The Definitive Guide to and Defense of Mono Black Ponza in Pauper in 2024

    Land destruction is good, actually. In a game based around having excellent resource management and outpacing your opponents’ resources, you’d think destroying your opponents’ lands wouldn’t just be fair game, it’d be encouraged. But no, land destruction’s fallen out of favor as a means to control the board due to the (incredibly infantilizing) “feels bad” moments it creates that WotC is oh-so-frightened of producing. God forbid somebody wins this game now and then. 

    I’ve begun terrorizing the only format where you can pull off a semi-competitive land destruction deck. I’m providing you this guide out of the goodness of my heart, in the hopes you, too, will become a terror at your LGS.

What’s Wrong With You? Why Would You Do This? 

    As any longtime MTG player can attest to, the burnout is real. After 15+ years of serious playing and collecting, plus another five at a card store where I had a very generous discount, a lot of the magic in Magic has been lost on me. I pined for a time when I actually felt like a planeswalker thematically linked to my deck, and not a guy with a disposable income and 15 Commander decks.

    I landed on a land destruction deck for pauper when I found the semi-cycle of three-mana land destruction spells in Choking Sands, Icequake, and Rancid Earth. Immediately, I thought about how brutal it’d be to open up a match with a Dark Ritual into an Icequake, and the rest is history. 

    This deck is incredibly brutal to run, and has some insanely punishing play patterns. Unfortunately, this is what I found compelling about it. I’ve never felt like a more nefarious and evil planeswalker than I do when I pilot this deck. 

Ultimately, this is what rekindled my love for Constructed - I’d found a deck that I felt truly emulated the flavor of being a mono-black planeswalker who’s traveled the multiverse in search of only the most oppressive and destructive spells he could get his hands on. 

    You should play mono black ponza if you’re also disenchanted and disenfranchised from the larger Magic sphere, if you’re searching for a deck with an oppressive and classic-feeling game plan, and you don’t care about the meta. Ponza is for players who want to punish and bully their opponents. 

    I want to be clear that this deck won’t 5-0 a league consistently, but it will go to game three nearly every time. 

Mono Black Ponza 2024

Decklist

Land Destruction

    The basis of this deck is the four copies each of Choking Sands, Rancid Earth, Icequake, and Befoul. Befoul, while costing an additional mana, is still essential to this deck by virtue of being optional creature removal in a pinch, plus bringing us up to 16 total sources of land destruction. We need to see at least one LD spell in our opening hand, but the Befouls will admittedly be the first cards we drop when sideboarding. 

    Playsets of both Dark Ritual and Cabal Ritual are the other essential cards. We’ll need to see at least one of these in our opening hands as well, and it’s usually beneficial to mulligan down to five to dig for one alongside an LD spell.

Creatures

    Where my list differs from some other lists is the creature base: it’s pretty rude to play all this land destruction without an actual out to end the game, so we’re stapling a traditionally valuable two card combo to our low-end in the form of Exhume-ing a swampcycling Troll of Khazad-dun. 

    Sign in Blood and Dusk Legion Zealot provide gas and a body to put our landless foes on some sort of clock. Finally, Gurmag is some extra 5/5 damage. 

    Note that Gloomfang Mauler is absent from this list - in my playtests, leaning into a more spellslinger base helps guarantee we hit land destruction spells in the first few turns and then shift focus to sticking a Troll. This might boil down to a personal taste - I very much enjoy the consistent bullying blowing lands to smithereens brings; maybe a bit too much for my deck’s own good.

    In a pseudo-Mono Black Control manner, we’re also running a playset of Chittering Rats. These little bastards are the sand you kick in the face of your opponents after you’ve pushed them to the ground. The possibly most sinister feeling in the world is watching your opponent dig for lands when you’ve locked them down to one (or even zero) mana, then running out the Rats and locking them out of drawing into a land. It’s insanely brutal and I never feel more like a villainous planeswalker than when I land this. 

    In a similar vein, Crypt Rats acts as both removal versus Goblins, elves, and other creature-heavy decks, or as an additional wincon if we can dump a Cabal Ritual into it in the late game.

Control, Removal

    The prevalence of other Trolls of Khazad-dun in the format makes Exhuming our Troll risky; they can always respond to our Exhume by cycling their own Troll, which will then swing in before our Troll and outpace us to victory. Our best defense for this is the Nihil Spellbombs, Tormod’s Crypts, and Bojuka Bogs. It’s very hard for us to deal with an Exhumable threat, which is why we only ever want to use our Divests to toss those pesky indestructible artifact duals, unless we have a Tormod’s or Spellbomb ready to go.

Besides this, four Snuff Outs are just about the best removal in the format, but I’m playing with the idea of running Spinning Darkness instead to help stabilize when we’ve taken a few hits, or Sign in Blood’d a few too many times.

Card Advantage

    Since we’re more often than not starting out the game with a two-for-one when we Dark Ritual into a Choking Sands, and then another two-for-one when we Exhume our Troll, we run the risk of running out of gas really quick. To counteract this, we’ve got four copies of Sign in Blood as well as two Dusk Legion Zealots. 

Two Thorn of the Black Rose round out our draw. Thorn of the Black Rose is so good in Pauper, and one of the best cards in this deck. It’s usually worth it to Ritual into a Black Rose on turn two if we can stand it - so long as there aren’t a ton of fliers coming our way, we’ll be able to keep pace with our opponent even if we have to keep dropping Rituals to hit their lands.

Mana Base

    Playing Pauper these days can start to feel like Modern with the near-ubiquity of the Lord of the Rings basic landcyclers. We’ve seen the average number of lands sink in Pauper decks since then, and this deck is no exception, especially with all eight of our Rituals.

    Here, we’re running just 16 lands, and that’s as low as I dare to go. Four Peat Bogs are essential pulls for our opening hand, letting us get an LD in on turn two at the latest. The single Bojuka Bog and Barren Moor come into play more than you’d expect - despite our limited draw power, we tend to see a lot of our deck each game due to the aggressively slow pace we drag the game to when we destroy lands. 

How To Play Mono Black Ponza

Opening Hands

    Land destruction in pauper sounds like it shouldn’t work. Pauper is a turn two format - meaning most decks’ turn two plays will set the pace for how that game will shake out. However, we’ve got several very strong turn one plays that can ruin our opponents’ turn two - namely Dark Ritual into any Land Destruction. You’ll see this is a theme.

    There are several very strong opening hands in this Mono Black Ponza list, but you’ll have to mulligan fairly aggressively for them, or else assume you’ll have a turn or two to set up (versus Faeries, for instance, which tends to run a lot of Dimir Aqueducts, our favorite target for Choking Sands). Our opening hands are also heavily influenced by whether we’re on the play or draw.

    The best hand you can keep has the spells and mana to destroy a land on turns one, two, and three. This looks like at least one Ritual, usually a Peat Bog, and at least two LD spells, plus a Troll or draw spell if we can spare it. On the play, we can safely drop a Peat Bog turn one and use it turn two to either Cabal or Dark Ritual into a Choking Sands, using the extra mana to fetch a swamp with the Troll. Turn three sees us untapping with three mana, which we use to blow up another land. Depending on what we’ve drawn into, our options should start to open up: we’ve got five cards in our ‘yard already, almost enough to meet Threshold on Cabal Ritual in case we want to hard cast a Troll, or we can dig for our Exhumes and just get that Troll back while also banking mana for more LD. 

    Openers with multiple LD spells and swamps to cast them might look like keepers, but we really can’t afford to wait until turn three to start blowing up lands. If we don’t see a ritual or a Peat Bog, it’s a mulligan.

    Our second great starting hand is anyway to get the Troll in your graveyard and on the field in the same turn, preferably an early one. If you see a Dark Ritual, Troll, and Exhume in your hand, you’re looking at a turn one 6/5 mega-menacer on the field.

    Depending on matchup and the play/draw dichotomy, these hands get better or worse. We’ll cover that in the Sideboarding section.

Strategy

    If you’ve made it this far I shouldn’t have to repeat to you that our goal here is to destroy our opponents’ lands, denying the resources they need in the early game while we stick a Troll or Gurmag and start unloading. 

    Hitting an LD spell on turns one, two, and three is paramount to our success. Usually this is enough to set any other meta deck back enough that they won’t have an opportunity to catch up, even if our only “threats” are Dusk Legion Zealot and Thorn of the Black Rose.

    The key to piloting this deck is understanding we are not a traditional control deck. Really, we’re in an amorphous middle ground where we can play an aggro game early on by sticking a Troll, or play the long game with consistent land destruction and never letting our opponents cast a spell. Lock their draws down with Chittering Rats and remove their graveyards with Nihil Spellbombs, Snuff Out any creature they play, and just wallop them with our 6/5. 

Sideboarding by Matchup

    The best part about bringing Mono Black Ponza to your local Pauper night is watching your opponents struggle to sideboard against you. With such a rarely seen deck (at least in Paper), you’re almost guaranteed to have the upper hand in games two and three. Where we have answers to the meta decks, they’ll have nothing to bring except more counterspells, more or less.

    Generally, versus creature decks, you’ll want more removal and more graveyard hate. This means bringing in our Tormod’s Crypts and Nihil Spellbombs to clear their graveyard of creatures before we Exhume our Troll.

  There’s this odd sensation I have where it feels like it might be optimal to choose to go on the draw in some matches. I don’t have enough data to back this up, but it’s almost a better option to be on the draw versus decks without turn one plays - you’ll still lock them out of casting anything, but you won’t burn a turn playing a swamp and now Ritualing into any land destruction.

    Note that Modern Horizons 3 just hit the field, and we’re still reeling from the Broodscale combo deck hitting the scene, as well as learning to deal with Sneaky Snackers and more. 

Versus Affinity

    Bringing the Divests into the mainboard is our best hope versus top-of-the-meta Grixis Affinity, and we can usually afford to cut our two insurance Anglers out for Chittering Rats and Snuff Out. Snuffing Out the Myr Enforcers and Divesting the artifact duals out of their hand should be our priority.

Versus Terror

    UB Terror also demands we bring our Divests in to deal with that stupid Kraken before they can cast it for cheap. They’ll undoubtedly be filling their graveyard with cheap Mental Notes, and we’ll have to keep an eye out for the Sneaky Snacker. Swap out the Snuff Outs and Befouls for Crypt Rats, Chittering Rats, and the Spellbomb to clear their graveyard before we try to stick a Troll.

Versus Synthesizer

    Divests are once again the answer. Your opponent absolutely cannot stick red mana - once they hit a Synthesizer we’ll have a hell of a lot of trouble stopping their land plays. A single Thraben Inspector hitting the field early shouldn’t bother us - if we’re playing well, an Exhumed Troll will roll right past them with its triple-menace. We can board out our graveyard hate in this matchup and bring in Snuff Outs and a Befoul if we think it’ll help, too. We’re not so concerned about them getting a Kor Skyfisher at the same time that we’re getting a Troll.

Versus Gardens

    This is one of our hardest matchups, just because they’re also usually running a playset of Trolls. The worst response to our perfect start of a turn one Dark Ritual -> cycle the Troll -> Exhume the Troll can be painfully interrupted by your opponent cycling their own Troll, then sticking it to the field and swinging in first. We can’t fire off our own Exhume combo without a Tormod’s Crypt or Nihil Spellbomb in play to shore up their graveyard, either. Finally, we absolutely cannot let them stick Avenging Hunter - that spells the end for our deck, since we can’t just remove their lands to stop them from advancing through the Undercity and generating advantage.

Versus Burn

    Another tough match up, Burn is mostly one-mana spells, meaning our usual Ponza strategy won’t lock them out nearly as well as we hope. We can switch gears to play a more control-y game by bringing in our Crypt Rats and Pestilence to deal with their board of creatures and our Chittering Rats to punish them for only running 17 lands on average. 

    This matchup is when Rancid Earth’s threshold effect is most useful. Even though Burn typically runs at least two two-toughness creatures in the form of Goblin Blast-Runner and Goblin Tomb Raider, we can wipe the board of Bushwhackers and Epicures if we land a Rancid Earth. 

Versus Faeries

    The cool thing about playing into Faeries is they have no answer to our Trolls besides their Edicts. To combat this, we’ll sideboard in more Rats (of both kinds) so we always have something to chump instead of our Troll, trading out our Anglers and Befouls. Snuff Outs can stay in the mainboard versus Faeries to deal with the Murmuring Mystics and Ninja of the Deep Hours.

Versus Gruul Ponza

    This is kind of a wild matchup, and also the one I’ve played the least of. Normally, I’d say to be afraid of the Generous Ents being cycled into the graveyard, but more often than not Gruul Ponza wants to stick an Arbor Elf, Utopia Sprawl, or Wild Growth on turn one. Punish them for that by blowing up the land, two-for-twoing an enchanted land or rendering their elf useless. This is one matchup where we’ll actually use our Befouls after game one - our number one priority is keeping them off five mana so they can never cast Avenging Hunter, or Boarding Party, or Annoyed Altisaur. 

Versus Caw-gates

    This is a free win. They have no indestructible lands, and their key cards are all lands we can blow up. Heap Gate and Basilisk Gate are the two main targets, but really we’ll just need to keep them off of white mana so they cannot stick those cheap Squadron Hawks and Sacred Cats. 

Versus Tron

    This is actually a great match up for us, but not a free win. Tron needs to assemble the Urza lands as quickly as possible with their Expedition Maps and Crop Rotations, which makes it hard to consistently deny their mana base. That said, pay attention to what colors they have access to; you’ll need to carefully remove their filter lands, and Energy Refractors with LDs and Divests, respectively, to keep them off of blue and green mana. This should help us stick our Troll and guarantee the damage gets through when they can’t cast their Moment’s Peace. Side in the Tormod’s Crypts as well to keep their graveyard free from Mulldrifters when we Exhume.

Good Game

    While playing this deck, my mind’s often drawn subconsciously to John Prine’s “Paradise”; a song about the strip mining and destruction of the town of Paradise, Kentucky during the coal rush in the 60s. It’s a song about the complete and total leveling of the town for the alleged progress of man - the ever-grinding machine that is fossil fuel consumption uprooting and destroying the histories of hundreds of Appalachian residents. Magic: the Gathering wasn’t around when Prine wrote this song, but if it had been, I’m sure he would’ve included some references to Choking Sands and Sinkhole. 

Weenies, Kor Equipment, and Sideboarding

Kitchen Table League Master List

Decklist

Last time we talked about the Rakdos Hellbent deck I’ve built for my kitchen table league. It’s a little slower than an aggro deck should be, in fact slotting into a more midrange-y archetype. Today I want to talk about possibly the most aggressive deck of the bunch, and how it ended up like that. 

In 2009 I purchased a Kor Equipment themed intro deck, probably from Target, to dive into the recently released Zendikar set. I loved Zendikar, with its floating rocks and Burning Crusade-esque aesthetics, and I loved a creature type rooted in white that wasn’t Humans or Kithkin. This deck played way better than the green-red Allies deck intro deck I also purchased at the time, but both were fairly weak for a time when Jace, the Mind Sculptor was dominating the actual Standard environment.

In my quest to recapture that old feeling of a younger Magic, one of the last battle decks I built before bouncing from my online card retailer job was an expanded Kor Equipment list based on the original 40 card intro deck. Once again, I tried to keep the total cost for the deck under $20 and use cards from my chaff box whenever I could. 

See the decklist above. It only runs about $6 to build, and hits in this format like a freight train. The play patterns are just too valuable for the other decks to keep up; anything that doesn’t spend the first two turns removing Kor Duelists and Armament Masters ends up drowning under a swarm of 3/3s+. The deck’s turn one, two, and three plays are almost always small threats that grow into big threats, usually with evasion, and it’s only bad match up is against the mono-red goblins deck, which can trade boards and recover so fast that it doesn’t care about the Kor board.

This genuinely surprised me. It really shouldn’t have; white weenies have been a staple archetype in most formats since Magic’s creation. The 1996 World Champion deck was probably the first instance of a competitive weenies deck, and it was created completely by accident. Because Tom Chanpheng forgot to register the 4 Adarkar Wastes, judges ruled he would have to use basic Plains instead. This rendered his single copy of Sleight of Mind useless, but that wouldn’t stop him from dominating the competition. This indirectly spawned the concept of “dead card handicap” when playtesting decks. When using the dead card handicap, decks are built with 6-12 “Dead cards” that do nothing in their build, and playtested against various other meta decks. When the handicapped deck can beat the meta decks with the dead cards, actual tech is swapped in to focus in on blind spots and off-meta matchups. 

This WW deck doesn’t need all that, though. Playtests have revealed that nothing can stand against this deck without some serious sideboarding. Which actually brings us to our first big plateau in our KTL: How do we decide on the sideboards for each of these decks? With 10+ in the meta, spread across 10 slightly different builds and archetypes, how can we hope to construct a 15 card sideboard that gives each deck a chance against the other?

The best way to go about this is taking the strongest deck in the meta, Kor Weenies, defining its weaknesses, and searching out the cards in the maybeboards and considerings that make sense for the meta. 

The best way to stop the Kor deck is to just destroy its permanents. Targeted creature removal is the best for this, and our format already has some killers for the Kor: none of them survive a Lightning Bolt unaided, and the discard outlets running around in both the Rakdos Hellbent deck and Dihada pseudo-control (more on this later) mean Terminal Agony is hard to cast for more than two.

But what about the Mono Blue Suspend deck and Mono Green Elves? The Ovinizes in the Suspend deck don’t completely neutralize an equipped Kor, and Reality Acid is too slow. Pongify just makes things worse. The real play here is to go up to four copies of Delay, and probably add some Counterspells just to be safe (it bums me out to run something so generically themed as Counterspell in these decks, but it's also the weathervane by which all other spells should be measured, and thus a necessary evil, the same as Lightning Bolt). 

The Elves have a harder time of it. Generally (like the Goblins), they just want to outpace the Kor deck by going wider than the Kor can go tall. 

What’s really funny is how bad the B/W Exalted deck plays against Kor Equipment. The Exalted deck used to be the king of the pile. Having access to both Knight of Glory and Knight of Infamy makes this deck really hard to remove and run built-in evasion. Unfortunately, the Kor deck outpaces it in terms of damage per turn in most instances, until at least the Exalted deck gets the mana to regenerate Duty-Bound Dead over and over. Turn one Kor Duelist into a Trusty Machete and an Armament Master is just too much damage on the field that early.

Board cards for the Exalted deck are looking like Duress and Oblivion Rings, which can hopefully neuter the artifacts before they become a huge problem. 

Now that we’ve got an idea for how to sideboard against Kor Weenies, we can play some test games and see what the Weenies deck needs to win against anti-weenie tech. 

Echoing Decay sees play in Pauper right now, here it hits every Kor in the deck before they can pick up any equipment, and still hits the Kor Duelists after they pick up a Bone Saw. Slotting it into the Dihada deck feels both flavorful and mechanically right, considering that deck runs a lot of one- and three-mana spells but sort of peters out on turn two. 

Kitchen Table League: Master List

I realized I wrote up but never posted several more blogs about the Kitchen Table League, I'm gonna do some months-belated catching up. I'll do my best to update it with links to each deck's page when I can.

My Kitchen Table League of cheaply constructed battle decks has swollen to somewhere near a dozen decks, so I thought I’d better make a list and give a brief overview of each one in the meta, how it plays, and what inspired it. Most of these decks were built from leftover draft chaff, but more than a few are based around Duel Decks, Theme Decks, and Intro Decks from Magic’s past that I remember playing with. 

Duel Decks: Dihada

Duel Decks: Dihada is an idea I’ve had buzzing around ever since they printed Geyadrone Dihada. I’ve drafted MH3 so many times I’ve lost count, but it’s at least enough times to draft four copies of Dihada. 

The general idea behind Duel Decks: Dihada was to build a Grixis control/tempo deck that used Dragon’s Rage Channelers and lots of looting to fill the graveyard and drop a Tombstalker for nearly free. The only problem is the actual Dihada planeswalker card - it kinda sucks. In most games, it frequently hits the field and proceeds to do nothing. Even in this creature-heavy meta, there aren’t really enough big things to steal or corrupt that you’ll be doing anything besides her +1 ability. Which isn’t so bad, except this deck would prefer opponents swing at its planeswalker instead of its own life while it's trying to land a Tombstalker. I’d hate to shift the entire meta around just to justify the Dihada deck, so it's currently in a limbo state while we work out the rest of the meta.

Boros Sunforger/Radiance

Boros Sunforger came out of the original Boros theme deck from Ravnica: City of Guilds. One of the first theme decks I remember purchasing, this deck permanently altered the chemicals in my brain when I saw Sunforger and Lightning Helix for the first time.

One of the first goals I set for myself when I started building the KTL meta was to find a way to make old, bad mechanics playable. Radiance has mostly been forgotten by players these days, thanks to its symmetrical effect making it an unreliable mechanic in mirror matches, but I think there are a few bangers hidden amongst the junk. Bathe in Light, in particular, is a board-wide protection spell in this deck, basically Braven The Elements-ing everything you own for just one more generic mana. Rally the Righteous is another fun trick, especially when you fetch it from your library with Sunforger. 

I remember the strategy insert for the Boros theme deck instructed you to “... play one creature on turn one, two creatures on turn two, three creatures on turn three…” and so on, and that’s really stuck with me as far as deck building in red goes.

Rakdos Hellbent

In a similar story to the Boros deck, I also have a strong memory of purchasing the Rakdos Hellbent theme deck from a Target back in the Bush era. Similar to the Boros deck, I wanted to take the bad Hellbent mechanic and see if I couldn’t use the newest Modern Horizons cards to kick it up a notch. The results have actually been spectacular.

Rakdos Headliner is just the two-drop a red/black aggro deck needed, and when followed up by a Rotting Regisaur it’s a really hard-to-answer play. Using the madness costs of Terminal Agony, Blazing Rootwalla and others makes sure you don’t just throw away cards without value, and once you can stick being Hellbent on your turn your whole deck becomes nothing but threats. Notably I really like running Bottled Cloister in this deck, since it’ll both enable Hellbent and draw you extra cards, and defend from the odd Duress-equivalent someone tries to throw at you. Not that they’d really do that, typically when playing against the Hellbent deck you want to keep as many cards in its hand as possible.

Mono Black Vampires

Another aggro deck, the Mono Black Vampires deck is basically a carbon copy of the 2012 Vampire Onslaught Event deck. It’s a powerhouse aggro deck with four copies of Vampire Lacerator, four copies of Gatekeeper of Malakir, four copies of Bloodthrone Vampire, and a single Bloodghast. I’ve removed the Skinrenders and Dismembers for power level reasons, but I’m considering returning the Dismembers. 

This deck is simple and sweet. It's here to play creatures and turn ‘em sideways. Ironically, this deck plays more like that Boros deck’s strategy guide suggests than the actual Boros deck.

Duel Decks: Elves

Duel Decks: Elves was one of the first Magic the Gathering products I remember purchasing. I played the hell out of it with my younger brother. It has gone through numerous reworks and rebuilds over the years, most notably as the basis for a Pauper Elves deck I ran in 2019. The deck got disassembled and reassembled during the pandemic since there were no live Pauper events to attend, and since remained the janky Lorwyn-era elves deck we’ve all come to know and love. 

Orzhov Exalted

Back in 2013 every dude I knew in high school who played Magic pooled our cash and set up our own tournament in my homie’s parents’ basement and played our own FNM with prize packs on the line. I built black/white exalted and just slammed all the exalted creatures from the 2013 Core Set in and topped it off with Oblivion Rings and Duress. It was unstoppable. Protection from White and Black on my two main two-drops made me champion. Here, the deck is presented with Gerrard’s Verdicts as an alternative to power it up a bit.

Orzhov Clerics Combo

Ten years ago, despite nobody in my play group of high school friends showing the slightest interest in playing some low-power legacy, I constructed an Orzhov clerics deck built around the Conspiracy combo deck from ten years before then. It’s a dinky deck that uses Conspiracy and Rotlung Reanimator to get a Cleric Zombie token for every cleric that dies, more if you can land another Rotlung. Or, it can get you infinite life by using that Kor cleric with the 0-mana activated ability. This deck’s existence is how I know I’m meant for this. 

Kor Equipment Weenies

See full post here