Introduction

Hello, Cut or Tap readers! As you may know, I love rogue (otherwise known as counter) decks, and with a ton of League Cups and Challenges happening across the globe, I will be presenting my current lists, or works in progress, of some off-meta decks. In this article, I will go over some of the pros and cons to playing rogue decks, especially for locals, and share some lists, with their general strategies and purposes in the current meta, and some options to try to “counter the counter.” For the sake of brevity, I will only be covering a couple of the important or difficult-to-understand matchups, as for some of the decks, the Mew matchup comes down to finding a Stadium and using Drapion V twice.

Rogue Decks in Best-of-One

Many local events will be held in Best-of-one, as opposed to the typical Best-of-three nature of the Premier events of the last year. This is a double-edged sword for rogue archetypes; on the one hand, your opponent cannot play around techs in Game 2, as there isn’t one, but on the other hand, your deck is much more prone to losing from clunking up in a game, and there is not really a chance to win or tie in that case. Beyond this, locals can be great for playing more fringe decks, as if you are at your local league, you have a pretty solid idea of what people tend to play. For example, if you haven’t seen much Mew lately, depending on your deck, you can gain quite a few spaces, by cutting your Drapion(s) and a Path to the Peak or two. Of course, this kind of metagaming is risky, as hitting one too many Mew could end your tournament run, but with the multitude of locals, this risky play can be the difference between winning a Cup, or getting Top 8 or 16. 

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