A Rogue Session

Features

metalmagic

27 March 2012

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A couple months ago I posted a thread in the forums asking users to suggest standard cards or combos around which I would build decks. This proved to be a very successful venture, even though I didn’t actually get around to building every single deck, but the ones I did build proved to be fun for me, and the community seemed to really enjoy it, so I am now moving onward with this idea into a weekly article, possibly bi-weekly if needed and if I have the time. Being chosen for February’s Player of the Month only helped encourage me to begin this, as I figured it was time to start contributing a little more to this great site.

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What I’m going to cover in these articles

General deck building advice will be given throughout the articles. At the end of each article, I will ask for a new card/combo to build around, and I will choose the one I like the most. I will be sure to choose a different user each week, so if you don’t get yours picked the first or second time, don’t give up! I will make this at least a bi-weekly thing if I get so many requests that it takes a lottery win to get your card/combo chosen for the next article.

This first article will explain my thought process when I begin to design a deck, all the way up to play testing and possibly beyond. The deck I will use for this will be the deck that received the most positive feedback from the community when I began this at the beginning of the year, Phyrexian Renaissance. The idea was submitted by mossflower, as he wanted a deck built around Rooftop Storm. I originally came up with the deck Rooftop Renaissance, but after I finished it I looked at his profile and noticed in his bio section he says “If the deck doesn't kill in one hit, you're doing it wrong.” I then tailored the new version of the deck to do specifically that, kill in one hit. When suggestion time comes, feel free to explain your play style to me during suggestions so I can do the same thing for you.

Finally, mossflower also suggested that something he would like to see would be a custom card to go in each deck I make, more specifically, creating custom cards from the deck builder’s point of view. He says a lot of decks just feel like they are missing SOMETHING, and I can agree with that. The created card will be my attempt to fix that lack of something that the deck is missing. I am open to suggestions for other things to do in these articles. Leave me plenty of feedback so I’ll know how to make these articles more enjoyable for the readers. If there is something I am doing adequately, let me know! If there is something I am doing inadequately, also let me know! Now….. On to the deck.

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To begin, I am going to explain how I choose my cards for decks I build, or more specifically, how I chose the cards for this deck. This deck is PRE-DARK ASCENSION, so please don’t ask why I don’t have X card from DKA. Whenever an idea comes to me for a new deck, I ALWAYS go to my computer and open up Notepad. I make a list of all the cards that the deck is based around, and I follow that up by typing all the cards I can think of that would be beneficial for the deck. In this case, my beginning list for Phyrexian Renaissance looked something like this:

Rooftop Storm
Hand of the Praetors
Phyrexian Crusader
Creeping Renaissance

Keep in mind I made this list after I made Rooftop Renaissance, so I already had a lot of ideas for it. Creeping Renaissance was originally Praetor's Counsel, until I remembered that the Renaissance does the same thing for the deck cheaper, AND from the graveyard, so this enabled me to run fewer of them and run plenty of self-mill since the only card I have to draw is Rooftop Storm. The realization that almost all of the black phyrexian creatures are zombies is what made me create the second version.

After you get the base cards down you want to have in the deck, it’s time to do research to try to find more cards that compliment your idea. I always use the advanced search engine on CoolStuffInc because I‘ve used that site longer than I‘ve known about TappedOut, although I know most people use Gatherer. In combo decks, such as this, you need to think about cards that will help speed up the combo and/or make it more consistent. In aggro decks you would probably be searching for other cards that hit hard as soon as possible. Control decks are somewhat different. Based on the colors you are running, you may or may not be running counter spells. Blue is the main color of control and usually runs counters, but not always. Quite a few versions of U/B and U/B/x Tezzeret Control I’ve seen and played against do not actually run any counters main board and pretty much only run Flashfreeze in the sideboard. I’ll go into control deck construction in more depth at a later point, probably in Solar Flare and U/x builds (and in a different article).

This deck requires a bunch of creatures to be in your hand at once in order to get the ‘one hit kill’ by casting all copies of Hand of the Praetors for free with Rooftop Storm, and then casting all other infect zombies for free, resulting in a quadrillion poison counters for the opponent. In order to get them to your hand, they must be returned from the graveyard by Creeping Renaissance. How do they get to they graveyard, though? Since I already addressed the other two stipulations for the win condition, all of my support cards will go into getting creatures into the graveyard and actually being the creatures. Since the creatures themselves are the win condition, we need to search for them first. I don’t know how Gatherer’s search engine works, but on CSI I narrowed the search to show only Zombies from the Scars Block with Infect. This gave me all the infect guys I needed, so my focus was then turned to milling myself efficiently. I found that probably the best card for continuous mill on myself would be Curse of the Bloody Tome. Armored Skaab fits well in the deck because 1.) it’s a zombie, B.) it mills yourself and III.) he has a badass weapon that looks like he ripped the pendulum off a pendulum machine and welded it onto a hilt. Oh, and he is a decent blocker for the early game to help stall for the combo. Forbidden Alchemy is an auto-include because it does everything we want this deck to do, can do it from the grave, and possibly twice. At this point our list looks like this:

Rooftop Storm
Hand of the Praetors
Phyrexian Crusader
Creeping Renaissance
Curse of the Bloody Tome
Armored Skaab
Forbidden Alchemy

The deck is definitely starting to take shape by this point. Most decks I start work on don’t look nearly this streamlined in card choice by now, but like I stated previously, this is the second version of the deck so the card choices were fairly obvious to me at this point. Now I need more creatures to win with, so these are the available choices for Zombies with Infect:

Contagious Nim
Scourge Servant
Blackcleave Goblin
Toxic Nim

Now, none of these look particularly exciting to choose from, so we have a couple things to consider when choosing. Our mana curve needs to be roughly proportional, or in other words not have too many high converted mana cost (CMC) creatures. We want to choose the ones that will have the most impact on the board when they hit, as we will need to be casting creatures from our hand before the combo goes off to either stay alive or go on the offensive to make the combo easier, while keeping the previous statement in mind. The three I choose were Contagious Nim, Blackcleave Goblin, and Scourge Servant as Toxic Nim is just terrible, although he isn‘t too much worse than the other three, and we already have a the 6-drop slot filled with Rooftop Storm. They stick with the mana curve, being 3, 4, and 5 drops, respectively, and they sort of hold up in battle, although none of them are particularly exciting. Fortunately we have Phyrexian Crusader to make up for the lack of awesomeness presented in these other creatures, and Hand of the Praetors makes each of these guys a bit more viable. Now that we have a relatively stable looking card base, this is the point where I like to set each card to a 4-of and count to see how much room I have used up if everything were to stay as 4-ofs and then narrow down to the number of non-land cards I want. In this deck, I wanted 23 lands minimum, meaning I would get 37 non-land cards maximum. Let’s take a look at what we have to work with right now, including the Toxic Nims because I normally list ALL options, no matter how bad they seem, setting everything to a 4-of.

4x Rooftop Storm
4x Hand of the Praetors
4x Phyrexian Crusader
4x Creeping Renaissance
4x Curse of the Bloody Tome
4x Armored Skaab
4x Forbidden Alchemy
4x Contagious Nim
4x Scourge Servant
4x Blackcleave Goblin
4x Toxic Nim

This gives us 44 cards. We want to get down to at most 37, so we need to cut 7 cards. The immediate cut I see is obviously the Toxic Nims, bringing us to 40 cards. Rooftop Storm is pointless in multiples, and as a 4-of you will often see more than one per game, and it gets quite frustrating. Cutting one brings us to 39 cards. Creeping Renaissance is useful even when milled, and since we can go through our deck at very fast paces, cutting one is not harmful at all, bringing us to 38 cards. Finally, Scourge Servant is solely here for being an infectious zombie, so cutting one of him barely affects the deck, lowers the overall mana curve, and gets us down to that 37 we were looking for. Our list now looks like this:

3x Rooftop Storm
4x Hand of the Praetors
4x Phyrexian Crusader
3x Creeping Renaissance
4x Curse of the Bloody Tome
4x Armored Skaab
4x Forbidden Alchemy
4x Contagious Nim
3x Scourge Servant
4x Blackcleave Goblin

This is the point where I generally get an idea of what my land is going to look like and if I will need any mana fixing/ramp (AKA Sphere of the Suns). Merely the presence of only two green spells, Creeping Corrosion, and their double green casting costs are a good indicator I will, since I don’t want to dedicate many of the land slots for green. We are already at the 37 non-land limit I did not want to surpass, so in order to fit them in, we will have to cut some cards. This is the tricky part, as the list already seems to be relatively well-defined, so what do you take out? I came to the conclusion to cut 1 Creeping Renaissance, 1 Armored Skaab, and 1 Curse of the Bloody Tome. My reasons for these cuts are as follows:

Creeping Renaissance has flashback, so it doesn’t matter if it isn‘t drawn, unlike Rooftop Storm. If it is milled, that is fine since it will still be utilized from the grave. Milling every turn will increase the odds of seeing it, so 2 should be fine to keep the deck stable. Armored Skaab is only in here as a blocker and additional mill, so although he does help reach the ultimate goal, he is not essential to it. He does have the benefit of being able to be cast for free with Rooftop Storm, but that is hardly relevant unless you have a BUNCH of mana open and want to cast both Rooftop Storm and Creeping Renaissance simultaneously and just so happen to want to hit another zombie to bring back. Curse of the Bloody Tome is great, but it is a very dead draw late game unless you want to mill your opponent, which might not be a bad option as an alternate win condition against control decks. While it increases the speed of finding the cards you need and getting your dudes in the gravy-yard, it can begin to feel redundant after you see the third, possibly second, in a game since this is not a fast combo deck.

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We now have a complete list, excluding land, so let’s look at the full 37 once more before deciding on 23 land to add in. 3x Rooftop Storm
4x Hand of the Praetors
4x Phyrexian Crusader
2x Creeping Renaissance
3x Curse of the Bloody Tome
3x Armored Skaab
4x Forbidden Alchemy
4x Contagious Nim
3x Scourge Servant
4x Blackcleave Goblin

I don’t do math to figure out what exact percentage of my cards are what color and do my land accordingly. I do, however, get rough estimates because it is much quicker. 13/37 (holy carp, I didn’t even realize how leet the blue portion was) of the cards are Blue (roughly 1/3), and we’ll say the other 2/3 is Black since there are only 2 green cards. Blue has NO double mana requirements, while black does. The two Creeping Renaissance are also double green, regrettably, even from the grave, so green is going to have to have a larger presence in the mana base than would be preferred. To make up for this, Green dual lands will be used so we don’t look stupid sitting there with 6 Forests in play and a bunch of U/B cards sitting in hand. We will still use a Forest or two to help increase the odds of the dual lands coming into play untapped on turn 2, as a basic land, double Woodland Cemetery hand happens occasionally, and starting with the wrong basic land sucks. Since Blue and Black are the main colors, their dual lands will also need to be used. There is such a thing as using TOO many dual lands, however, as you will play games where next to none of your lands come into play untapped, and those games are slow and frustrating. 4x of each of the available duals (16 all together) is slightly excessive and will cause this problem to happen more often than one would like. Our options for lands are as follows:

Woodland Cemetery
Hinterland Harbor
Darkslick Shores
Drowned Catacomb
Forest
Island
Swamp

The basics should go without saying, but whatever. We will run 4 of each of the UB Duals because they are so important. Having both colors available very early is important. We have until fairly late into the game to assemble our GG mana, so we won’t focus as much on Green. We will run 4 Woodland Cemetery since black is the more prevalent of the two main colors. That is 12 of our 23 slots filled up already. I normally like to keep around 10 basic land if the rest are duals to help with the odds of getting them, at least in 3 color decks. 4 color is a whole other story, so we won’t go there in this article. To make it exactly 10 basics, we will fill the extra slot with our 1 other dual, Hinterland Harbor. Our black mana is represented very well in the duals, so now that we are moving on to the basics, it should be fine to run roughly the same number of Swamps and Islands, so to make it as even as possible and still have at least one Forest, 5 Swamps, 4 Islands, and 1 Forest should be perfectly acceptable. The extra blue in the basics is also important because while we don’t need as much blue early on as black to cast things, we are casting more important things early on like Armored Skaab, Curse of the Bloody Tome, and Forbidden Alchemy to fuel the graveyard for the combo. Let’s take a quick look at what the mana base finally looks like:

4x Woodland Cemetery
1x Hinterland Harbor
4x Darkslick Shores
4x Drowned Catacomb
1x Forest
4x Island
5x Swamp
Black Sources: 17/23
Blue Sources: 13/23
Green Sources: 6/23

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Sphere of the Suns adds 3 additional sources of each color, so I believe we are very well set. Each color is appropriately represented in the mana base, thanks to the abundance of dual lands currently. This brings us to the conclusion of the construction of the main deck. Do not forget that this deck was made BEFORE Dark Ascension was released, so there may be better options for cards now. We now have a full 60-card deck, ready to test! Testing is possibly the most important aspect of deck building as it allows you to find your decks’ weaknesses and strengths and allows you to adjust the mainboard and sideboard accordingly. I recommend doing this before playing in ANY tournament if you want to perform better. Adequate testing also helps you get a good general feel for how your deck should be playing and helps with mulliganing.

For my next article, I want users to either A.) Suggest cards/combos for me to build a completely new deck around and I will do much the same thing I did here, but with less detail since I think I explained relatively well my process, or B.) Suggest me other things to include in the next article. I want this to be an article everyone can read and hopefully get something out of, so I can adjust my topics to whatever people want to hear! Rogue deck building or not, I will still enjoy making it, so the future of my articles is completely dependent upon you, the user! Leave me plenty of feedback so I will know what to improve on and what I am doing well to make reading these a pleasant experience for all (or most). And yes, I know this one is excruciatingly long, but thank you if you read the whole thing!