I am noone really. Just a seasoned gamer who started into the tabletop gaming hobby around the age of 14. I had been playing video games since I could crawl
and though I rarely get to play video games anymore, I still do enjoy them. I started with Dungeons & Dragons and moved into Magic:
The Gathering and eventually into board games. I currently play board games more often than video games as they are more social than
sitting behind a computer screen whenever I have free time. I am world of warcrack sober for a couple of years now.
Why the name PauperTim? Well, I like the sound of it. TheOrangeMitten is my main gamertag and you can find it all over the place though for some places it was already taken and others the name was simply too long.
I am one of the founders of the pauper format as well. The story is a long one. I was in a MTGO clan and played a ton of magic with my clanmates. Most of them didn't have that much money so we all had pretty even powered decks and would play lots of multiplayer games, reminiscent of kitchen table magic. We would all get on teamspeak or ventrillo and just have a good time. One of the clan members, Tharionwind, had a good friend Zahori who was very active in the MTGO BBS and they had starting doing Player Run Events, and some non traditional formats were being played. Tharionwind got involved in a few, but they were tournaments with prizes, which draw forth some spikes with expensive decks.
Tharionwind wanted to create one, with a low budget. Zahori and Tharionwind found Peasent Magic and decided to make the tournaments called PDC which was short of Peasant's Deck Challenge and started advertising for it over a month in advance. Well right at that time there was this card that came out as an uncommon that was ridiculously broken. The name of the card was skullclamp. As the three of us started testing the format out and realized a few of the uncommons out at the time, minding the fact that we had a very small card pool and this is before skullclamp was banned so we had 7th edition, Invasion and up to Darksteel. I think Fifth Dawn had just come out when we started testing. We figured out, we needed a ban list. We tried without skullclamp, then brainfreeze and fecundity decks were both way stronger than the rest of the decks. We had less than a month to act at the point when we realized this.
I suggested to both of them that we should just play with all commons. For starters we couldn't check to see someone's deck if there were only 5 uncommons in the deck. We can't just walk over and pick up the deck and deck check it like real life. The second big concern was the balance of cards because if people played with the format and it was completely busted, then we were worried people wouldn't return.
We started playtesting just with commons, and we weren't thrilled at first honestly. The first decks were basically draft decks of the most recent set. We slowly started adding some older cards and realized that there was something there, and for the most part it was pretty balanced. Affinity did start to get out of hand we tried restricting and banning techniques without taking away the deck too much and eventually as the power level of the other decks rose with more cards being printed, we hit the nail on the head with removing cranial plating from the deck to make it fair.
I ran the pauper PRE's for a little while as Tharionwind started to take his leave, but then I became busy with real life and also drifted away from the game. I came back when pauper was finally put back as a real format, but have lingered in the shadows playing for a few months and then just watching videos and listening to podcasts to get my fix, then rinsing and repeating.
One thing though, is that even though I helped create the format of pauper, it really wouldn't have gone anywhere without Tharionwind, Zahori, and all of the people who actually carried on the torches for the game, running player run events and playing in events every week, and making videos on a steady basis. Those are the people you should thank for pauper and have done way more than my contribution to the format.
I plan on making several pauper, pauper cube, board game, video game, and magic articles containing reviews, news, opinions, podcasts, and videos on this website. Hopefully you will enjoy the content I provide.