“He raged at the world, at his family, at his life. But mainly, he just raged.”
I’ve been meaning to write for ages about the Raging Goblin Rule. Whenever making a Red Deck, there is often a temptation to include Raging Goblin. This is an error.
The Raging Goblin Rule states that there is always a better one-mana Goblin that you could put in your deck instead of Raging Goblin, and that if there isn’t, you need to find another deck. The reason for this is that a 1/1 haste creature with no other abilities is never the right threat, and as Mike told you recently, there are such things as wrong threats as well as wrong answers. The Raging Goblin knows this, which is one of the main causes of his general rage.
The only way that I would ever play Raging Goblin is if, instead of being a 1/1 for R, it were, say, a 2/1 for R. Despite my daily e-mails to Wizards of the Coast R&D for the past four years on this very subject, they have not seen fit to print a 2/1 Goblin with haste for R. Until the following happened:
…
From: [email protected]
To: me
For this year’s Auction, the Magic Invitational is inviting seventeen "celebrity deckbuilders" to submit decks and I would like you to be one of them. If you accept, you’ll select a Vanguard avatar (first come, first serve) and build a deck that will be bid on with life/cards at the auction, for the Classic Vanguard format. Decks are due at the end of the month.
Let me know if you’re in!
…
From: me
To: [email protected]
I’ll do it. What is a Vanguard avatar?
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From: [email protected]
To: me
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=magic/magiconline/vanguard
You might like in particular to scroll down to ‘Goblin Warchief’
…
From: me
To: [email protected]
That’s great, thanks. I shall begin work on constructing a Blue-White control deck.
Do I have to make a sideboard as well?
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From: [email protected]
To: me
Yes, sideboards will be needed, because it is best 2 out of 3.
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From: [email protected]
To: me
Mark Gottlieb and Alan Comer don’t want to make sideboards and are threatening to do something really horrible to me unless I change the rules so that you only need to make a sideboard if you have Wishes in your deck. They outrank me round here, so we’re doing it their way.
…
So, I had to make a deck in the ‘Classic Vanguard’ format (which is like Extended in real life, but with no banned cards and with these weird avatar thingies):
I made a fun deck:
Avatar – Oni of Wild Places (at the beginning of your upkeep, return a creature to your hand. All creatures have haste)
4 Goblin Cohort
4 Drooling Ogre
2 Sparkmage Apprentice
4 Cosmic Larva
4 Flametongue Kavu
3 Yuki Onna
4 Savage Firecat
4 Magma Jet
3 Flamebreak
4 Aether Vial
2 Chrome Mox
4 Great Furnace
18 Mountain
There’s lots of cool stuff in that deck, including using Goblin Cohort to trigger itself, attacking with a 7/6 trampling Cosmic Larva on turn two (with a Chrome Mox) and reusing Yuki Onna and Flametongue Kavu.
As I don’t have Magic Online, and Vanguard Classic is a rather difficult format to playtest (especially when you don’t know what kind of decks make up the opposition), the deck above is pure theory.
For the auction itself, I built a deck according to the usual principles. That is to say, select the most powerful Red cards available and then make tweaks according to best guesses about the opposition.
The best Red cards in the format, by a long way, are the Goblin cards from Onslaught. This is actually rather a shame, because it means that there is not much room for innovation – I could put in some non-Goblin cards, but that would just be to make the deck bad for the sake of it.
I decided to include Burning Wish, as the sideboard rules meant that this seemed like it was equivalent to playing with a sideboard when other people weren’t. I particularly wanted to be able to cast Shattering Spree if other people turned up with Affinity decks or something unpleasant like that. Other useful cards include Sowing Salt against Urzatron, Disorder against White Weenie, Reckless Charge to help kill people quicker, Firebolt and Lava Spike to finish off opponents and Threaten to recruit blockers. Since I have no idea what sort of craziness other deckbuilders, who actually have had access to a computer to test their decks, will have come up with, Burning Wish allows for at least some responsiveness.
The Goblin deck I made is based on every Goblin deck ever, but in particular Osyp’s suggestion from last November. The main change that I made was to get rid of Goblin Matron, Gempalm Incinerator, and Goblin Ringleader. These are all great cards that give the Goblin deck a measure of card advantage, and the ability to compete in the long game. But in this format, other decks would be likely to be doing ridiculous stuff if given time. To my way of thinking, the best way to anticipate the different possible strategies made possible by the different avatars was to smash people as quickly as possible.
Creatures (30)
- 3 Zo-Zu the Punisher
- 4 Goblin Warchief
- 3 Raging Goblin
- 2 Sparksmith
- 2 Goblin Sharpshooter
- 4 Goblin Piledriver
- 4 Siege-Gang Commander
- 4 Skirk Prospector
- 4 Frenzied Goblin
Lands (1)
Spells (29)
And that is the story of how Raging Goblin got to join his friends in the Red Deck, and (hopefully) to play in the Magic Invitational itself. It might even help to calm him down.
Take care