Going anti-meta

At the time of writing this article I am a few days after MazuCon. As You may now or not the tournament gathered 40 people , more or less 10 of them being from outside of Poland. You may find a summary of this event here (WARNING: Polish language required!). Congratulations to the winner Christian Pfeiffer who piloted his Ramp Horde Priest deck to the perfect result!
Anyway, I would like to share with You my thoughts about MazuCon, as well as tournament report.
After last big event which was Worlds as far as I remember I promised myself to prepare for the next big event. "To prepare" I meant to have all Tier-1 decks played against each other and either choose the best one or choose something what I would call anti-meta.
As You may conclude from the topic I went with the second option, which happened to be bad, unfortunately. The definition of "Anti-meta" deck may differ between people, but in my understanding it is a kind of a deck that makes many of Your opponent's cards dead, blanks or just a good resources. As we all know today's meta is filled with allies, so many players pack cards that can deal with them. Most of the time these are abilities, but it can be an armor or weapon as well.
To be honest I didn't take rouge into account for some reason until I found a topic about it on wowtcg.com. It was horde version, so I took it, uploaded to MWS and played with it a bit. It was pretty playable, had really explosive draws, and could kill out of nowhere. Downsides of this build were bad draw and troubles against Ice Barrier. After all the second one became a real pusher to go to Alliance Caleb Pavish. Frankly speaking the only answer to barrier horde had was 4 copies of Steal Steel. Not much comparing it to flip I can enable every second turn.
To not bore You stiff here's the final version of my alliance rogue:


Hero:
Caleb Pavish
Caleb Pavish Back


Abilities:
4x Dismantle
4x Poison the Well
4x Gouge
4x Sap
4x Sinister Strike
4x Tricksters Gambit
3x Carnage
3x To Arms
3x Vicious Strike


Allies:
4x Burly Berta


Equipment:
4x Smites Reaver
4x Maimgors Bite
4x Meteor Shard


Quests & Locations:
4x Fordragon Hold
4x Whats Haunting Witch Hill
3x Corrosion Prevention


After a quick glance someone might ask: why the hell Berta ? I found her extremely good when being on the play, and not that bad on the draw against slower decks. When You face mage (except very aggresive version) or any Ramp deck like shaman or priest You can play her easily on 2nd turn. I bet that opponent will fight an uphill battle to strike her down. She's going to draw us a lot of cards or she's going to be killed by any combination of two laser-guided Savagins, Cairnes, Korkron's etc. Both ways we buy time to setup our finishing toys and force the opponents to not kill our hero. Even on the draw I can throw her to the field to disguise the opponent or just row her.
I have chosen 4 copies of dismantle because I wanted to have an option to deal with hammer instantly. Without it it would be extremely hard to win against any ramp deck that throws Mazukons and other fat guys   at us with the speed of the light. One could have chosen mentioned Steal Steel as so many decks pack Miniature Voodoo Mask today, and there are also other pieces of equipment worth to steal from the opposing player.
Quest base. I went with cheap quests and I really, really like Whats Haunting Witch Hill. Most of the time it says: pay 2, draw a card at instant speed. Even if our opponent packs a location it is steal draw for 3 resources which is not bad. Fordragon Hold was just to be sure I won't be rushed by weenies, but with this one I also managed to kill Edwin with buffed Berta! (I'm not even mentioning triggering her Death Rattle effect! - achievement earned).
With 12 copies of weapons I never had a problem with drawing one. I would even assume that having 2 spare copies of  Fan of Knives would have been a good idea anyway.
When talking about abilities there is plenty of cards we can choose from. Just after I saw Nick Toth deck from Metamart 3k at Saint Louis I have realized that there are two cards that I really needed at MazuCon: Bully and Prey on the Weak. The first one is really a rouge's Swiss Army Knife - You can kill an ally with it, You can destroy equipment with it - sweeeet. Second one is just great instant kill. Few times I had problems to deal with ally with 3 or 4 HP.
The last card I have really thought about back and forth was Daze. At first glance it is just pure madness: for 3 You can discard any card You want from opponent's hand. Stash it and You will see what is the guy on the other side of the table playing. But during our tests every time I have played this card I was able to find 3 or 4 threats and discard just one. That was the main reason to cut this card from the final version. It might have been a big mistake.
That is more or less everything I wanted to share with You. Next time I am going to go through the tournament round by round so stay tuned.
FOR THE HORDE!


PS: Some of You may have noticed that language had been changed to English. Don't adjust Your monitors! This is intentional! I am still going to write articles in Polish as well. In case You reeeeally loved it in Polish , just let me know ;-)
PS2: Will buy/trade 3x To Arms