It seems like only yesterday I was sitting at home in my house relaxing, and now the semester is underway, homework starting to pile up, and we’re nearly out of January. This is also a good thing, though! We’ve got some fun things coming up this next weekend. Sunday, February 1st marks the date of the Budget Cup II, and the day after that is the start of Rock League Season 3! These are two important events for a lot of the more budget players in the community who don’t have access to a playset of every single card. The Budget Cup is a chance for you to brew crazy decks based around low cost strategies, and Rock League gives you a similar challenge, limiting you to 4 uncommons and the rest commons. In today’s article I want to talk about both of these things. Let’s start with Rock League.

I joined Rock League midway through Season 2 and had a blast. You can always find people who want to play, and it’s extremely affordable for the average player since you mostly need commons. From the decks I played against in Season 2, there were a few clearly powerful strategies that floated to the top.

These cards were very central to a lot of strong decks last season. Gearsmith gives you a piece of free card draw stapled to a body for the low, low cost of 1 resource. This is easily your best turn 1 play in these decks. With this drawing you the best artifact in your top 3 cards, it is very easy to set up for a turn 3 or 4 Pterobot. Pterobot is a very hard card for most decks to beat, because it is a flier with high toughness that is also an artifact. Those three qualities negate Murder, Crackling Bolt/Burn, and blocking with most of Wild’s troops. The most common forms of removal for those shards are effectively useless against a very fast and evasive threat. You have to hope that in the format without reserves that you took into account these cards stomping you and brought along some form of artifact removal.

That’s one of the first lessons I learned quickly in Rock League. You need to have the cards maindeck that prepare you for any possibility. This means that you may have some dead cards in every matchup, but you have silver bullets in a lot of them. Do try to make these answers as versatile as possible. Turbulence may be great at this in a Wild deck, but for the cost of an uncommon it might just be better to play Nature Reigns instead. This shows us the second lesson. Rarity is a limited resource.

Now clearly that is a part of the rules of deckbuilding, so it seems obvious, but it is important to probe the impact that this rule has. We only have 4 uncommon slots. Is it worth it to use one of them as a generally better conditional answer than to conserve it for a generally worse conditional answer? That’s something to evaluate in context of the deck you’re building.

Moving on to the next deck that I saw a lot, it wasn’t so much a deck as a card.

When you socket him to give him Spellshield, he becomes an extremely hard to remove threat. He has a big body, rarely outclassed in Rock League by any 1 or more troops and he can’t be hit by a single removal spell in the format that I can recall.

This is another card that every deck needs to have a solution to. It can be as simple as “Kill them before they cast it,” or as time sensitive as “Countermagic save me.” Either way, your deck needs an answer. So this makes 2 commonly played cards that are hard to deal with that require answers in every other deck. That influences deckbuilding in a pretty major way, giving you an idea of the meta before you play a single match.

So how have I approached this meta? I decided that I wanted to be casting unremovable fatties. Last season, the main deck I played was a Boulder Brute deck that pumped him with various spells like Wild Aura and Blood Aura and then turned him sideways and won. I loved the deck, and I plan to play it this season as well as one of my decks. Here is the list for that. It came together so well in the last set that I haven’t really wanted to change it at all this time around! The only things I did were to add reserves and to add Sterling Starwatcher to those reserves. Everything else has been played in the maindeck at some point.

Rock League B/W Brute Force



Troops 4 Boulder Brute (MinW Conservation) 4 Moon’ariu Sensei 4 Cottontail Ronin 3 Dandelion Sprite 3 Feral Ogre 2 Glimmerglen Witch 1 Crazed Squirrel Titan Actions, Artifacts, Constants 4 Blood Aura 4 Murder 4 Wild Growth 3 Wild Aura 2 Sorrow Shards # Name 14 Wild Shard 4 Blood Shard 4 Shards Of Fate Reserves 4 Nature Reigns 4 Sapper’s Charge 3 Sterling Starwatcher 2 Sorrow 2 Glimmerglen Witch

Champion: Zared Venomscorn





I wanted to shine a spotlight on another fun deck I plan to try out this season. It is in the same shards, but it plays completely differently. It’s Blood-Wild Bunny Legion.

Rock League B/W Bunny Legion



Troops 4 Shin’hare Militia 4 Moon’ariu Sensei 4 Blood Cauldron Ritualist 4 Briar Legion 4 Concubunny 4 Cottontail Ronin 2 Bucktooth Bannerbunny Actions, Artifacts, Constants 4 Briarpatch 4 Murder 4 Evolve 1 Nature Reigns Shards # Name 9 Blood Shard 9 Wild Shard 3 Shards Of Fate Reserves 4 Boulder Brute (MinW Conservation) 4 Blood Aura 3 Nature Reigns 4 Sorrow

Champion: Warmaster Fuzzuko





So what’s going on here? Evolve is a really strong card. I wanted to take advantage of that card and the activation of Warmaster Fuzzuko. So what cards go well with swarming the board? Why Bunnies of course! So I threw a bunch of the better bunnies in, along with another pair of cards that love the “Legion” strategy I’m already building, the Briarpatch and its Legions. I don’t know if this is just my wishful thinking, but I really want these cards to be good in Rock League. If a game ends up going on forever, the Briarpatches give me a huge advantage because the majority of my draws will be gas that only get better and better.

The basic gameplan is just to play Bunnies and then pump them. Attack. Rinse. Repeat. Nice and simple. You’ve got a little removal in Murder, and something to do with the weaker Battle Hoppers you can’t pump with the Blood Cauldron Ritualists. The Bucktooth Bannerbunnys make swinging in for lethal out of nowhere a possibility. And a singleton Nature Reigns as a mise against Pterobot. Generally you just want to swing through it and win that way.

This deck also shows the cost of rarity. Because I wanted to focus all of my efforts on assembling my winning board state I didn’t reserve any of my uncommon cards for removal like Turbulence that would clean up the issues I have with cards like Pterobot or Duskwing Rider. Instead, I have to rely on the explosive power of Evolve and Bunnies, or grind out wins by using cards like Blood Aura out of the reserves paired with my larger Briar Legions.

Now I normally write about control, and I haven’t done that so far this article. That’s because I’m not as big a fan of control in Rock League. I tried to build a sapphire base control deck at first in Rock League, but it wasn’t great. It’s possible that the deck could have gotten better with the addition of Phoenix Guard Messenger and Verdict of the Ancient Kings, but I don’t really think so. It can’t beat a resolved Boulder Brute or Pterobot with any sort of consistency, and it sure can’t win before they drop, so it’s not a well-positioned deck. Sad, but likely true.

Transitioning into the Budget Cup, one of the fun aspects of the format is that if you’ve only played Rock League, you can likely have a reasonably competitive deck by just adding in some rares you have lying around that are stronger than some of the commons and call it a day.

You can also work with existing decks, like those that Top 8ed the last Budget Cup. There have been a lot of sweet new cards added into the mix with Shattered Destiny. One of the decks that caught my eye that I wanted to play with was the deck piloted by Caerbannog. Servant of Shathak was the card that the deck was built to take advantage of. Certainly a hard card to build a deck for, as that restriction cuts down on consistency. From the general purpose of each card, it seems to me that the deck was built to stick a Servant of Shathak hopefully on turn 1, and then tempo out the opponent with removal, Countermagic, and various tricks. I like the idea, and it seems like a card like this only gets better with the addition of more cards to upgrade the singleton aspect of the deck. So here is my take on Servant of Shathak for the Budget Cup.

Budget Cup II S/D Shathak



Troops 4 Servant of Shathak

4 Buccaneer

4 Thunderbird

2 Menacing Gralk

2 Mentor of the Song

1 Storm Colossus

1 Living Totem

1 Cerulean Mentalist

Actions, Artifacts, Constants 4 Countermagic

1 Verdict of the Ancient Kings

1 Crackling Wit

1 Immortal Decree

1 Inner Conflict

1 Oracle Song

1 Repel

1 Solitary Exile

1 Stoneskin

1 Stormcall

1 Time Ripple

1 Yesterday

1 Arcane Shield

Shards 9 Sapphire Shard

9 Diamond Shard

4 Shard of Purpose

3 Shards of Fate

Reserves 2 Augmented Awakening

1 Flock of Seagulls

1 Judgement

1 Arcane Shield

1 Cerulean Mentalist

1 Blinding Light

1 Clear Sky Stormcaller

1 Forgotten Lord

1 Infusion of Diamond

1 Queensguard

1 Royal Enforcer

1 Snare Trapper

1 Vanguard of Cerulea

1 Mentor of the Song

Champion: Wyatt the Sapper







Puzzle out what I’m doing. It’s mostly the same, just with some additions of various kinds of removal and some other threats. The reserves are equally messy to preserve the ability to keep Servant of Shathak in the deck. There are some cards for aggro matchups like Flock of Seagulls and Infusion of Diamond. There are other cards for control matchups like Mentor of the Song and Forgotten Lord. Basically it’s just a set of cards that lets you tune your mainboard by paring out the bad stuff and adding in some things that work better.

There are many other strategies that are wide open for this tournament though. Playing Blood-Wild Spellshield is completely reasonable. You have access to Dandelion Sprite, Boulder Brute, and the various auras to pump them up. This was part of strategy that Herford used in his Top 8 deck. He used the Wild Spellshield troops and the Countermagic and disruption of Sapphire to play the tempo game by sticking a threat his opponent can’t remove and then stopping them from messing with it.

I’m really excited to be able to host the Budget Cup II this weekend. I can’t wait to see all of the sweet decks that you guys are brewing. Let me know if you plan on streaming and are willing to/want me to use your match as one of our feature matches. If you want to use a cardblocker we have those available as well. It’s going to be a fun tournament. If you want to bounce ideas off me or get a second set of eyes on your decklist, feel free to PM me in game and I can take a look at it.