Whether it is a tournament, Friday Night Magic, or just a bunch of friends getting together playing some cards, there is always going to be a select few decks that are on top of the food chain. Some obvious examples of this have been Necro, Tog, MBC (Mono Black Control), and Affinity. The thing these decks always have in common are that they always employ the top cards (and usually the most expensive cards) of a given age of Magic.

Just like in any sport, those who are willing to pay the money for the free agent are going to get the upper hand by just talent alone. The same holds true in Magic. There are no substitutes for strong rare cards. So does that mean that those of us who can’t get or afford those cards should give up? NO!

Instead, we go Rogue.

In this article, I will define a Rogue style, and then give a few examples of successful Rogue decks I used, and became fairly dominant in my area.

The term Rogue, in Magic, means to not play the standard run in the mill deck. A Rogue Player will employ not so common cards, and devise alternate strategies for victory, and will take pot shots at the top tier decks.

There are usually between three to five decks that you can expect to play at any given time. By playing something that is not one of them, you can have the upper hand, if you are properly prepared. Not only do people typically play only the top crust decks, but normally, they will prepare only for them as well.

A Rogue Player will do his best to take advantage of these facts.

So how do I go about doing this? First we must figure out what the top decks are. Since I don’t play Magic anymore, I am forced to use the last full block cycle that I played full time during; that was the Odyssey – Onslaught Block. In this time period, we had some very strong decks. UG Madness was the first one to spring up, and was very dominant due to its countering spells and speedy creatures. Soon people revitalized MBC and then discovered the overwhelming power of the Psychatog (Tog). Later in the block came Wake and then Beasts and Goblins. There were a couple stragglers that popped up here and there, but most got squashed by Tog. The most notable straggler was Reanimater. It was a very good build, but Tog completely owned it.

So now we know what the top decks are. How much closer has that gotten us to victory? Not so much, however, the next step is to examine your environment. You can have a pretty good guess of who is going to play what deck each week. This is especially true after you watch the field over the last month or so. Paying attention to practice games is also key. Just take a mental note of what you see, and what cards are being played the most. You can from there gather what might be a good deck for the upcoming tournament.

Next, take a moment and think. If last week, there were six Tog decks played, you want to stay away from a Tog style build for a few weeks, because you know most likely everyone will be gunning for it. This also gives you a pretty good idea of what might be played next week. If it’s a control deck winning a lot, then it will be a quick Goblin deck stampede the following week. So you have to use this knowledge to your benefit.

Being a Rogue Player is a full time job. You have to smarter than the other players. You have to do your homework. You have to know all the tricks, all the newest combos, and then exploit them.

During the time period suggested to you above, and then in my environment, I typically saw only a few people playing Tog, but I knew that they were not the best players. For the most part, the gaming group was a creature heavy environment. There was going to be lots of Exalted Angels, Wild Mongrels, Wurm Tokens, Arrogant Wurms, and other big fat creatures. So how did I figure out what I wanted to play? I did some simple thinking, and had some dumb luck help me spring out into the open.

First, being the big creature format, I decided I needed to play something control oriented. I needed something that could ice the creature charges, but still be able to avoid the Upheaval-Tog combo. I also decided that Enchantments and Artifacts were safe to use, since no one really expected them in that time period. The obvious card to play around for me became Opposition. I saw someone earlier in the season having some success with the card and was using Squirrel’s Nest decently with it, but was not doing enough to force the issue with the combo.

You have to also remember, that while playing a Rogue Deck, you don’t have time to screw around. Get in there, pop your cheesy combo, get the win and shuffle up. The problem the other player was having; was that she was trying to be cute with the idea. She was playing Living Wish and trying to avoid using the common creatures of the day. That’s not the right thing. Use whatever you have at your disposal to get the wins.

The other Opposition deck that I saw, employed Mobilization to tried to pump out tokens and lock people down. Again, a nice cheesy engine that should get it done, but nothing was added to the deck to force the issue. But I noticed during this failed attempt that the person was not afraid to cast face down Exalted Angels and use them as Opposition fuel until the tokens were accumulated. This is where I make a mental note of a good strategy and keep it close to my heart.

So I went to work. I gathered the main cards and so far I had Opposition, Exalted Angel, and Squirrel’s Nest. Great, I am already looking at three colors. Well, might as well employ the Birds of Paradise to make some ease of color conversion. But I was stuck. I knew the idea was the right one to take. I didn’t know how to get the deck into full force.

The following week my friend, Patrick, came home with an idea of a Wizard Opposition deck. He was going to use all the crappy Wizards to fuel the Opposition. The end result was, of course, that as we all know, Blue does not generate creatures as fast as other colors, and so Patrick consistently got his head kicked in during play testing.

It seems there is always food in his articles... last time it was Strawberries.  What will be next?  Garlic Bread?  Maybe... Pineapple Upside Down Cake?  Who knows...

We were up late cooking spaghetti one Thursday night and were talking about our two deck ideas, when we both took a breath, looked at each other with the twinkling in our eyes of small boys on Christmas Eve.

We dashed into the living room and starting going through the card binders and pulling out our ideas and tossing them into a pile. What we discovered was that while my idea could throw out some creatures speedy like, I could not keep the board under control. Patrick’s deck kept control for a bit, but could not keep up the creature count. What we delved into was to combine our ideas into one deck, and a twist, to make a seriously heinous deck that dominated our environment until 7th Edition rotated out.

We stuck with Opposition and Squirrel’s Nest as our basis of operation. The idea was to get either a Llanowar Elf and or Birds of Paradise out on the first turn, then a morphed creature on turn two, or better yet the Nest on a land. Finally, Opposition would hit the board on the third turn. I was very successful with this.

The thing we both stumbled upon were the two Muses of white and green. They were such strong additions to the deck concept. However, being experienced players, we decided to think about worst case scenarios. I also remembered the other Opposition decks that failed and recalled the comment I continually was making. How do I force the issue?

The worst case scenario was that we were hit by Duress early and lost our Opposition. Now what? Now, we stall, became the answer. How do we do that? With my friendly army of Wizards. We employed the best of the best Wizards of the time. Voidmage Prodigy was a must kill in this deck. Then we started adding Echo Tracers and finally stumbled across the funnest of all Wizards, the Willbender. However, we still did not feel we had a strong enough deck yet. A lot of player would feel this was enough, but not us. We did find some more additions, and ended up making a submission deck.

We first discovered the Riptide Laboratory. The Lab worked amazingly well with the Echo Tracer. I could block, and bounce your other creature plus my Tracer with six mana, which sounds like a lot, but it’s not so much with the mana acceleration this deck employed. Remember, we relied on getting our forth point of mana on turn three. The Willbender used with this land became a real pain for the MBC match-up, because they could no longer target me. I can remember one match in particular; my opponent had an active Visera the Dreadful and one card in hand. He cast his spell; Chainer’s Edict and targeted me to force me into sacrificing my lone face-down creature. In response I flipped my creature, a Willbender, for U1 and changed the target of the spell to him. He hastily got mad and activates Visera and targets my Willbender. I simply responded by activating the Lab, returning my ‘bender safely to my hand. This made us so happy, that we took a marker and wrote a checklist on Willbender. This checklist was a run down of all the cards we wanted to bounce the target back onto the caster. A few of the cards we wrote on the card were Chainer’s Edict, Stone Rain, Duress, Unsummon (….your own Wurm token?), Naturalize, etc.

Lastly, to finish off the deck, we ended up adding Static Orb. The concept was that if they could afford to Pyroclasm or Infest, we were screwed. The Static Orb forced the opponent to reveal his plan to us by choosing to untap two lands or creatures, and we would just re-tap them, since the Seedborn Muse kept untapping our permanents during their untap phases.

The deck was highly successful, not only because it got Opposition in play quickly, but it had many ways to win. If I did not lock you down, I killed you with an Angel assault. I could ping you to death with my wizards and squirrels, or I could just lock it up the Orbs and Opposition.

The second example I wanted to share with you was not nearly as successful, but much more fun for me to play. It was centered around the drawing power that blue experienced in that day, such as Opportunity, Concentration, Compulsion, Deep Analysis, and Arcanis the Omnipotent.

The deck came to me while I was looking at someone else’s trade binder, and I made an off remark about the shear number of Words of War he had in his binder. He commented on how crappy the card is and that no one would, should, or could use it. So I traded him and acquired three of them. I went to work mentally assembling the deck while looking at my environment. I felt that with the number of counters I had available, I could hold my own with Tog. Wake would be a problem, but it wasn’t very popular at our store. The main deck at this time was UG Madness.

What I decided to do was to employ the concept that Burning Bridges tried to employ. I would be drawing from the blue portion of the deck, and burning from the red, but would rely on the Ensnaring Bridge to keep the Wild Mongrels and Aquamebas and Wurms (Oh my!) at bay until I got my combo up and running. I liked to think of and describe it as a missile launching silo. It takes time to get the big bay doors open and missiles in place and aimed, but once they launched, head for the hills.

That’s exactly what the deck did. I used early counters to keep myself alive until I got to the Bridge. I would most likely do this by milling through my deck with Compulsion. My frantic casting, trying to stay alive, would keep me at a low card count in hand to begin with, and then the Bridge was an awesome saver. Soon I would get Words of War in play, and could slowly pick off and weed out the creatures, until I could draw into Arcanis.

At six mana, Arcanis had ability to dodge incoming fire power or tap to draw three cards. His only draw back was that he is a Legend. Once Arcanis was in play and survived summoning sickness, the game was very nearly over. At the end of my opponents turn I would tap Arcanis, and send three mana through the Words of War and pump six damage into my opponent. It did not take long for sixes to add up to 20 and a victory. The problem the deck did experience was that Duress hurt badly. Of course a typical deck has problems with Duress, and that did make that feel a little better I guess, but it still stinks when one card kills you.

The problem a Rogue deck has is its own success. You are going in with a notably weak deck, and are relying heavily on the surprise factor. Once it gets to be a known deck, people become aware of it, and now it is just another weak deck. It’s now time to change decks for a little while. The Rogue Player needs to be the Gorilla Warfare Warrior of the store. You have to know when you can get in your hits, and when you can’t win a fight. If you can’t beat the top deck, hold you idea in storage for the right moment.

So how do you know if you’re being successful as a Rogue Player? Simply put, if you break up the current environment in your store, as gratifying as it is, you did your job. People will start off by changing sideboard strategies, to include you, and weaken their chances against other decks. Soon they will change their decks completely to something more stable (in their minds) and here you are playing a completely new deck. As always, you are one step in front of the crowd.

Lastly, the best feeling in the world as a Rogue Player is when someone asks to look at your deck. Never deny the person, because you are being Rogue to change the tone of the store. By letting this person do so, you are encouraging him to try something new.

I do remember when my store decided not to play Tog anymore because Tog was an auto-loss (believe it or not) to my Wizard-Op deck. So it was me, one person of a group of twenty, making a top tier deck unplayable at the tournament.

That’s when you know that you are doing well as a Rogue Player.

Chris Newton

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