Decklist is here: https://moxfield.com/decks/r8InlntCwES0swQhX_8T5Q

I really enjoy playing my Lagrella list, however often I find myself struggling to close out the game. Looking for suggestions for changes I can make so I can win more often and sooner.

I would prefer something that doesn’t totally change the deck, but works with the general idea I have going on of blinking for value.

Thanks!

My biggest issue so far has been having my opponents run out of cards and leave my my main damage engine offline hence the “Target player draw” category. The big cycling creatures are there to pick up the damage slack late game and be discardable early if needed. Maybe went overboard on the protection but it has really paid off being able to get access to that effect so often cause the deck does get understandably targeted first at the table most of the time.

Hey everyone!

I shared MTG Master here some time ago (or long time ago, time goes fast!). It’s a project I’ve been building myself for Commander and Pauper Commander, and quite a lot has changed since then.

If this kind of post isn’t allowed here, mods, just let me know or feel free to remove it. No problem at all! I don't want to break any rules.

I’ve kept working on it pretty much constantly, fixing things, improving the deck analysis and adding new tools.

One of the things that has always been important to me is keeping Pauper Commander as a proper supported format.

Since my last post, I’ve improved quite a few things:

• Better deck analysis and card-count evaluation
• Natural-language card search
• Collection management and card scanning
• Opening hand simulator
• Matchup analysis
• Better deck building and testing tools
• Commander and Pauper Commander support across the platform

And one of my favorite recent additions is the combo finder.

MTG Master already detected known combos in your deck, but now it can also look at the cards you’re playing and find possible combos you’re only one card away from completing, or two cards away if you want to explore further.

I find this much more interesting than simply showing a list of popular combos, because sometimes you discover that a card you’re already playing is part of something you hadn’t even considered.

The project has evolved a lot since the last time I posted here, so if you tried it back then, I’d love to know what you think of it now.

And if you’ve never tried it, you can find it here:

https://mtgmaster.app

I’m still building it myself, and feedback from actual PDH players is particularly useful to me. If something about Pauper Commander isn’t working as you’d expect, or there’s something you’d really like a PDH tool to do, tell me.

I can’t promise I’ll build every suggestion 😄, but I do read them.

Thanks!

Marc

Hey, fellow Canadian PDH Players! We've got a new monthly series starting up at Clutch Games in downtown Toronto, and we'd love to see you out! It's only 3 hours, once a month for now, but please show up and help us grow this community! I'd be happy to answer any questions as well, so please reach out!

greetings all, me and some friends are getting into paper pauper commander and would love to see y’alls decklists!

just finished my first brew: https://moxfield.com/decks/1VKagRtECUK3yy9rRY7Udg

I went with [[KUTZIL, MALAMET EXEMPLAR]] blending auras with 1/1 counters

looking forward to seeing your brews!

I understand why commons are not allowed in the command zone, but who do you think would be strong in the meta/fun commanders if it was. I personally know I would enjoy some of the common backgrounds

Hey everyone! I'm pretty new here and have been wanting to try my hand at building a pauper deck. [[Witherbloom Apprentice]] stood out to me and Golgari spell slinger sounded like a fun archetype. My gameplan is really simple, ramp super hard and play a bunch of cheap draw and removal cards to drain the table and dig. I have a few infinite combos that let me generate infinite mana with [[Sadistic Glee]] + [[Basking Broodscale]] and [[Pili-Pala]] + [[Careful Cultivation]] and then an [[Energy Refractor]] to mana fix. The infinite mana could be spent to storm off or be spent on a few different buyback spells like [[Sprout Swarm]] or [[Brush With Death]]. I don't intend on winning often with combos since the tutors in Golgari seem pretty limited in pauper. Let me know what you think! I'm not sure if the typical deck building convention in EDH translates as well to pEDH so any feedback is appreciated.

TL;DR: This Moxfield package is a non-comprehensive list of viable and/or powerful pauper commanders, meant to help make it easier for players to find what commander they want to build, dodging some pitfalls of PDHREC and Scryfall.

https://moxfield.com/decks/2PG9swlNj0K4ARmm2VVxnQ

Background

One extremely common question that consistently comes up across PDH communities is newer players to the format asking what commanders are viable or what are good commanders in their favorite color. PDHREC can sometimes answer that question, but it creates a feedback loop where a few popular commanders get 99% of the attention and a ton of equally interesting or powerful commanders get ignored.

I've been maintaining the list for about 2 years now, as both a reference for me to answer these kinds of questions more quickly and as a link I can give to new players. For example, instead of a player reading through all 850 mono-black pauper commanders on Scryfall, they can just look at the selection of 60-80 mono black commanders in my resource to feel less overwhelmed. PDHREC accomplishes something similar, but like I said, they pigeonhole players into collectively choosing the same commanders over and over and over. For example, [[Duskfang Mentor]] is a really cool and powerful mono-black commander, but they don't show up until page 5 of mono-black commanders on PDHREC, which a new player will probably never reach.

When I started the list, it had ~550 entries, IIRC. With the many sets since then, it ballooned to ~800. I've been working to slim it back down, both because Moxfield limits packages to ~1000 cards and because keeping each color combo smaller helps make the list digestible and less intimidating.

Scryfall already is plenty good at showing all the 3-color and 5-color commanders, and PDHREC is already dominated by partners and backgrounds. So I eliminated those from my list to make room for more of the options that make my list unique as a resource.

(side note, I just started trying to add tags, so it's nowhere near complete yet, and I've given up on the primer section describing what makes many of the commanders work, as I think it'll just end up being too big for Moxfield to handle. So, if you want to question certain choices, please just ask either in this post's comments or in the moxfield package's comments.)

Refinement and Feedback

As I have been slimming down the package, I have mostly been eliminating commanders that are very similar. For example, [[Corpse Harvester]] used to be useful for grabbing stuff like Gangrenous Zombies and Gray Merchant of Asphodel, but now those secret-commander builds can be accomplished better by [[Grim Servant]], even if the goal is to still be zombie tribal. However, there are a few similar commanders that have me spinning in circles, where one is more popular and has a higher power ceiling, but the other has some sneaky, interesting upsides that newer players wouldn't usually think about. For example:

• [[Melek, Izzet Paragon]] vs [[Johann, Apprentice Sorcerer]]. Johann is much cheaper, can still give you multiple additional "draws" per turn, and still lets you play with topdeck manipulation, but they lose the spell copying. The quiet advantage of Johann is that Melek is a combo engine that demands removal be aimed at them immediately, while Johann will get left alone a lot to slowly accumulate value.
• [[Longshot, Rebel Bowman]] vs [[Corruscation Mage]]. Longshot obviously storms faster, but Corruscation Mage is more resistant to the spot removal that often locks Longshot out of the game, since it's split across two bodies (and I've seen this win Corruscation Mage a cPDH game).

So my conundrum is figuring out whether to prioritize the louder, higher power version or the quietly very good version for a few similar cases. The quiet ones feel like they're catering to the spirit of emphasizing capable, but less popular commanders, so the same as excluding partners. However, it also feels like excluding known cPDH commanders just because they're known meta decks that earn a lot of hate from the table feels like also doing a disservice to new players looking at the list, too. On the other hand, if somebody's purely looking for cPDH commanders, this doesn't feel like the dedicated resource they actually want, either.

So what do you all think? Would love to hear from people newer to the format and not just old-heads like me. What would make this more useful to you?

• Focus on uniqueness, consistency, or the highest potential power ceiling?
• Should this resource span the whole range of casual, high power, AND competitive commanders, or cut out commanders that only play well in competitive pods?
• Are there commanders you love that should go on here that don't overlap much with what's already there?
• Right now I am trying to focus tags only on mechanical themes so that I can use them to help find commanders that heavily overlap with each other in the future, and also so that the tags will mostly apply regardless of how a certain person chooses to build a specific commander. However, I'd also be curious to know any tag ideas you have.

Which commanders can best make use of [[Balustrade Spy]]? What about [[Lotleth Giant]] for that matter?

I love making new decks and I’m looking for some new commanders that you don’t see at every table. I’d love to hear what your favorite ones are!

With 5 tournaments and the ongoing league, August-September saw a whopping 119 games played and the meta was not left untouched.

The Weavers duo dropped from the top rank to a respectable 4th, while still having an above average winrate. Hawkeye fizzled down to 17th while Malcolm/Red had a mediocre performance, holding on to 9th with Kediss/Malcolm.

Gretchen came back into the top 10 again, and two new commanders enter the leaderboard. Erinis / Gloomstalker has often been criticized for not being able to close out games, but that might be changing. If she can pack enough stomp alongside her control package, perhaps she'll be able to stay in the top 10. Guidelight Pathmaker is a powerful tutor that can bring combo pieces directly to the battlefield, thus making counterspells useless once the engine gets going.

At this time, the top 10 leaderboard is 80% combo commanders. Will we see some more control/midrange/aggro success before the year is over? With Raffine now legal in the format, I think the odds are in favor of at least one more non-combo deck in the top 10!

Both commanders perform very similar tasks; I was wondering which would be more efficient/effective.

With PDH allowing vehicles, spacecraft and nonlegendaries I was surprised they didn't allow planeswalkers in the command zone as well. Especially with the addition of Jace tokens in the new set, pauper will now have planeswalkers anyways.

What are your thoughts on this?

Link for uncommon planeswalkers:
https://scryfall.com/search?q=r%3Auc+t%3Aplaneswalker+game%3Apaper&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name

Is anyone here brewed for Geist of Saint Thalia? I am loving the art and want to use her in a pauper edh. I have seen deck lists utilizing Sphinx’s Approach. But I dont know what would be their wincon. Would eggs voltron work on her? Or is there a win con combo? (Blue is my least color, sorry)

Thank you!

With its printing to Uncommon, does this make it a Legal Pauper Commander?

I'm having a hard time making a hardhitting Hamza PDHdeck. Seems underwhelming and runs out of gas way too fast. Please post deck lists or suggestions for good cards. Thanks!

Would you play your pauper commanderr deck at a usual edh game night?(If it is build aroumd a legendary ucommon)

Was building [[Rhox War Monk]] for a Pauper Brawl thing I do with my friends. We find 60 cards much easier to brew, assemble, sleeve, test, and adjust than 100 and you can build the same commander differently depending on whether you're tuning it for 1v1 or free-for-all PLUS commanders that don't really work in 4 player get new life as 1v1 decks ( ex: Psychatog as a dimir control shell)

With that aside, something neat I came up with was using [[Open the Gates]] and running [[Citadel Gate]] , [[Manor Gate]], and [[Sea Gate]] as a way to both hit my land drops and color fix for a build-my-own dual.

It's not flashy, but it was a little deckbuilding triumph I was proud of. Definitely something I'm gonna start implementing in any 3 color deck that has green.

Another example is running a small eldrazi spawn subpackage in [[Erinis, Gloom Stalker]] + [[Street Urchin]]. [[Eldrazi Repurposer]], [[Malevolent Rumble]] (while running stuff that doesn't mind being milled like [[Moment's Peace]] and [[Lignify]] / [[Ambush Viper]] so I have removal that can be picked up by it too), [[Rapacious One]], [[Writhing Chrysalis]] (both chunky threats). This way I'm still ramping with the spawns but can still generate fodder to be sacc'd to the background even when I don't have artifacts.

Just wanted to blab about some neat stuff I came across while deckbuilding.

What are some little pieces of tech / small synergy packages you've all came up with in your builds?

Curious about any PDH communities in Canada, particularly but not exclusively Southern Ontario, that may be represented here. I've been working on building a base in the Toronto area with a couple dozen players, and the next step is getting a regular event set up at an LGS. I've got interest from a few venues, and would love to start consolidating players, to show stores that PDH belongs on their calendar.

Notably, while my primary focus is to build resources locally, I am extremely interested in collaborating with groups from other provinces. Mostly just want to see who else in my country is hungry for more PDH community organizing. Et j'aimerais bien entendre de mes voisins.

Here is our rankings for all 38 new Pauper Commanders Options in the set: https://poddives.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-hobbit-pauper-edh-commander-tier.html?m=1

Considering how specific and weird this question is, yes I am working on building [[Loot, the Anomaly]] and I wanted to try and design the deck around lowering his power while keeping his toughness consistent.

I'm new to Pauper Commander and I'm not used to running mono color decks, but I was interested by his reveal and was excited to try him out.

I've been posting about the monthly / quarterly state of the cPDH meta for a while now and decided to dive a bit deeper into 2025 and look at how that year ended.

The top 10 plus one more noteworthy commander are reviewed with their stats for the year. Some were popular and successful, others saw success with only a single player, and some favorites from 2024 fell out of favor.

Let me know your thoughts on the meta, and if you have deeper questions on the data I'd be happy to answer them.