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I had only been writing this column for a few months when I discovered a tendency of mine. I was having readers submit decks in those days and I was doing a bit of a "75% tune-up" of sorts before I realized the concept violated a fairly central principle of 75% building. You don't make a deck 75% by taking out strong cards and adding weaker ones, and that was what I was trying to do at first. To counter that, I targeted "take out tutors and very strong staples and add synergistic cards instead" as a technique, which saw me going tribal, a lot. In the Nekusar article, I said:
And I meant it. I was using building a tribal deck as a bit of a crutch. It's 7 years later and I'd like to think I have learned a little bit about how to build a bit more creatively. The problem? Avoiding building tribal has become a crutch. It's become an even easier crutch to rely upon lately because everything these days is tribal, so avoiding a tribal build immediately makes it off-meta and therefore more interesting. But 75% doesn't mean off-meta, does it? It means picking one of our principles and building around it from the ground up. We can build a novel and interesting tribal deck, can't we? If you insist on being off-meta, why not do both; tribal and off-meta? I have just the card to build around.
Umbris, Fear Manifest has two tribes in its text box and, naturally, players are taking advantage by jamming a big pile of Nightmares and Horrors into the deck. And why not? The deck literally plays best when you do that. The meta build is to include these creatures because the deck functions perfectly when you do. So, if we're building a tribal deck but want to build off-meta, how do we reconcile all of these factors? By building a tribal deck, but the tribe isn't Nightmares, and it isn't Horrors. The tribe is Rogues.
The reason for doing this is simple - Rogues put cards into their graveyard rather than exiling them. This lets us have a crack at them before they get exiled in some of our games and in some other games, we'll have cards like Planar Void, Tormod's Crypt[/card,] and [card]Draugr Necromancer to exile anything we mill, meaning Rogues will be functionally identical except you trigger Mill by playing a cheap creature or hitting them with something unblockable rather than tapping out to play a big, clunky monster like Toxrill, the Corrosive or Dream Eater. Umbris wasn't designed to play with Tribal Rogues, but everything that deck does synergizes with how Umbris was meant to be played that you won't really notice a difference. How would it look?
Going REALLY Rogue | Commander | Jason Alt
- Commander (1)
- 1 Umbris, Fear Manifest
- Creatures (29)
- 1 Anowon, the Ruin Thief
- 1 Changeling Outcast
- 1 Consuming Aberration
- 1 Dauthi Voidwalker
- 1 Enigma Thief
- 1 Faerie Vandal
- 1 Frogtosser Banneret
- 1 Ghostly Pilferer
- 1 Glasspool Mimic
- 1 Gonti, Lord of Luxury
- 1 Invisible Stalker
- 1 Krydle of Baldur's Gate
- 1 Lazav, Dimir Mastermind
- 1 Marang River Prowler
- 1 Merfolk Windrobber
- 1 Nighthawk Scavenger
- 1 Nightveil Sprite
- 1 Notion Thief
- 1 Oona, Queen of the Fae
- 1 Opposition Agent
- 1 Soaring Thought-Thief
- 1 Stinkdrinker Bandit
- 1 Sure-Footed Infiltrator
- 1 Sygg, River Cutthroat
- 1 Syr Konrad, the Grim
- 1 Thieves' Guild Enforcer
- 1 Thieving Skydiver
- 1 Triton Shorestalker
- 1 Zareth San, the Trickster
- Instants (4)
- 1 Aetherize
- 1 Cyclonic Rift
- 1 Drown in the Loch
- 1 Soul Manipulation
- Sorceries (8)
- 1 Distant Melody
- 1 Extract from Darkness
- 1 Feed the Swarm
- 1 Knowledge Exploitation
- 1 Maddening Cacophony
- 1 Necromantic Selection
- 1 Notorious Throng
- 1 Predators' Hour
- Enchantments (9)
- 1 Cunning Rhetoric
- 1 Leyline of the Void
- 1 Military Intelligence
- 1 Mind's Dilation
- 1 Planar Void
- 1 Reconnaissance Mission
- 1 Reflections of Littjara
- 1 Rogue Class
- 1 Web of Inertia
This was... actually super easy. It turns out a LOT of the cards that go in the stock Umbris deck are rogues. Umbris plays Dauthi Voidwalker, Notion Thief, Sakashima, Opposition Agent, etc. The thing is, it's not even about the cards played in common, it's about how the two strategies play very similarly. Rouges decks are about milling and then exiling if you must, so as long as you're willing to include a lot of the exile cards that Umbris decks run anyway, the extra work is worth not having to pay seven mana for Hullbreaker Horror and watch it eat a Doom Blade. Your smaller creatures allow you to get more out and just swing at their face. Best of all, you are exiling their stuff to play it yourself rather than growing your commander because a pile of unblockable Rogues do more damage than a big, vulnerable Umbris anyway. You'll incidentally get some counters on it, sure, but it's not your main focus. Having your commander be your backup plan seems kind of awkward, but when you see how the deck plays, you won't complain.
This is a fairly straightforward list, but there is a bit of novel tech I'm proud of and I'm going to highlight it. The first is the inclusion of Web of Inertia. Web forces them to do your dirty work for you - exiling their own cards and growing your commander. If they choose not to grow your commander, no big deal, attack someone else, then. I also love the inclusion of Predators' Hour, a card that's really bad in a deck with a pile of 6 mana Nightmares but which does a ton of work when you smack them with 7 3/3 Oona tokens. Cunning Rhetoric is also very good here. As always, I'm up to my old tricks and I'm running Snow-Covered Basics literally just for Draugr Necromancer, a card that is 100% worth doing that for.
What do you think? Should I have kept it simple and played a few Nightmares? Maybe a hybrid approach with Maskwood Nexus and Xenograft? Or is this sleek and nimble Rogues build right up your alley? Leave it for me in the comments section and let's head into the last article of 2021 the right way. Until next time!
