There are cards that are simply design mistakes. Cards like Nadu, Winged Wisdom have abilities that are too strong or combinations that are too efficient for the Metagame they're intended for. Something was overlooked by the design team, and consequently, the card performs much better than intended.
Others, like Balustrade Spy and its sibling Undercity Informer, end up breaking formats because something new emerged that allows for new interactions with these cards—in Pioneer, for example, both were banned when Zendikar Rising's double-faced lands created an overly efficient combo without concessions to the mana base.
The Spy Combo has been at the center of debate in competitive formats for a few months. First, in Legacy, many players advocate banning Balustrade Spy and Undercity Informer since most of the archetype's play is partially determined by who starts the game if the opponent doesn't have Force of Will and similar elements to prevent the combo on the first or second turn. The message from the latest Banned and Restricted update about Legacy left a sour taste in the format's community.
More recently, the archetype has gained more attention in Pauper: the combo already existed with the plan of using five lands and Land Grant to find the necessary mana—efficient, fast, but very inconsistent compared to other strategies that did something similar, like Dredge. But about a month ago, a new spin on Spy Combo emerged, combining the plan of another well-known archetype—Walls—with a combo-kill.
Spy Walls is now the fourth or fifth most-played deck in the format, growing in representation each week as we see other archetypes adapt. We're back to the days of one or two copies of Relic of Progenitus in the maindeck, we're starting to see cards like Envelop, which handles Dread Return at the lowest possible cost, making their way into the sideboards of strategies like Elves, and we're also seeing the rise of non-interactive strategies in the Top 8 of recent Challenges, which raises the question: is Spy Walls a healthy deck for Pauper?
What is Spy Walls?
As explained above, Spy Walls is a combo deck that blends two distinct archetypes: Walls Combo and Spy-Combo. Your goal is to search all five lands from the list with cards like Land Grant, Sagu Wildling, and creatures with landcycling to cast Balustrade Spy, put all cards into the graveyard, and use any combination of three creatures to flashback Dread Return, returning Lotleth Giant to the battlefield, whose ETB effect will deal lethal damage.
The Walls package offers the archetype three key elements:
In short, the Walls package makes the Spy Combo much more consistent, less linear, and opens up space for alternative win conditions. Sounds familiar.
Whenever a combo explodes on Pauper, it evolves immediately. The Broodscale Combo went from an All-In 
to adding a splash of 
to Writhing Chrysalis, which enabled an efficient midrange play with the constant threat of a hit-kill. Before being banned, All That Glitters started in Affinity, but went on to dominate the metagame when it entered the Boros Synthesizer lists, whose game plan was more efficient in playing the fair game, and Peregrine Drake started in entirely combo-oriented lists until arriving at its Izzet list, which combined the potential of infinite mana with a Control strategy featuring Mulldrifter and cheap interaction.
The motivator for the Spy Combo transformations began with Sagu Wildling in Tarkir: Dragonstorm
. The new dragon offered another cheap way to find the lands on the list while counting as one more creature for Lotleth Giant — eventually, it made sense to add more and more creatures until arriving at the plan of playing with Walls, a strategy that, on Magic Online, has difficulty closing the game due to the amount of clicks the archetype's common interactions require to win.
Adapting to Adaptations
Whenever a new combo shows up, it naturally follows a cycle in Pauper: it is born, undergoes the acid test to gain relevance in the Metagame, and, if successful, the rest of the format adapts to it. Then the deck evolves, begins to adopt new lines and possibilities, and thus a second version of it is born, likely trading speed for consistency. We are here, and the next step is for the format to adapt again.
We're starting to see copies of Relic of Progenitus in Boros Synthesizer maindecks and similar decks, or more of the artifact in various sideboards. Some lists are starting to add Faerie Macabre as a hard-to-interact answer that only needs to take the right cards at the right time for the combo. Some archetypes are starting to include Envelop as the most resilient cheap answer against Dread Return. We're also seeing a slight increase in Nihil Spellbomb in Wildfire and Affinity lists, which already used the artifact naturally.
The other trend we've started to see from this point on is an increase in the most common lines possible for winning combos in Pauper, gaining more presence in the metagame: Blue-based decks like Faeries and Tolarian Terror are the traditional combo predators in almost every competitive format. In the case of Spy Walls, it's easy to deal with graveyard hate that's already on the board with Masked Vandal, but working around multiple Counterspell decks is a challenge that it tries to compensate for with board position.
The growth of combos and non-interactive archetypes is another common symptom. Decks like Elves or High Tide aim primarily to win before the opponent, and fewer targeted answers and a greater focus on speed tend to be the natural route to deal with an archetype that thrives on a lack of interaction.
Spy Walls, in fact, is excellent at responding.
Masked Vandal has become a maindeck tool alongside Mesmeric Fiend since Lead the Stampede and Winding Way are reliable sources of card advantage, and some recent lists have been relying on Mirrorshell Crab for stack interaction or even to counter Faerie Macabre.
The result is that the chess game between the Metagame and the Spy Combo is narrowing, and the debate over the format's health consequently returns to the cycle of questioning whether a combo is too good for Pauper.
The Fun Factor and Pauper's Health
Just like in Legacy, one of the most common arguments I see when complaining about Spy Walls (and High Tide in the same category) is that it's not a fun deck to play against. It makes all your decision-making meaningless if your opponent finds a Balustrade Spy, and while it requires much more setup in a commons-only environment, its game pattern tends not to benefit strategies that players like.
Everyone has a different vision of what Magic should be, and they will never be in absolute harmony—if they were, there would be something seriously wrong with the game's structure or human nature. For many years, Pauper was the stage for veritable displays of friction between midrange mirrors like Monarch and Faeries, and since Modern Horizons 2, we've experienced instantaneous jumps between stable metagames and spikes of irregularity that seem unfair. In some cases, they truly are; in others, players just don't like playing them.
Spy Combo and High Tide fall under this criteria. It still seems too early to say whether either of them is broken to the point of requiring another ban in the format—the key cards, Balustrade Spy and High Tide, would be the obvious targets—and it's natural for the forces governing the rules of a competitive environment to disagree with what the community considers ideal.
In current Magic standards, for example, players' priorities seem to be based on three pillars:
For the rules of a competitive format, however, the pillars that usually underpin the Metagame's health are defined by:
Spy Combo, High Tide, and the Next Banlist
The next Banned and Restricted announcement is on November 24th, but the Pauper Format Panel mentioned in the last announcement that they could move up the ban date for the format to determine the fate of High Tide, and the fate of Balustrade Spy may be connected to it.
The biggest concern with High Tide is how much its strategy promotes non-interactive and lengthy games, especially in tabletop games where the round clock is shared—a very different situation from Balustrade Spy, which has a deterministic combo and therefore doesn't extend the game as much.
However, the Spy Walls/Spy Combo also raises concerns and doubts about the viability of non-interactive games, and in its case, it may become increasingly difficult to compete with it without playing blue, ignoring what it's doing and being faster, or overloading your list with targeted answers aimed at delaying its plan for as many turns as possible.
Despite its rapid rise, it's still too early to say whether Balustrade Spy signals as many problems in Pauper as it appears to have in Legacy and Pioneer. The next PFP announcement—whenever it happens—will also determine how much the "fun" factor plays into the committee's equation regarding Pauper's health, given how many players view these combos as unfun matchups.
By then, perhaps the metagame will adapt, players will tire of the latest news and start looking for other archetypes, or perhaps Spy Walls will reach numbers similar to what we saw a few months ago with Basking Broodscale. Time will tell, so let us embrace our new combo overlords and enjoy the moment while we can.
Pauper’s evolving combos show how creative strategies can shape the metagame and keep the format fresh.
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