As we approach the end of the year you know that means, the final RIW Pauper Championship Series event for the 2025 season is this Saturday November 22nd! Today I am going to try and give you the tools to be successful at this event and punch your ticket to the RIW Pauper Championship Series Invitational happening December 6th!
TIP #1: IMPORTANT RESOURCES
RIW Pauper Championship Series (November 22nd) Link:
RIW Pauper Championship Series Invitational:
As someone who has attended most of these Pauper events I would like to provide some insight into the recent metagame we have seen at weeklies:
Rally Red is likely to be the most represented deck at this event. The deck is fairly easy to pick up and can snipe wins out of nowhere with its strong aggressive starts. Things like board wipes, life gain and damage prevention are the type of effects you are looking for to beat this deck.
Walls Spy is not only a quick combo deck but can also play a solid midrange game. Some of the more veteran players will likely gravitate towards this strategy because of how powerful it can be. The ways you want to interact with this deck is removal and graveyard interaction.
People love their kindred decks and Faeries are the most popular of them. To beat this deck you are looking to fun up the board to block Ninjas and to pressure the counterspells as they only have so many.
Midrange strategies are always popular as they have a lot of card draw and can control the pace of the game using every single resource at their disposal. Pressuring the removal, getting aggressive and closing out the game quickly and/or playing discard spells to tear apart their card advantage should be a winning strategy against this deck.
Speaking of midrange decks, Jund Wildfire is better than Gardens at gumming up the board. Ways to attack this deck is removal spells for Writhing Chrysallis, aggressive starts and/or discard spells to pressure card advantage.
Although the metagame is sure to be diverse you can count on these decks showing up in high numbers. The biggest take away from this list is that you should be prepared for the Rally Red matchup as a lot of players are likely to pick it up.
If any of these decks seem appealing to you then you should absolutely play them and be prepared for the others in this list. If none of these decks are appealing to you but you still want to find a way to compete with them, that’ll take us to the next tip.
Mono White is one of those decks that never really gained a lot of popularity but has been just on the outside of the meta for quite a while now. Although the deck has not been popular it is the perfect recipe for all of the things we are looking for in the current meta.
-Get aggressive with the high creature count and anthem effects
-Gaining life with Lunarch Veteran and Martyr of Sands
-Preventing damage with Prismatic Strands
-Graveyard interaction with Thraben Charm
-Artifact hate with Dust to Dust
-Removal and sweeper heavy decks can be an issue
-Combat damage can easily be prevented
-Removal is mostly conditional
-Creatures are not powerful on their own
Being in the home stretch of the RIW Pauper Championship Series is exciting! It will be interesting to see how this event shakes up the leaderboard just before the Invitational in a couple weeks! Looking forward to this event and hope to see you there!
