On February 15th, the Pauper Commander (PDH) scene turned its eyes to the Hudson Valley 1k. It was a landmark event for the format—48 players battling it out in New York, marking one of the largest turnouts we’ve ever seen for a competitive PDH tournament. When the dust settled, one player stood atop the bracket. That player was Dallas, known to many in the online community as the Princex of Pauper.
He didn’t just win; he piloted Disciple of Deceit to a dominating 5-0-1 record.
I hopped on a call with Dallas a few days after the win. I wanted to know how he did it, but I also wanted to know what he was doing. Disciple of Deceit is a deck that scares people. It’s a deck that looks like a pile of random commons until you’re dead on Turn 3.
We spent over an hour talking about “Turbo” in PDH, the ethics of pubstomping, and why playing this deck feels less like Magic: The Gathering and more like a high-stakes game of Mahjong.
“I Wonder If This Card Should Be Banned”
We started the call with pleasantries but Dallas didn’t waste time getting to the point. When I brought up the data I’d been seeing on Disciple of Deceit, he dropped a bombshell.
“I wonder if [Disciple of Deceit] should be banned,” he said, casually.
I had to pause. “What makes you think that it would deserve a ban?” I asked.
“The win rate is extremely high,” Dallas explained. He believes that in the hands of a pilot who knows the lines, the deck wins “over 70% of the time.” He argued that while we care about general data, we should also care about what is possible at the ceiling. “If you give those people this deck, and they win over 70% of the time, that’s a problem. And should at least be assessed.”
I pushed back a bit with some data I had pulled up. I mentioned players like Sukunado and Duke Slayer, who had brought the deck to recent Common Cause events with mixed results (records like 1-3 or 1-1-2).
Dallas wasn’t deterred. “The deck can be built and played so many different ways,” he said. He sees those mixed results as a symptom of the deck’s complexity, not its power level. It’s a hard deck to build, and an even harder one to fly.
The Evolution: Alex Tong vs. The Toolbox
To understand why Dallas’s version of the deck is so lethal, you have to look at its history. Dallas explained that there have been two prevailing schools of thought on Disciple.
First, there was Dallas’s original vision: a slow, grinding toolbox deck.
“The idea in my head was… like Gretchen Titchwillow or Thrasios,” he said. The plan was to lay out low-value pieces—1/1s and 1/3s—that nobody wants to waste removal on. “Nobody really wants to invest resources early when I’m not actively trying to win the game. But eventually, I get to the point where I have too many things that I can do.”
Then, there was Alex Tong. Alex took the deck to Richest Rags 5 and went 5-2-0 with a completely different philosophy.
“Alex used a list that was very, very focused on the Mirran Spy and Battered Golem lines with Retraction Helix and Banishing Knack,” Dallas told me. Alex focused on a single way to win.
For the Hudson Valley 1k, Dallas decided to fuse the two.
“I saw the new lines that he was using… so I was like, well, let’s just kind of form a hybrid of these ideas,” Dallas said. He adopted Alex’s focus on the Mirran Spy combo lines but kept his own toolbox philosophy. “There’s so many lines.”
The result? A deck obsessed with the numbers 1 and 3.
“I cut all of the five cost cards from the deck, except for Street Wraith,” he explained. Why Street Wraith? “Because Street Wraith is basically free. It’s just two life to draw a card. You get to play one less card in your deck.”
He streamlined the list to focus on 1-mana value and 3-mana value cards because Disciple of Deceit’s “transmute” ability allows you to discard a card to search for another of the same mana cost. By homogenizing his mana curve, every card became a tutor for every other card.
Playing Mahjong with Magic Cards
This is where Dallas’s brain really started to shine. I asked him to explain the “Turbo” nature of the deck, and instead of using Magic terminology, he started talking about tiles.
“The way this deck works is I plot out all the win paths that I have [like a Mahjong hand],” he said. “It’s one and nine of all three suits… North, South, East, West… If you have one and nine… and nothing else, well, that’s all of the tiles that you can have in your hand. You just win.”
In the language of PDH, Dallas can see which combos he’s closest to completing in his opening hand - which he rarely mulligans as cards in hand is such an important resource - and determine the fastest route to a winning combo.
He likened the deck to Mahjong. In Mahjong, you are constantly discarding tiles to pick up new ones, trying to complete a specific “hand” or set. Disciple does the exact same thing. You discard a card to tutor the exact piece you need.
“Even if I have like a combo piece for line one, I can always throw the card away and go get another combo piece for line two,” he said. “It’s this mesh of possibilities.”
He described a state in Mahjong known as a “waiting hand,” where you have everything you need except one specific tile. That is exactly how Disciple plays. You sit there, looking harmless, just waiting to transmute that one specific card to complete the set.
“The deck theoretically has two Turn 2 wins that it can do,” he added casually. “It has a Turn 3 win. There’s multiple Turn 4 wins… When you have a lot of them, the chances of being able to luck into one or to manufacture one go up precipitously.”
The Only “Turbo” Deck in the Format
We talked a lot about archetypes. I asked him what “Turbo” actually looks like in a format defined by commons.
“I think it’s the only real turbo deck in the format,” Dallas claimed.
He contrasted it with decks like Dargo/Kediss or Gretchen. Gretchen is a combo deck, sure, but it’s not Turbo. It doesn’t sacrifice everything for speed. Disciple does.
“It forces the opponents to play slower in order to make sure that it doesn’t just steal the damn game,” Dallas said. And that’s the trap. “They’re going to get greedy. They’re going to think, ‘Oh, well, someone else will have a piece of interaction’… They’ll look at the board and say, ‘Ah, there’s no way he’s got all four of those cards in his hand.’ I’m going to play my mana rock… and then the game’s going to be over.”
It creates a psychological pressure cooker. If you tap out on Turn 2 to play your Sky Diamond, Dallas might just win.
The Combos
I asked him for the nitty-gritty. What are the actual cards winning these games? The answer is a list of cards that look like absolute draft chaff until they are infinite.
The Combo Engine: It usually involves Mirran Spy or Battered Golem. You combine this with Banishing Knack or Retraction Helix on a creature to bounce 0-cost artifacts repeatedly.
Untapping the Disciple: To keep transmuting, you need to untap Disciple. “You actually never want to use Freed from the Real on Disciple,” Dallas warned me. “That’s arguably one of the most important cards in the deck [for the mana combo].”
Instead, he uses cards like Moonsnare Prototype and Springleaf Drum. But the MVP? “Mothdust Changeling,” Dallas laughed. “It’s a one mana drop… Tap an untapped creature you control to give it flying. It’s just a tap outlet.”
The Win Condition: Once you have infinite mana and infinite untaps, how do you win? Dallas admitted to a funny mishap at the Hudson Valley event. He intended to run Bloodrite Invoker. “I could not get a physical copy of the card, and the organizer of the event did not allow proxies,” he admitted.
So, he improvised. He ran Timura’s Invoker instead. “That card ended up being fine. It helped me win the game at least once,” he said. It allowed him to draw his deck and find another win condition.
The Finals
The final pod of the Hudson Valley 1k was a shark tank. It featured a Syr Konrad player (Russell Harder) and a Gretchen Titchwillow player. These are established decks. Russell is a very experienced player.
Dallas’s “Mahjong machine” outpaced them all, but not in the way you’d expect.
“It’s a little funny that the combo deck that tries to win… with four different combos ended up just beating my opponents down,” Dallas recounted.
The Gretchen player tried to lock the board down, but Dallas had accumulated so much incidental value and life that he simply outlasted them. “I actually had more life than him,” he noted. By the time the control decks had exhausted themselves stopping each other, Dallas had enough power to win the game through combat damage.
Speaking to the deck’s flexibility, Dallas included: “Eventually, I get to the point where I have too many things that I can do, and then you’re not able to respond because the types of pieces that I have available are so varied.”
Ethics of the “Pubstomp”
We shifted gears toward the end to talk about community. Dallas is passionate about growing PDH. He manages a board game restaurant and bar, and he runs events, something we have in common. We spent some time talking about our favorite format.
He admitted to a strategy many of us have tried: bringing a PDH deck to an EDH table. “Sit down at regular EDH tables and just be like, hey, here’s my silly pauper deck, and then just like absolutely wipe the floor with them,” he said.
But he’s stopped doing that. “I think that a lot of us have come to the conclusion that that’s probably not very ethical,” he said. EDH players are looking for a social experience; Dallas is looking to win at all costs. “If I eat a board wipe on turn four, I’m ruined. But if you don’t interact with me… I’m going to win the game.”
He now prefers a strict Rule 0 conversation. He tells them, “This deck is probably going to win.” He treats it like a cEDH deck sitting at a high-power table. “I think that if you’re playing a good combo deck in this format… and you sit down at a bracket three game… that’s the appropriate environment to try and sell people on it.”
What’s Next for the Princex?
Dallas is a busy guy. His work at the board game bar is taking off (“It’s kind of been popping off,” he said), which means fewer events run by him personally. He thinks his tournament organizing might drop to once a year.
But his competitive drive isn’t going anywhere. “I wanted the ecosystem to exist so that I could go to other tournaments and win them,” he told me. “I believe I have fulfilled that prophecy as of this past weekend.”
He plans to join the Wanderer’s PDH League, and he plans to keep proving that Disciple of Deceit is the boogeyman of the format. “If the [rules committee] doesn’t decide to heed my warning,” he said, referencing his ban talk, “I will show them why they should.”
If you see Dallas sitting across from you at a table, shuffling a pile of blue and black commons, check your hand. If you don’t have interaction on Turn 1, you might just be a tile in his winning hand.
Follow Dallas:
- Discord: Look for “Princex of Pauper” in the PDH Home Base and other major servers.
Links
Dallas’s Disciple of Deceit List