Arcane Toolbox Rogue /post Karazhan

The pleasure is mine

Hi, Ead’s the name. I’m a long time MtG Legacy player from germany bringing to you a petdeck of mine – Toolbox Rogue. Rogue is by far my favourite Hearthstone class and I was tinkering with a toolbox variant since the 2nd month in the games existence with more or less volatile success. Most of the time other archetypes of rogue decks dominated the class being tempo, midrange or combo oriented but with the advent of the new Kharazan expansion Rogue shifted somewhat out of the meta while people are experimenting with Arcane Giants in Miracle or some N’zoth-deathrattle formations, which I find to be lackluster.

So I started to put my old deckideas for this class back together and came up with the following list.

Concept of the deck

Rogues heropower provides the incentive to facetank a significant amount of damage to ensure manageable boardposition and has utilitycards in its roster like deadly poison that promote such playstyle. The direct consequence of this is that slower, ergo control or even midrange variants need to assure a consistent and powerful heal sources. The current meta does not offer any able healcards besides Earthen Ring Farseer, which is certainly playable but does not provide enough heal for my purposes. So I gave our old pal Reno Jackson and he is for more reasons than this a godsend for any toolbox deck as I will show.

So Reno is our sustain and enables us to live through the aggro pest and facedecks out there – but he can only help us not to die, how can we actually win? Enter Arcane Giant. This card is amazing and the most broken card Kharazan has to offer imo and viable especially in Rogue decks since Rogue spells are mostly cheap, provide tempo and cantrip into the next spell making that giant really cheap. Cool card, right? Ask your druid friend, even he thinks so. You know what makes it even better? Gang Up. With this we have a very viable finish for the lategame, enabling us to slap 4 Giants on the board, which can power through any removal this meta has to offer besides Equality- and Brawl plays. Do you remember the old Giantsmage decks that copy’d Moltens? Yeah, I’m nostalgic sometimes.

TL;DR

Plan of this list is to cycle through your deck, ganging up Arcane Giant for the kill while going on adventures with Reno if needed.

THE FOLLOWING PART IS OUTDATED AS THE LIST EVOLVED WITH THE ADVENT OF ETHEREAL PEDDLER SYNERGIES 

^THE OLD LIST ^

The tools in my box [aka “Cardchoices”]

So this list wants to cycle, playing spells and getting to that Reno and Arcane Giant as fast as possible. For this I want to play a minimum of 12 spells in my list. There are some more and less obvious cardchoices.

Obvious ones: Backstab,Preparation, Deadly Poison, Eviscerate, Sap,Gang Up,Shiv, Fan of Knives, Shadow Strike, Conceal are all staples of this deck, providing cheap removal or reach or tempo, or all in one at the same time. The reasons to play them are obvious.

Less obvious ones:  

• Shadowstep: For me this card is the ultimate Toolbox card that synergies with every minion in this deck thats not a finisher. Suddenly your SI shoots for 4 and costs 4. Barnes drops potential 2 friends. Teacher plants a Token. Xaril gives an extra poison. Drake draws cantrips for 2. Skulker stabs twice. Reno Jackson heals twice. Sweet mama.
• Sprint: We want to cycle through our deck, check. Cheapens Giant, check. 2nd drawsource that’s not Auctioneer that you can also prep, check. Wrecks control, check.

Minion choices 

• Swashburglar One of rogues better one drops if you don’t play cold blood. Gives you a quality card, chances are a spell. Pretty good.
• Bloodmage Thalnos Cantrips and empowers our spells. What else do you need?
• Doomsayer  We are kinda slow and get problems against decks that can generate big bodies quickly like Shaman decks or Beast druid. Also pretty good with Conceal
• Undercity Huckster See Swashburglar.
• Questing Adventurer We play a lot of spells and can hide that dude under conceal. Pretty good. Also he is a friend of Reno.
• Barnes I am testing him out atm. He is pretty good with most of our minions since we play some deathrattles and non-battlecry-ability minions like Teacher and Auctioneer. Even if he pulls some quality battlecry minion like Reno, you could still Shadowstep the 1/1.
• Xaril, Poisoned Mind Brings extra spells, all of which can be easily utilized by this deck to their maxmium extent. I love this guy.
• Dark Iron Skulker I heard token decks are a thing atm.
• Ragnaros the Firelord Sometimes 4 Aracane Giants are not enough, and this guy is breddy gud, even more so with Barnes 😉

Replacements

While I had already great success (JAGSHEMASH), these cardchoices are not definitive. I already replaced the Argent Squire in my deck with a Conceal because it just performed better and I am open to new cardchoices. Thistle Tea and Shadowcaster  are very good cards and should be considered. I am already toying with the idea of dropping Barnes in favor of Shadowcaster.  For instance possible replacements if you like to meme it up are :

– Barnes – Ragnaros the Firelord + Shadowcaster + Yogg-Saron, Hope's End

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

NEW LIST CARD CHOICES

The concept of the deck stayed. Just some card choices are different:

• Arcane Anomaly My new list is spell heavier and I don’t play Cold Blood which is why I am trying the anomaly in the Argent Squire-slot
• Burgle  This one got a small buff with Ethereal Peddler release. Amazing most times since class cards are just so much better.
• Assassinate People are playing minions in this meta now that are just out of reach from burst-removal spells. Can’t just Shadow Strike that Malygos. Assassinate is a spell you can prep into and gets rid of the real big problems.
• Ethereal Peddler Sometimes just a Pit Fighter, which ain’t that bad, really. Sometimes a Thaurissan that proc’s twice. Needs further testing.
• Vanish We are not able to overload the board with minions and current meta topdecks love doing that, being it Druid Token decks, OTK Patrons or Discardlocks. Vanish just seems solid now, giving us back that Reno or cleaning the board that we can still put some Arcane Giant on afterwards.
• Yogg-Saron, Hope's End Y’all know what’s up.

 Thoughts about the new list

Performs more stable than the last one. Keeping Preparation  enables insane miracle-like turns with burgle, making me thing wether to play two copies of them since extra copies would be nice for Assassinate and Vanish and Sprint. Yogg-Sothoth is just broken and should be played. Vanish performed great so far as nobody is expecting the spanish inquisition. Swashburglar,Undercity Huckster, Burgle + Ethereal Peddler is a package that needs to be played together now because it has that much potential.

Gadgetzan Auctioneer With only one prep in the deck I decided against Best Deals because his impact on the board is very lackluster. Sprint does the same but fits the deck better imo.

— 

That’s it for now folks, I will keep updating the deck with Matchups once the meta settles after the last Kharazan wing.

I thank everybody who read through that wall and would be glad if you come and check me out on Twitter and Twitch.tv since I just recently started to work on my channel and community presence.

Cheers, Ead