He’s back. He’s returned. He’s resurrected from the grave and ready to serve street meats and potentially obscure and exotic dishes with a variety of after effects. Learning from my first failed deck, which you can read about here, Rocco has been fully reborn and transformed into an entirely different deck entirely.
Here is my elf boi in his full glory ready to serve the party. Rocco is a group-hug-esque commander who seeks to give everyone advantage at the end of his controller’s turn. However, there is an exchange. While Rocco gives everyone essentially a free impulse draw, whenever anyone takes those “gifts” of his, he is compensated by letting you give any creature a +1/+1 counter and also giving you a food token. Now keep in mind that you can give any creature the +1/+1 which can be used to your political advantage. Furthermore, it is not only his “gifts” that grant you the counter and food; this counts for any card cast out of exile from any player (including yourself).
So for Rocco, he’s been redesigned to be truly involved in the game. To explain that further, we have to take a look at the philosophies involved with the first design of Rocco’s deck. I wanted Rocco to be more involved with my opponents, but the problem I had was I was constantly trying to change the rules of the game, which my opponents took quite unkindly too (which makes a lot of sense as an afterthought). So now, we are keeping that philosophy but by making our entire deck involving that of our opponents.
Yes, all cards, outside of lands, involve our opponents in one way or another. That may involve summoning costs and gaining advantages. I want to think of this deck like something of a slightly parasitic or a mutualistic relationship between ourselves and our opponents. As they do things, we net a few advantages.
The problem with players is they don’t often appreciate sharing. I grew up in a household with two siblings, and if you are a similar situation, you know that you have to share. For the players who are incredibly rude and not willing to give some of their wonderful spells, we’ll just have to coerce them just a little bit. Think about when you’re younger and you want to play with the computer, but your younger sibling is overtaking their time. So in that way, you tell you’ll stick your wet finger covered with saliva in their ear unless they exchange positions with you. It’s the same way. It’s just a little bit of coercion but family friendly.
We are friends. We are playing together in a pod after all. So as such, just as we convince our friends to share with us, we are also sharing with them. We can politically grant tools to our friends assuming we all come to similar conclusions. We can even trade our toys constantly for mutualistic benefits. Although, sometimes, other players get envious because they didn’t want to join in the trade deals with Rocco. I mean, they were given the offer, but they just refused.
We don’t really build a board. Why would you personally commit cards when your opponents will openly do that for you instead? And that’s exactly the plan. We’re just going to leave our friends here on the battlefield as they generate an army for our personal use. And that army comes without any costs. No need for military compensation. No need for mana costs or even playing cards. Our opponents will just give it to us for free.
We should also work to reward our friends for playing the game. Why not grant them some super-soldiers? Players are always complaining about how the game takes too long, so how about we just give them our guys above to flail at each other.
I think my most favourite card within the deck itself has to be Bloodroot Apothecary above. I think this card best symbolizes the deck and what we are trying to do. We want our opponents to lose through their own actions. We don’t want to have to do much of anything at all. We’re just friendly. We’re just giving people things. We’re just sharing in the fun. We are just part of the crowd. If our opponents just so happen to lose; well, that’s just unfortunate and their own faults. We did nothing wrong. We just gave them a simple treasure, and they somehow ended up intoxicated and killed themselves. It happens. Happy New Year!