Pauper Metagame
We are tracking 2,009 competitive Pauper decks from the last 14 days of published tournament results. Madness Burn is the most-played deck at 10.5% of the field, ahead of Mono-Blue Terror (6.2%) and Affinity (6.2%). The top three decks account for only 22.9% of the field, so this is an open format — a broad gauntlet rather than a handful of decks to beat.
Pauper is built entirely from commons, which makes it both the cheapest competitive format and a surprisingly stable one — the card pool grows with every set, but new commons rarely displace established staples outright. Shares here tend to hold their shape across windows, so a genuine move in the trend column is worth paying attention to.
| # | Archetype | Meta share | Decks | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Madness Burn | 10.5% | 211 | Up 2.3 pts |
| 2 | Mono-Blue Terror | 6.2% | 125 | Down 2.1 pts |
| 3 | Affinity | 6.2% | 124 | Steady |
| 4 | Mono-Blue Faeries | 5.2% | 105 | Steady |
| 5 | Jund Wildfire | 4.8% | 96 | Steady |
| 6 | Elves | 4.2% | 84 | Down 0.7 pts |
| 7 | Mono-Red Deck Wins | 3.2% | 65 | Steady |
| 8 | Balustrade Spy | 3.2% | 64 | Steady |
| 9 | Mono-Blue Control | 3.1% | 63 | Up 2.2 pts |
| 10 | Urzatron | 2.9% | 58 | Steady |
Share is a deck's percentage of every Pauper deck we recorded in the window; trend compares it with the previous window of the same length. Full decklists, matchup win rates and card-level breakdowns are in the browser below.
How these numbers are produced
Each deck counted here comes from a published competitive result — Magic Online leagues and challenges, and paper events whose organisers publish standings and lists. We do not sample, weight or estimate: a deck is in the window because a real player registered it in a real event inside the last 14 days.
Decks are grouped by a rules-driven archetype signature that matches on the cards which actually define a deck, rather than on its colours. Lists the rules cannot confidently place go to a human review queue instead of being guessed at, and when we merge or split an archetype we relabel its history so the trend line stays honest. More detail is on our about page.
