Interview: Alexandre Weber - Four-time Brazilian Pauper Champion & PFP Member

It was the last week of October 2016, and Peregrine Drake was about to be banned. Several Pauper players gathered at a famous store in the Liberdade neighborhood of São Paulo to compete in the National Championship. That year, I had moved to the city and was taking a break from Magic, but I occasionally visited the stores to get to know the environments - on one of those trips, I not only bought a Mono Black Devotion deck but also participated in a qualifier, winning a tournament that I had no intention of winning.

Then, I was in the Nationals. The first round was about to begin. In front of me, a calm and enthusiastic man greeted me. “Good luck!” - we said to each other. Luck was something that, on the first turn, I discovered I would need a lot of: he was playing Burn, I was playing Mono Black Monarch, it was impossible to win that match without tons of luck.

My turn 4 of Game 1 was to cast Thorn of the Black Rose and take the Monarch token from my deckbox. At the time, Monarch had not yet arrived at Magic Online and was a mechanic exclusive to paper (the National adopted the MTGO legality only in 2017), but it was a tech already known in some regions of São Paulo - the opponent took the card to read, then took the token to read, and I tried to explain the mechanic as simple as I could: “It's like a Phyrexian Arena that works at the end of the turn, if you deal combat damage to me, you gain control of it”, to which he replied “Cool!”.

As expected, that enthusiastic guy beat me 2-0. As I signed the slip, his name stuck in my head: Alexandre Weber. He stood up, we wished each other good luck, I swallowed my frustration at getting the worst possible match in the first round and continued my participation. A day later, I found out on Facebook that Alexandre had been crowned national champion in that tournament.

Eight years have passed since that day. In one of the groups I participate in, someone said early in the afternoon: “Weber won the National Championship again!” Yes, again, because this wasn’t the second time – since that fateful encounter in the first round of what would be his first national title, Alexandre Weber has already taken the trophy home four times: in 2016, 2017, 2018 and now in 2024.

Weber started playing Magic at the age of seven, playing with friends and then moved on to competitive Yu-Gi-Oh!, returning to Magic only in 2015, where he bet on Pauper because it was the only format where he could have a deck.

Today, he is not only a four-time Brazilian champion and one of the best and most influential Pauper players in Brazil and the world, but he is also a member of the Pauper Format Panel, a committee that collaborates with Wizards of the Coast to regulate the Pauper Metagame and the most important initiative in the format’s recent history. Alexandre is also a content creator on his YouTube channel.

This week, I was able to meet with him again to talk about Pauper, the Metagame, and his perspective on what the ideal format would be, as well as discuss the Pauper Format Panel and the future of the format.

On behalf of the Cards Realm team, I would like to thank Alexandre Weber for granting us this interview. You can find Alexandre Weber on his Twitter account (@webermtg) and also on his YouTube channel.

Thanks for reading!