Aburame Shino

Aburame Shino's Corner

Steps to Creating a Rogue Deck Part 2

Welcome back to Aburame Shino's Corner. If you read last week's Article on rogue deck building, I explained the art of exploiting weaknesses in Tier 1 decks. Now that you know how to do that, let's begin my next explanation. 2. Choosing the proper colors to use to exploit the weakness. Finding out what colors best beat a deck isn't always as simple as running Boil to defeat Mono-Blue Control, or using Zodiac Monkey to Forestwalk over in the Mirror Match. Sometimes the best colors to defeat your opponent do not come out as clear, and it takes some time to find the correct colors to exploit weaknesses. Also, even though you think a color will be good against a Tier 1 deck, that doesn't necessarily mean your assumption is right. Let's set up a quick simulation to test your skills. Let's say you've been using a Mono-Red Burn deck at your local tournament, and you do incredibly well. However, your Metagame is incredibly Meloku heavy and that's the one card in the format that you've been having troubles against. Everytime you try to Char the card the opponent uses Eiganjo Castle to make the Char not work, and whenever you use Pyroclasm to get rid of the tokens he just makes more, making your efforts futile. Outside of double-burning the Meloku to kill it, what do you think the best way to deal with Meloku would be? Take a minute to think of something. When I was finished thinking about ways to beat  this, I came up with two cards that could beat the destructive power of Meloku, both of them not even staying in the red color. The first one is Night of Souls' Betrayal. Using Night of Souls' Betrayal will turn the opposing Meloku into a 1/3, and make it so that none of the tokens will stay in play without some help from a creature pumper like Glorious Anthem. The second card I came up with, and would probably be a better choice if you wanted to go rouge, would be Reverence. Not only would nobody see it coming, but it would also keep the tokens and Meloku from attacking, plus give you the color White that lets you use cards such as Lightning Helix. While it doesn't keep the tokens from blocking, you're playing Burn, so it shouldn't matter as you can throw damage at their face. When you're thinking of cards that will defeat your opponent, try not to stay in the same color-scheme that you wanted to. Just because you can stay within a certain color scheme doesn't necessarily mean that you should. Limiting yourself to colors that won't help you beat your meta will stop you from making your deck as good as it can possibly be. This concludes my second article. If you have any criticism, thoughts, or just want to talk to me, you can contact me at OrconStores@yahoo.com, or by AIM at OrconStores.