The Basics - Colour Fixing Lands
So you’re looking to build a multicolour deck in pauper. You’ve got your theme, you know your colours and now it’s time to take a look at your lands. “Oh no!” you think, “this is pauper, there are no fancy untapped dual lands here, no shocks, no fetches how on earth do I build this?”. Well, let's take a look at the colour fixing options available and go over some of the pros and cons. In this first article, we’ll look at the mana fixing options available on lands, we’ll cover other forms of fixing such as artifacts in a future article.
How Many Colours?
The fact of the pauper mana base is that almost all of our fixing options give us a tapped land. We lack the ability of other eternal formats to fetch for a Volcanic Island or a Ravnica shock land. Even the Khans of Tarkir and Shards of Alara Tri-lands are uncommon and unavailable to us. That creates an interesting deckbuilding challenge. Three, Four and Five colour decks were, until recently, very difficult to build. To ensure consistent access to your colours, there are hoops you have to jump through or sacrifices you have to make to your deck to give up non-land slots to mana fixing. Decks like Tron or Affinity have large amounts of mana and artifacts that can filter that mana to the colours they need. Bogles sometimes relies on Utopia Sprawl or Abundant Growth to turn their forests into rainbow lands. But let’s assume that you’re not looking to go in that direction, then your best bet is either a mono-colour or two colour deck. If some of those deck names seem like gobbledegook, don’t worry we’ll be taking a look at them in future articles.
#1 The M19 Tapped Duals
Here we are. This is the bog standard default mana fixing for pauper. A non-basic land without a land type (Island, Mountain etc) that enters the battlefield tapped. These lands were first printed at uncommon in Oath of the Gatewatch and Shadows over Innistrad, entering our format in dribs and drabs as they got reprinted at common in Planeswalker decks. Core Set 2019 finally gave us the full cycle at common with one included in every pack. This makes these duals easily available. If you look at most of the top tier decklists you’ll see that almost nobody plays them, this is because there are better options available to us. We’ll take a look at those other options later, but it’s worth bearing these in mind if you have an abundance of them from drafting M19. The other place that these are really useful is in Standard Pauper on MTG Arena. It looks as though Wizards are going to keep these in standard in some form going forward, so if you’re looking to play on Arena, these are a good option.
#2 The Ravnica Guildgates
If you’ve been playing more recently during Guilds of Ravnica or Ravnica Allegiance then every pack has a guildgate instead of a basic land. These aren’t much different from the M19 duals above, but they have one important characteristic, the gate subtype. There are a few common cards that care about gates, for instance, the recently printed “Open The Gates” lets you search up a basic land or a gate. This could be a powerful way to fix your mana in base green decks. In Standard Pauper these are dual lands 5-8 right now, so if you’re looking to build a multicolour deck bear these in mind.
#3 The Khans Gainlands
Here we go. These are the gold standard of dual lands in pauper. Khans of Tarkir gave us this cycle of common tapped duals designed to make the intensely multicolour draft format based around 3-colour tribes work. As they’re common they still enter tapped, but as well as fixing your mana they gain you a life. It’s often said that pauper games start with both players at 21 life because these are such a great turn 1 play. With the recent reprinting in M20 these should be easy to get a hold of at the moment, but if you don’t have access to these then our previous cycles are perfectly workable, but the extra few life points can be valuable against aggressive decks.
#4 The Karoo Lands
Our final cycle is known as the Karoo Lands. This cycle comes from the original Ravnica block. When these lands enter the battlefield they require you to return another land to your hand. This ability first appeared on the card “Karoo” which was first printed way back in Visions, hence the name for this cycle. These lands are often included in small numbers in two colour decks with a very even split. They differ from the other cycles that we looked at above because they tap for two mana, making them especially potent in decks with ways to untap lands. However, these are a bad turn one play because the ability is not optional, and the only land available to return is the one you just played. Often you’ll see these played on turn 2 returning a Khans land to hand, which is then replayed on turn 3 to gain you another life. Don’t forget that you can always tap the land you’re planning to bounce for mana first so you don’t get too disrupted and the fact that they tap for two keeps you at parity on tempo. These lands are also a fantastic late-game play as they let you bounce utility lands to your hand to regain their effect. We’ll take a look at some of the utility lands on offer in a future article.
#5 “Fetches”
Evolving Wilds and Terramorphic Expanse. These are Pauper’s Fetchlands, printed in many sets as a way to provide fixing for limited gameplay, though these days you see Evolving Wilds in sets instead of Terramorphic Expanse. Functionally both cards are the same. They enter the battlefield untapped but don’t tap for mana themselves. You can then tap and sacrifice them to search for a basic land in your deck, which enters the battlefield tapped. The downside to fixing your colours is that you lose a turn while the land enters tapped. A common gameplay technique with these is to tap and search in your opponent’s end step so they don’t know which colour you’re looking for. These are particularly good in decks with a small number of lands in their second colour. You can’t always rely on naturally drawing a dual land or a basic of the right colour, so these provide additional ways to get those lands for critical turns.
Until the printing of Arcum’s Astrolabe, Ash Barrens was the new hotness in pauper. Initially only printed in a commander product availability was an issue, but we saw a reprint in Masters 25 and Commander 2019 bringing the price down to a slightly more affordable level. Ash Barrens is often used in the same sorts of decks as Evolving Wilds. The cycling is powerful because it can be done at instant speed, so in a blue deck you can leave mana up for a counterspell and then cycle at the end of your opponent's turn if you didn’t need it. Blue decks also enjoy this as a way to reliably shuffle your deck after a brainstorm. In a pinch, it can even be played untapped as a colourless land. This flexibility makes Ash Barrens more powerful than Evolving Wilds, though it’s still not really any faster than evolving wilds as the cycling ability costs mana to activate.
The Panoramas from Shards of Alara are an interesting set of lands. Like Ash Barrens they tap for colourless mana in play, but can fix you at the cost of a mana and sacrificing the Panorama. Like Evolving wilds the land you fetch comes into play tapped. This generally makes them slower than Evolving Wilds or Ash Barrens and as such they don’t see play in any decks.
#6 Others
Let's take a look at a few other common fixing lands that don’t fit into a particular cycle.
Crumbling Vestige doesn’t see much play but is sometimes used in builds like 5-colour Bogles, where they need a single coloured mana for just one key spell. While you can pick it up again with Karoos or other effects, it’s not really worth running unless you absolutely need it.
Gateway Plaza and Unknown Shores are examples of this type of fixing. Wizards likes to usually have an effect like this in standard as it can help draft or sealed. There are plenty of similar cards, but none of them are really played in Pauper, as there are also plenty of fixing artifacts that filter your mana and have other upsides, but we’ll talk about those in a future article. However, these are often considerations in Standard Pauper. While they may look great at first glance, they have downsides. Gateway Plaza will cost you a turn as you have to pay one mana when it comes in but does fix your mana nicely from there on. Unknown Shores only filters mana for fixing, so if you need a specific colour the spell effectively costs 1 more. However, if you happen to have a few cards like this in your collection and don’t want to spend your wildcards on the other lands we’ve talked about then they’ll get the job done, but it’s worth remembering that there are better options available.
Summary
So there you have it. These are the current options for mana fixing via lands. From the Khans Gainlands to Ash Barrens and everything in between. However this isn’t the full picture and many decks will often rely on artifacts for their fixing instead, so we’ll pick that up in a future article. In the meantime I hope this has been useful for you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with feedback here or on twitter at http://twitter.com/PauperPlanes
