I’ve recently starting thinking about KBPTL (Kamigawa Block Pauper Tiny Leaders) again. While the format was mostly invented as a shitpost, I think the format is at least interesting to speculate about. Whether it is fun to play, I do not currently know. So because it is enjoyable, I will be using this article to speculate plenty. I have a desire to playtest the format, but currently I have not done so. As such what I say may turn out to be inaccurate.

But first, an introduction for people unfamiliar with this format. KBPTL is a combination of the following formats: Kamigawa Block Constructed, Pauper Commander and Tiny Leaders. Kamigawa Block Constructed means you can only use cards from Saviors, Betrayers and Champions of Kamigawa. Pauper Commander means you can only play commons in your maindeck1, and your commander has to be an uncommon creature. (Although it does not need to be legendary.) Finally Tiny Leader means every card in your deck must have a mana value of 3 or less, and your deck must be exactly 50 cards.

This has a couple very major consequences for deckbuilding. As every single uncommon creature available is monocolored, all decks are only a single color. The total number of cards that are legal is so low that, depending on which color you pick, you get between 0 and 3 cuts from the total card pool.2 The card quality is also exceptionally low, the best statted creature in the format is probably Kitsune Blademaster. But most creatures end up not passing the vanilla test3, while not really having good enough abilities to make up for it.

I expect this format to have a very large number of board-stalls. The defending player has an advantage in magic, and the creatures in this format are not strong enough to overcome that on their own (with some exceptions). The format is also very low on cards that create two-for-ones, this means beating out your opponent on value is really hard. The final piece is that because the creatures are so weak, it is very hard to snowball a tempo advantage into winning the game. In traditional formats, having early tempo can help get your opponent to the 5-7 life range, where they’ll be forced to make sub-optimal blocks to stay alive. Whereas here I expect the tempo advantage maybe getting your opponent to like, 13?

Because of this, I expect the format will settle into two main plans for winning the game. Chipping with evasive creatures and alpha-striking. Now here I consider evasive to be a slightly broader category than normal, as a creature that cannot be blocked profitably is effectively unblockable. Kuro’s Taken, for example, can’t reasonably be blocked unless the opponent has a creature with 3 toughness. But mainly blue and white have creatures with flying, and black has creatures with fear. Now alpha-striking will come to certain cards that make blocking hard and/or cards making your creatures bigger. For example, Shinen of Life’s Roar lets you swing freely with all your other creatures, and cards like Unearthly Blizzard also let you have a pretty guaranteed profitable attack.

Both of these strategies have notable flaws though. You might simply not have enough creatures to make the chip strategy work. White only has 4 creatures with flying, and most colors have at least 3 solid answers. Because of this you can often run out of creatures to chip with. The alpha-strike plan has a resource problem too. It is really hard to attack for 20. White only has 22 power worth of creatures in total4. The conclusion this leads to is that the best way to win is to combine the two strategies, chip in to get your opponent to 13 or so, then swing at them all out.

Now there are a couple cards I’d say might be able to break the eternal board stall. I’ll discuss the three I expect will be most impactful: Death Denied is one of the only cards in the format that can create large value swings. This card can instantly give you a lot of card advantage, which nothing else in the format can match. Then there are two cards that can kill multiple creatures on their own: Horobi’s Whisper and Glacial Ray. As long as you have arcane to cast, these spells can kill your opponents’ creatures until you have good attacks. I could see these cards working as a way to win a “fair” combat game.

Now, I have spent all this time without addressing the elephant in the room: You have a commander!!!! I did this to have a broad overview of what I believe the games will play like by default, so we can talk about commanders that seem strong given this meta. I’d split commanders broadly into three groups: good attackers, alpha strikers and value engines. Good attackers will help win by giving you a creature you always have access to that can consistently get in for damage. These are: Faithful Squire, Akki Coalflinger & Skull Collector. (I’d also say Thief of Hope fits in here too, as it helps you get in for damage, just not through combat.) Alpha strikers will just help get you in a state where you can attack for lethal. These are: Cunning Bandit, Budoka Pupil, Student of Elements & Hired Muscle. Finally, there are the value engines, these try to win by giving you access to actual two-for-ones, letting you try to win the card economy. These are: Tallowisp, Nezumi Graverobber, Ghost-Lit Raider & Orochi Eggwatcher.

I think this has probably been enough for an initial speculative article. This is already my longest article by a wide margin. I currently intend to do some actual playtesting of this format, if that ends up happening, I will probably write another article. But for now, as a final note, I’ll leave it at what I expect the strongest commanders to be: I expect that one of Tallowisp, Skull Collector or Cunning Bandit is the number 1 deck.

  1. I interpret this as the kamigawa printing being at common, this means I don’t consider the four later downshifted cards to be legal in the maindeck. ↩

  2. The exact number of cuts depends on how many lands you want to play, but as your curve ends at 3, that is probably around 18-20. Leaving you wanting 29-31 nonland cards. The colors respectively (in WUBRG order) have: 32, 34, 28, 31, 27. ↩

  3. The vanilla test is an (outdated nowadays) test for whether a creature’s power and toughness are good, simply coming down to if power+toughness >= mana value*2, so a 2/2 for 2 passes but a 1/4 for 3 does not. ↩

  4. This is middle of the road, the total power of each color is (in WUBRG order): 22, 17, 28, 24, 21. This is not taking into account ways creatures can increase their own power. ↩