Collective, the Community Card Game is thriving. Somehow, everyone decided that this week is a good time to join the tournament because reasons. However, certain members of the community has felt that there lacked contents aside from what Deadz0n is creating. This is my attempt at to fulfill the void.
Rage archetype has suffered from a problem of not having enough enablers for a while, but with the introduction of Sunlit Edge, there should be much better consistency for Rage decks and I will be giving it a try in the tournament setting.
Game Plan: The way I see it, Rage is a mediocre and slow multi-step combo deck with 3 simple steps:
- Fulfill the quest for "Excise the Body", which will give you The Rage Vessel.
- Instead of going aggro, the game plan is to chip some damage and stall the game long enough for you to play down: Gbur, Savanna King at turn 7.
- Play The Rage Vessel on Turn 8. Since it has every Rage ability in your field or Graveyard, it will copy Gbur's Rage effect of dueling the opponent's face, with even 1 Sunlit’s Edge, it will be guaranteed 19 damage to the opponent hero and you can win the game on the spot without counterplay.
One card kill can be immensely satisfying, and here is how I built the deck to achieve this goal.
Deck Structure:
We need our Enablers: Scarlet Stabtician x3, Skinmunch Skitterer x3, Sunlit Edge x3, New Mort Stahl x3, Flambeau Spill x3. These cards are all capable of dealing damage to our own ally. Flambeau Spill offers great healing and occasionally removes the opponent's units as well.
Then we need the Ragers: Burning Blood Savant x2, Pinata Man x2, Aspamalgam x2, Magma Golem x3, Plasma Pummeler x3, Curse Pride Alpha x3, Gbur, New Mort Stahl x3, Savanna King x3.
For all the ragers, the card that surprised me a lot is Pinata Man. Every candy has great synergy with Rage units.
Plasma Pummeler was a card I wanted to cut the most when I first played the deck. Now I believe it is the MVP out of all the basic ragers. I heavily underestimated the part of the ability that says "When you deal damage", which means oftentimes, Pummeler provides +4/+4 of value to your hand instead of +2/+2. This improved stat line especially helps with doubling the damage that Gbur does, giving Burning Blood Savant an actually great stat to stall the game.
Through short playtesting, I found that the Rage deck suffers from a lack of consistency: Sometimes, all the cards drawn are Ragers, sometimes only enablers. Rage deck also suffers from a Curve issue: Scarlet Stabtician and Skinmunch Skitterer are the only 1 drops. Despite that Excise the Body is a 1 mana card, ideally, it is played in turn 2-4, so that units can be developed.
Here are the Filler cards I added to help with these issues:
3x Reckless Razer: 1 drop, good stat line, and Scour 3 really helps with drawing either enabler or rager.
3x Art of War: Giving Rager duelist and +1|+1 can help them effectively proc their rage effects proactively.
Both of these cards also help a lot with drawing Gbur, Savanna King, which is one of the main win conditions.
3x Bottle Robber: Value. Cycle the deck to allow a better chance of drawing the right pieces, life gain to stall the game, and be able to trade against Cassie / do chip damage.
1x Two-Fanged Snake: lol.
Mulligan
Always keep 1 Excise the Body, never mull a 1 drop, rarely mull a 2 drop unless you have 2x of them and both are Ragers or mull the Art of War (treat it as a 5 drop card). Try to go for at least 1 enabler and 1 rager in the opener.
Debatable Cuts
I decided to cut a lot of Ragers because I don’t see them contributing to a win, such as:
Molten Sludge - A good card, but I felt that I had too many 4 mana cards in the deck and wanted the curve to be on the lower side. It should have some okay combo with Rage, the Vessel but I rather have Alpha that can proactively remove key threats. The 3 drops also feel more important than developing a decent ground game.
Blackjack Widow - I believe the 1/2 stat line is too terrible, and that Star Chips has less interesting synergies in comparison to Candies. Maybe objectively better than Pinata Man but I can't help but feel immense sadness when I play this card so I dropped it.
Battle Smith - Rage units don't have high ATK and can't make use of the Overrun keyword. It doesn't fit the game plan I have in mind.
Forbidden Journey - Now. This might be a really bad cut but here is my reasoning is that Rage already suffers from consistency issues due to the Enabler/Rager dynamic and that with Excise the Body, you are already 1 card down when it comes to drawing the right pieces to get the needed value.
At its best, you get a 0 mana 5|5 with a Plasma Invocation at turn 5. At its worst, you draw it turn 6 and it is a dead card. Even at its best, Excise the Body + Forbidden Journey together are essentially 2 dead cards in hand without immediate benefits, which can lead to more awkward early turn plays that set you really behind.
It didn't feel right, it didn't feel fun. These are terrible reasons but let's move on...
Cat with Frying Pan: Classic. Power turn 1 play and help with proc rage in later stages of the game as well. It is usable for sure, but I just thought that other cards were better at helping with my game plan.
Expectation coming into the tournament
Very low. I expect to maybe win 1 game against other meme players, but if others are playing seriously, such as Heldim Aggro/Dhat Control/Karma (I heard that Dunewalkers are stirring up shit as well), there is no chance of me winning.
But really, my mission is to showcase underplayed and forgotten archetypes and Rage has seen very little ladder play in the past months. I believe rage is underplayed for good reasons:
The game plan is very disruptable: Enablers are very easily removable by Duelists and Removals. Without enablers, you can't progress the quest of Excise the Body.
Color Drain is run in every deck and as long as the opposition knows the game plan, they can simply remove Gbur and Rage, the Vessel would be helpless against it.
Even meme decks such as Dora Draw can set up their combo one turn earlier against Rage and be more consistent at doing them.
However, the key advantage of playing the Rage deck is the unique aesthetic aspects of Rage, the Vessel. Oftentimes, Rage, the Vessel found themselves meditating and doing nothing for good 5 seconds, seemingly out of nowhere, it starts to slam the opponent's face. This subverts the expectation that rage is a purely impulsive behavior, but one that is developed through deep and long meditation.
I hope to complete my quest of excising the body and then show the Collective community that the path to happiness is not achieved through a lonesome and slow life of breaks and meditation, but achieved through our constant drive to work and live to our fullest every day.
03/12/21 Update
Well. Played the deck in the tournament. Damn. This deck sucks. I went 0-10 and I got blasted so hard that it destroyed my IRL health lol. I think the archetype itself has quite a lot of problems but let's talk about my experience first:
Against Deadz0n's deck, a few quick removals just got rid of all my enablers and then the Rage cards become vanilla cards that can't do anything. At turn 6 his board is nearly full while mine is empty. (Storage Hunt vs. Sunlit, Whale vs. Alpha, Road Maniac with Food vs. Sunlit... the list goes on)
Monsterland was running Karma. Rage has no removals or pressures it has a 0% chance to win against that.
Games against Magneter, my board presence was too bad against their 5|4 Agiles and they drew the combo every game. Even without the combo, my Rage deck didn't have removals to deal with the Giga broken free 2|2 Hawkins token.
I lost both games against Cornmeal but I was able to win against their Pain deck when I tested Rage before. The games were not close though, and it is funny how Pain gets 3|2 Two Fanged Snake as an enabler while Rage gets Sunlit Edge 0|3, which is literally the best card in the Rage deck.
The games lost against Vmnunes were so regrettable that it triggered something in me. I know that games are just. Games. There is no stake whatsoever. This is just for fun. The deck I bought in isn't favored. But a part of me just can't help but feel extremely furious and disappointed. I missed a window to use AoE board wipe and I miscalculated their lethal by 1 which then made me die.
But hey… At least it won 1 game against EmptyFolder in group B and he didn’t do so bad in his group as well… (Even in the game I won it was just an outright robbery)
Mistakes happen and they are magnified when anyone plays a suboptimal deck. I think it is really interesting how negative I felt and how even after all the years of playing multiplayer games, I can't help but feel so bad about it. I couldn’t eat properly, couldn’t sleep properly. I really can’t fathom or rationally explain the human’s obsession with wanting to win? Regret?
I think it is a combination of my own faults and the archetype being weak, but let me discuss my deckbuilding problems first:
I should have included:
Forbidden Journey - 100% must and it is fairly easy to trigger it. A part of the game of Collective is developing a good board for as little mana used as possible: 0 mana 5|5 and scout a great answer is just that, the cost of inconsistent draw and delay in power is 100% worth it.
Molten Sludge - For an archetype that is so terrible at developing a good board early on, Molten Sludge is really necessary for getting bodies out there. It is the ONLY positive board state card in Rage. It has really good synergy with self-damaging effects as well better than any other Rage creatures. Also in a meta where Deface and Color Drain was so powerful, these "Anti" cards can't counter Molten Sludge the same way they can counter Curse Pride Alpha
For the new version of Rage, I added a lot more early game drops, some removals such as Blood Bathe, got rid of Skitterer, and swapped for Cat with Frying Pan to fight for early board presence.
Problematic cards in Rage
The WORST Rage card ever is Aspamalgam. Rage taking 3 damage while playing an archetype that already sucks at getting a board presence is NOT ideal. I used to think that the card is good because of the card refills but it feels like I am helping my opponent here.
New Mort Stahl is a good enabler for Rage but playing 4 mana 0-6 at turn 4? You can compare this card with Dr. Veinmovski that cost 1 less mana. Sure, the latter has no ability revolved around Rage synergies and only Refresh is available. But the so-called rage synergy is not exactly a positive one: Yes you are proc'ing rage but you are lowering the health of your own unit by 1... Necessary for "Excise the Body", but you are destroying your own board presence by lowering the health of your own card while, unlike Sunlit Edge, it can't contest against opponents playing their units down.
New Mort Stahl feels at least 1 turn too late for this card to be played, it should be a 3 mana 0|5 IMO.
I ended up cutting Skittermunch Skitterer. I actually thought the card is amazing. BUT, it provides 0 board presence. In 2 of the games, I would have loved to attack with Skittere T2, but my opponent literally played a really random 1 mana 1|2 that just prevented me from attacking completely, which delays the turn that Heldim gets angel, which make me lose. Frying Pan Cat is the much better alternative for 1 drop, unfortunately.
The reality is that Rage is only runnable in Heldim (Felt too slow in Pearlmaw) and winning turn 1 and getting early board presence is huge.
I had to cut Cursed Alpha Pride because the deck had too many 4 drops and not enough "good" 3 drops in Rage (probably runnable after Deface and Color Drain nerfs). Even with the deck balanced and optimized, I don't see it competing and winning against other decks.
The experience of playing this game really made me appreciate how strong removals can be. Yes, removals are reactive, not a game plan, and it is often just a 1 on 1 trade, but good removals destroy and interrupts potential synergy between cards. It is no longer a 1 for 1 trade with this lens, but often a 1 removal kills 3 of the opponent's cards. Such as Sunlit Edge + Alpha, then they deface Alpha, not only that Alpha is no longer good, but that Sunlit Edge couldn't fulfill its purpose of buffing the stat on a unit with strong abilities as +2|+2 mean nothing when Alpha does not have Duelist any more.
Rage deck is forced into running synergy cards or else Rage will never proc. It (at least my version) suffers from not having the removals, which means fewer ways to disrupt the opponent's game plan the same way they disrupt mine.
Against Pain. Can't kill their backline win-con Two-Fanged Snake. Against vmnunes. Nothing against 5 mana 4|6 flyer. No tools to disrupt synergies because of the need to run Enablers + Synergists. Removals are good. Every deck needs a few to destroy synergies without completely losing sight of your own game plan.
My latest brew included AoE Rage / Board wipe Absolute Storm... But really wish the cards can contest board better because 0|3 that allows BlackJack Widow to become a "2 mana 1|1 ambush leap, create a star chip" doesn't seem like a power play. 0|6 one is not it either.
On the other hand, should Rage be buffed? Right now, Rage the Vessel a lot of the time is 5 mana “win the game” but it does take some setup that can be hard to do I suppose so it isn’t really too broken. I would still like Sunlit Edge to maybe be a 1|3 and let Mort Stahl be 3 mana. Aspamalgam should make you lose 2 HP instead of 3.
Going to read a book this week.