The Pauper Format, Explained

What Pauper is

Pauper is a 60-card constructed format in which every card must be a common. The construction rules are Standard's (four copies, fifteen-card sideboard, 20 life) and the card pool is the widest in Magic outside of Vintage: every set ever printed, filtered by rarity instead of by date.

It began as a Magic Online format, became sanctioned in paper, and has been played seriously for well over a decade. Wizards of the Coast supports it directly now, including a banned list maintained specifically for it.

Every other format restricts which sets you may use. Pauper restricts which rarity, which means it gains thirty years of card pool and gives up the fifteen cards per set that were designed to be splashy.

the trade Pauper makes

What counts as a common

A card is legal in Pauper if it has been printed at common rarity in at least one official Magic release. Rarity belongs to the printing, not to the card.

That has three consequences worth internalising before you build. A card printed as a rare and reprinted at common later is legal, from that moment onward. A card printed at common on Magic Online but never in paper is legal too. And the copy in your hand does not have to be the common one: if a common printing exists anywhere, any printing of that card is legal.

The practical way to check is a deckbuilding site's Pauper legality filter, which reads rarity across every printing. Guessing from memory is how a decklist gets a game loss for the one card that was only ever uncommon.

Bans, and who decides them

Pauper has its own banned list, and its own process. In January 2022 Wizards of the Coast introduced the Pauper Format Panel: staff plus community members who follow the format closely and recommend action to the Play Design team. Pauper announcements therefore land on their own schedule rather than with the general banned and restricted updates.

The list is long by the standards of a commons format, for a reason that is easy to miss: a card at common is printed in enormous quantity and is available to every deck, so a broken common is broken everywhere at once. Downshifted rares that turn out to be too strong get removed quickly. In August 2026, Seeker of Skybreak was banned within days of Marvel Super Heroes releasing, for a two-card infinite combo with a card from that set, while Bonder's Ornament was unbanned to give slower decks something back.

Check the official list before an event. Any article, this one included, is a snapshot of the day it was written.

The cards that define Pauper

Six commons that explain the format's power level better than any description. Three of them would be unremarkable in Modern; at common, in a format where nobody has a five-mana bomb to cheat into play, they set the terms.

Lightning Bolt ↗

Three damage for one mana, printed at common more than once. The card that decides how big a Pauper creature has to be before it is worth playing.

Counterspell ↗

Two mana, counter target spell, and a common in several sets. Blue's Pauper decks are built around it in a way no other format still allows.

Preordain ↗

One mana to fix the next two draws. Cheap card selection is how a commons deck reaches its handful of powerful cards reliably.

Ephemerate ↗

One mana to blink a creature, with a rebound trigger that does it again next turn. The engine behind the format's value decks.

Deadly Dispute ↗

Sacrifice an artifact or creature, draw two and make a treasure. Turns tokens and leftovers into cards, which is Pauper's version of card advantage.

Journey to Nowhere ↗

Two-mana exile removal at common. Answers the creature that is too big to burn, and shows how much removal Pauper decks can afford to play.

Note what is missing. There are no planeswalkers, almost no card that wins on its own, and no tutor worth building around, so games are decided by resource attrition rather than by who drew their best card. A Pauper deck that plays Counterspell and Lightning Bolt is not playing cheap versions of better cards, it is playing the actual best answers in the format.

The archetypes to know

Pauper's metagame is stable enough that these six have been recognisable for years, even as individual cards come and go.

If those names sound familiar, it is because they are the same strategic families as anywhere else in Magic. Our archetype guides cover what each game plan is actually trying to do, written for Commander but true at any deck size.

Building your first Pauper deck

Two colours, 17 lands, and 8 to 12 pieces of interaction. Pauper curves are low, so the land count sits below what a Standard deck wants. Almost every successful build is two colours, because the fixing available at common is real but not free.

Card advantage wins the long games, and there are many long games. Nobody has a bomb to end things, so a deck with a repeatable way to draw cards beats a deck without one, given time. That is why the blue decks have persisted for a decade.

Buy the deck, not the staples. This is the one format where the whole list costs less than a night out, so there is no reason to build half of it and proxy the rest. Our guide to buying singles covers where bulk commons are cheapest, which is not always where rares are.

Frequently asked questions