Hello PDH friends!
Alkadron here, bringing you another exciting piece of news about ongoing developments in the governance of our Pauper Commander format. But first: Context!
Hopefully by now you’re read Scarecrow’s article about the reorganization of the RC: we shrunk a bit for a number of reasons, but near the top of that list was the fact that we wanted our (online, text-based discussions) to be swifter and more streamlined, and it’s easier to do that with necessary input from just five folks instead of a full ten. This shift comes with some challenges though. Notably, the five of us remaining on the Rules Committee are not a diverse bunch, but we still want to be the best possible representatives and stewards of a diverse and global community.
Each of us remained on the RC in part because we were closely engaged with some corners of the community (discord, facebook, youtube, twitch, podcasts, reddit, local communities), but we can’t be everywhere. Which is a shame because we want to be everywhere. The next best thing is making sure we have meaningful, relevant, and trustworthy input from everywhere as we make decisions. So we’re subcontracting!
Enter: the Pauper Commander Advisory Group (PCAG). This is a group of folks with presence in more corners and facets of the community than we (on the RC) have: We’ve got representatives from Germany and Brazil, and we hope to expand to other corners of the globe soon. We’ve got folks from Sanctuary and the Common Connoisseurs. We got casual folks who make twitch content and competitive folks who organize tournaments. In short, we’ve got a lot of folks with global outreach who have invaluable experience and connections to PDH players from all walks of life. And they’re here to help us out!
Two of our new PCAG members you may already be familiar with, if you knew what the RC looked like prior to May 2024: Yaloron and Plant stepped into the PCAG from RC roles when we re-organized stuff.
Yaloron
Yaloron is active on the PDH Home Base discord and on Moxfield under the same name. He started playing Magic in 2011 and PDH in 2013 with Species Gorger. Mostly, though, he played Limited and 60-card Pauper for several years. When he came back to PDH in 2019, he was one of the first pioneers developing the competitive side of the format. Yaloron developed the cPDH Tier List on deckstats alongside Crash, as a tool to introduce others to competitive PDH. Yaloron is also known for his comprehensive, detailed primers for cPDH, which are considered some of the best in the format. Yaloron was also part of the PDH RC from 2021-2024, but has moved to an advisory role so he can focus more on brewing, playing, and tuning.
Plant [aka WhoTheHell]:
Plant started playing somewhere in 2004, building decks from his limited pool of random cards for all his friends to play with. After a long break from Magic in between, he was reintroduced with Commander. It was only a matter of time until PDH, combining all that is good in Magic, hooked him for good. Casual in the streets but Izzet in the sheets, Plant likes to think outside the box when brewing and tries to break the color pie or push some other nonsensical ideas to their limit. Advocating a good vibe with some edge to it, he leaves sparks wherever he goes, that sometimes flourish into new PDH pods.
The rest of the PCAG were recently invited to join us. We got:
Bobby BFine
Bobby has been playing Magic since 2009 and commons-only Commander decks since 2010. In 2014, he built his first PDH deck, Disciple of Deceit, and dabbled in the format intermittently while also playing the likes of Standard, Modern, and Legacy (usually with some type of combo deck in hand). Bobby eventually caught the cPDH bug in 2020 and channeled his enjoyment for the competitive side of the format into the creation of the Sanctuary PDH Discord server and online PDH tournament series in early 2023. An avid combo enjoyer, you’ll see him doing a bunch of graveyard-centric things in casual games and going to infinity and beyond at competitive tables. You can find his tweets here.
PapaPauper (@papa_pauper)
Ryan has been playing Magic since Invasion, and he got hooked on commons in 2015. While his main focus is cPDH, he does still play 60-card Pauper and Pioneer. He also loves watching Modern, Legacy Vintage and Vintage Cube. You can find his youtube channel here for live deckbuilding, gameplay, tournament coverage, meta analysis, and gameplay. You can also follow this link to join the Common Connoisseurs Discord Server, or find his tweets here.
Sniffhow
Sniffhow plays PDH with the rest of his squad, the PDH Pals, which you can find streaming on Twitch twice a week. He’s on the PCAG because the PDH Pals continue to have their finger on the pulse of the kitchen table soul that PDH thrives in. Sniffhow is an incomparable Toggo, Rootha, and Izzet aficionado. A true pioneer of “Floor Meta,” he’s been brewing decks out of whatever’s lying around for a decade and a half. He played “competitive” Modern from 2018-2020 and has been playing cubes since there have been cubes. He’s a huge advocate of The Holy Trinity and if you ask for deck help, he’ll suggest Howling Golem, Marching Duodrone, and Scaretiller before looking at the deck. He tweets on behalf of the PDH Pals here.
Murilo (Orthusk)
Murilo started playing Magic in 2003, Commander in 2014, and PDH in 2018. He plays a wide variety of other formats, but PDH has been his main focus since he founded the Pauper Commander Brazil website in 2021 as a format resource and hub for Brazilian players. Murilo was already an advisor in the PDH RC discord server from 2021-2024, so it was only natural that he was one of the first PCAG members. Murilo is occasionally seen on the PDH Home Base discord with the username murilo_orthusk, but is far more active in the online Brazilian PDH community that he leads on WhatsApp, playing weekly SpellTable games.
(While introducing and hyping up our fantastic new PCAG members, I would be remiss here if I didn’t also mention that our fearless leader Podkomorka has stepped from the RC into a Server-Admin role for Discord, Facebook, and the PDH Home Base website, because that’s where his passions lie.)
Podkomorka
Jonathan has been playing Magic since 2013. Since 2018, he’s been a leading member of the PDH Home Base community and the administrator of the discord server. His responsibilities involve overseeing the development of the PDH community, which includes managing various online resources and community spaces like our website, archive, Discord server, and Facebook, among other things.
So that’s the who. We should talk more about the what. The PCAG’s role is to act as extra avenues of communication between the RC and the community we serve. We don’t want to create degrees of separation between us and the community – we (on the RC) are still extremely available and engaged for chats with anyone. But we want extra representatives in and from more communities.
Importantly, we imagine that these extra lines of communication going both ways: we want PCAG friends to let us know how their communities are feeling and reacting to various and sundry Magic updates. We also want our PCAG friends to let their communities know how we in the RC are feeling and reacting to various and sundry Magic updates. Clay described the role of the PCAG as:
- Format Ambassadors
- Discerning Liaisons
- Trusted Advisors
(I’ll be completely honest: I’m only about 80% sure I know what a “Discerning Liaison” is but damn if it doesn’t sound real fancy.)
Fans of the non-Pauper Commander format will recognize the Advisory Group structure from Commander’s Advisory Group: the CAG. Our structure is meant to mirror theirs. Here they describe their CAG as “the primary advisory body to the RC … composed of well-known and well-regarded personalities from the commander community.” We wanted to find folks that we recognized and trusted as people that you recognized and trusted. And I think we found them.
One last note about the PCAG before I go: we started the process of inviting them to join us a few weeks before this article went live, by which I mean early May 2024. We thought we were inviting them into a time of relative peace, with no active burning questions to resolve. We thought we weren’t going to yeet them all directly into a big conversation that needed decisive action and a prompt RC response. We were wrong.
Days after our new PCAG friends joined us, Stickers got banned in Vintage, Legacy, and 60-card Pauper, for good reasons. Big discussions immediately rippled through our community about whether or not stickers would or should remain legal in PDH. I am pleased to report that our brand new PCAG members all hit the ground running, providing outstanding advice and outreach as we navigated the situation. We didn’t mean to give them a trial by fire, but they got a trial by fire and it was awesome.
The stickers fiasco served to bring us all together for a big conversation right off the bat, which strongly reinforced the value of us having big conversations. Moving forward, we’re going to convene regularly for check-ins and big conversations about new and old concerns as we work together to keep our format healthy, welcoming, and growing towards the future.
If you see our friendly neighborhood PCAG members around, give them a warm welcome. Thanks for reading!
-Dave