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Cooking Up a Rocco, Street Chef Deck for Foundations Standard

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When playing Magic, I am what most people refer to as a brew maker. This was true when I started REALLY playing competitively back in 1996. I always enjoyed making my own stuff, and while there would be a general consensus of what the best decks were even back then, it isn't like today where it is all instantly known thanks to the power of the Internet.

Before jumping into how I brew, let's talk about a few reasons why:

  1. It's fun!
  2. There is nothing more satisfying than crushing opponents with your own designs.
  3. Except when top players in your area compliment you on your deck design.
  4. Opponents don't know what you are doing even when you are doing it.
  5. Often it is less expensive because the consensus surrounding particular cards being good doesn't yet exist, and you can pick up exceptionally good rares for $1-4.
  6. Sometimes it can pay off if you speculate on some cards.

In terms of how I typically like to make decks, I have two typical modes. First, and my favorite, is to try and abuse cards that might be very powerful in narrow circumstances or fit in well with an existing universe of cards in your favorite format. More than two decades ago, on February 15th, 1999, Urza's Legacy came out. A card that looked horrible was a rare in the set, Donate. But, I happened to love one particular Ice Age card that nobody played, Delusions of Grandeur.

Illusions of Grandeur
Donate

Not that I was solely responsible for the implementation of the Illusions/Donate deck with Yawgmoth's Bargain that ended up being one of the top decks at the time, but I was ahead of the curve on the concept.

The second version of brewing that I like to do is to rework existing decks that are known to either work consistently or that have worked once or twice. The second one is more boring, so let's concentrate on the first brewing type of abusing cards and small combos.

Let's start first with the 4 most important concepts in what makes a card powerful. Card advantage. Time advantage. Flexibility. Being under costed. Below are 3 examples from the original set.

Ancestral Recall
Time Walk
Swords to Plowshares

This leads me to nostalgia for the most perfect and ever printed. Wall of Blossoms. Look it up, seriously...

There are two main ways that I find cards to try to abuse and put together in a brewed deck. The first is to read the card. You know how it is, you read a card and you can just see how it is busted. The second way is to play games and be crushed by a card you didn't realize was so good.

The best situation is to be able to take multiple busted cards and combine them together for a ridiculous advantage, that is what will be tried as I walk you through this brew I am trying to make/design currently. This is a first attempt. After that, it is critical to test it and learn what works and doesn't. For this brew we will start with my favorite Elf available in standard. Rocco, Street Chef and add in a card that I was shown the true power of, Caretaker's Talent.

Rocco, Street Chef
Caretaker's Talent

The first thing you'll notice is that if we have them both in play, things can get ridiculous quickly as Rocco will give us food tokens on our turns and potentially on their turns which will then enable further card draw off of Caretaker's Talent. This leads me to the following conclusions:

  1. We want low cost cards (or ramp). If we have something like +2 cards a turn on a regular basis, we can't be looking at casting huge cost bombs.
  2. We want cards that bring in tokens, work with tokens, and more specifically food.

The idea is to take one card I think is busted, Rocco, and combine it with the Caretaker's Talent which others have shown is busted, and build something even more ridiculous in combination. We will need to be careful of the potential issues surrounding mana colors, though...

This will all go better if we can go fast and ramp, and can include cards that most people already use with Caretaker's Talent. That's where Llanowar Elves and Carrot Cake come in. Let's add Pawpatch Formation for it's flexibility. In this environment, hitting a flying creature or an enchantment or replacing itself are all good options.

Llanowar Elves
Carrot Cake
Pawpatch Formation

Seeing that we are going to potentially have a tremendous amount of food, it is a good idea to look for some food payoffs. Hello internet, thank you for ideas. Unfortunately, an internet search and a Magic card database search for Standard seem to only turn up Night of the Sweet's Revenge. But it makes food tap for mana, and potentially makes all your creatures huge to end the game. Worth 2 copies for sure.

Now, this is really looking like a Green and White deck splashing Red for Rocco. One way to make that splash less painful and add some flexibility against counterspells would be to add Cavern of Souls. Now, this is a possibility that I consider, and thus I look at other Elves that would make sense to add to the deck. Of every elf available, one stands out as potentially the best option... Elvish Archivist.

Night of the Sweets' Revenge
Cavern of Souls
Elvish Archivist

This is a good time to emphasize, I am walking you through my process on this particular brew. This will potentially turn up way too many cards to use that will need to be trimmed. But going down this road, we clearly want cards that provide tokens, food, are elves, enchantments, are payoffs for all of this craziness, and are potentially good in the current metagame in Standard with tons of aggro decks. Bear in mind that we value low casting cost, flexibility, and options to look at more cards to get our combo we are attempting to abuse out. Rocco, Street Chef + Caretaker's Talent.

This means I personally like all of the following cards as options. Candy Trail, Sheltered by Ghosts, Overlord of the Hauntwoods, Yenna Redtooth Regent, Serra Paragon, Unflinching Courage, Fountainport, Mirrex, and Reclamation Sage.

Other options obviously include not looking toward the Cavern of Souls in combination with elves, but instead looking to all Green and White creatures. It is about here that I remind myself that if Rocco can be on the board and combined with other effects to deter the opponent from using their bonus card, then Rocco is ridiculously powerful. Elvish Archivist and Caretaker's Talent will do a lot to convince the opponent of that.

Searching some more, with the expected food tokens and food cards like Carrot Cake and Candy Trail, squirrels could be good. Unfortunately the best squirrel payoff is a Black and Green card, Camellia, the Seedmiser. It would definitely be too many colors, but if Rocco doesn't pan out, then a squirrel food deck with Caretaker's Talent could be another options to try.

Or just go heavier on the Green, look to just splash white and red. Play big green monsters like Bristlebud Farmer and Polukranos Reborn // Polukranos, Engine of Ruin. Who doesn't want to play a turn one Llanowar Elves and turn two huge hydra? What about Tough Cookie?

Now, after all of those thoughts, what do I end up with? When all else fails and you aren't sure, it is always good to backfill your deck with something you know worked at least a little bit. So, thank you to Brian Kibler and his mostly Green stompy deck from that Atlanta Spotlight. But then when I put that together, I realized the mana was too problematic and I would need to remove Rocco if I wanted to go that direction, which of course, is the opposite of what I want to do.

And sometimes, you get to the end of that whole process and realize it didn't quite work out. With enough experience, you will see many of the problems ahead of time. This deck would want to be aggro, but there just wasn't enough of the correct mana colors or tokens that I was going to be able to produce regardless of how I mixed things up. Rocco costing rwg makes it just slightly too hard without any trilands in Standard. Too much would be dependent on getting the Overlord or a Cavern of Souls. Even then because of the mana situation, I couldn't fit in many Fountainports or Mirrex to help with token creation for the Caretaker's Talent.

One option would be to drop Rocco to 3 copies, and then depend partially on the any color mana from Mirrex to play him when I can. In that situation, then maybe the following works. Maybe.

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