Crushing Dreams on a Budget
How cool is that? It's too bad I can't take credit for it, but I ran across that lyrical gem when I was researching five color deck alternatives. What deck are we talking about? Pauper Dreamcrusher Child of Alara.
Get a load of this guy.
Here's the thing. "Pauper" commander means different things to different people. For the purposes of this deck discussion, it means that every card in the deck was printed at common rarity except the commander.
So, we have a deck that consists of Child of Alara + 99 commons.
This is where things get interesting.
I've been playing a five color deck for a long time that is a soul-crushing control monster. It's creatureless and attacks the game from an angle that is difficult to play against. When the lock is in place, it's only a matter of time before the game is officially over.
The scary thing about the Child of Alara deck is that it is strategically similar to the five color control deck I'm referring to, except it costs 100 times less. Tappedout is telling me that the Child of Alara deck is about $50. Heck, you probably already have - or can get your friends to give you - most of the cards for it.
The deck basically works like this. You ramp a bit to get access to all five colors. You cast your commander. You proceed to blow up your commander and replay it over and over, reaping massive card advantage and generally wrecking everyone else's day.
From there, you win.
Your commander, in the form of Child of Alara, is both the control condition and the win condition. Most decks in this format cannot handle repeated destruction of all non-land permanents.
You are essentially engineering a situation where you have Child of Alara in play, along with a way to kill it and return it, backed up by countermagic and bounce spells. Despite working with an all common card pool, this situation is alarmingly easy to put together.
The problem is that this deck suffers from the same problem as the other five color control deck: it sucks to play against. Now that we can no longer tuck commanders, the Child of Alara deck is almost guaranteed to have access to the board wipe, typically on command because of the way the deck is built.
I was playing this deck on MTGO last night in a quick 1vs1 game against Olivia. The BR Olivia deck is a powerhouse, especially since my opponent didn't have the same "only commons" restriction I was working with. We had some back and forth action for a few turns. I killed Olivia with a Wrecking Ball at his end of turn, untapped, played Child of Alara, and then passed. He played a land and passed back. I transmuted Dizzy Spell for Sidisi's Faithful and played it. My opponent conceded.
This may not be immediately obvious, but Sidisi's Faithful lets you choose Child of Alara to "exploit," then choose itself (Sidisi's Faithful) as the creature to return to its owner's hand. In other words, you can trigger the Child of Alara board wipe every turn and Sidisi's Faithful will be back in your hand before it happens. As long as you can replay Child of Alara from your graveyard, you can wipe the board every turn.
Game over.
For a low-cost deck, it's a fun to build and play with Pauper Dreamcrusher. Plus, there is an active forum with discussion on the deck for those of you who like to discuss card choices and strategies with other, like-minded individuals. And who doesn't like looking through commons for gems that break open a certain line of play?
Did you know that Angelic Purge from Shadows over Innistrad is a common that deals with indestructible gods while simultaneously giving you a way to sacrifice Child of Alara and trigger the destruction of everything? How deliciously convenient.
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