chair at the event, and one less player in the numbers that everyone needs to see the game grow.

Reprints could solve this problem, but in their absence, we need to look inward. At what point do chasing profit margins and market scarcity hurt the business model of dozens or hundreds of stores that might see fewer players at their tables because Pauper got expensive? How much does that warm feeling of having profited because you had a playset of foil Mental Note or when you felt like the Wolf of Wall Street of Colored Cardboard since you bought them before the spike justify having one or more people missing from your weekly tournament as the barrier to entry goes up?

It's naive idealism to think we can rethink a structural problem in card game culture and prioritize the long-term health of the game in the country over profit. But there's also real concern about the lack of new Magic players flowing into local stores and how many play environments have shrunk in recent years—and the blame almost always falls on prices.

The community that built one of the largest Pauper scenes in the world was powered by hundreds of Silvas who wanted to play Magic without breaking the bank. They built a culture around that, and they established a strong, consistent, but still accessible market that lets anyone join, participate, and compete.

Now, that same market and community are looking at new players and at those who aren't willing to compromise their income on colored cardboard and repeating that same old mantra in the name of profit: "Maybe this product is not for you."