Rocks on the Brain...

SabreW here with another deck for you guys. This time, as the title says I got rocks on the brain as I was excited with REDU (Return of the Duelist, for those that don't know) out with the New EARTH/Rock support cards. Rocks were one of my favorite decks back then, so I decided to bring my old deck back out and trim it up a bit.

Spoiler:

Monsters:

3x Beta the Magnet Warrior
3x Giant Soldier of Stone
3x Block Golem
2x Gaia Plate the Earth Giant
1x Grandsoil the Elemental Lord
2x Koa'ki Meiru Guardian
2x Koa'ki Meiru Sandman
2x Koa'ki Meiru Wall
1x Neo-Spacian Grand Mole
2x Rescue Rabbit

Spells:

2x Catapult Zone
1x Dark Hole
1x Heavy Storm
1x Monster Reborn
2x Mystical Space Typhoon
2x Pot of Duality
2x Solidarity

Traps:

2x Call of the Haunted
1x Mirror Force
2x Rock Bombardment
1x Solemn Judgment
2x Solemn Warning
1x Torrential Tribute

Side Deck:

2x Giant Rat
1x Gorz the Emissary of Darkness (Anti-OTK)
1x Morphing Jar
1x Book of Moon
2x Breath of Light (Anti-Rock)
1x Mind Control
2x System Down (Anti-Machine)
2x Dimensional Prison
2x Fiendish Chain
1x Steelswarm Roach

Extra Deck:

1x Ally of Justice Catastor
1x Black Rose Dragon
1x Scrap Dragon
1x Stardust Dragon
2x Fairy King Albverdich
2x Gem-Knight Pearl
1x Maestroke the Symphony Djinn
1x Number 17: Leviathan Dragon
1x Number 39: Utopia
3x Soul of Silvermountain
1x Wind-Up Zenmaines

As you can see, the deck focuses less on stun like most Rock decks you would see and more on Special Summoning and Beatdown style play, while still coming up with a good enough defense to help get what I need. Now for some of the Individual cards:

The Boss monsters in here are Gaia Plate and Grandsoil. Gaia Plate helps me get past the boss monsters my opponent has that my smaller monsters cant beat. Grandsoil is another big beatstick I can use as well as be a psuedo-Monster Reborn for my Gaia Plate, Block Golem or one of their monsters should I need it.

My main attackers here are surprisingly the Koa'ki Meiru monsters. Most players use them for their negation effects, but this deck sees them as really huge beatsticks when combined with Solidarity.

Block Golem: The MVP of my deck. No need to explain his effect or how much he makes this deck awesome. XD

Rescue Rabbit, GS of Stone and Beta: An Xyz engine for Rocks that I just love. The Rabbit always had an interest in digging up old fossils (why do you think he was so popular with Evols? XD). This time around though he's taking an interest in mining, and digging up some old gems in the form of Giant Soldier of Stone and Beta the Magnet Warrior. Rescue Rabbit pulls Soldier and Beta from my deck and get instant Rank 3 and 4 Xyz monsters, respectively.

Catapult Zone: This deck is all about getting rocks to the grave to special summon the later, and this field spell helps get that done in spades. Along with providing even more defense for my already defensive rocks, this card gets rocks into my grave.

Solidarity: No intro needed for this card other than 2700 Atk Koa'ki Meiru's, 3400 Atk Pearls, and 3600 Atk Gaia Plates and Grandsoil. Solidarity just might be my new favorite Spell Card. (That or I might still be sad about my Amazons not being playable anymore. )

Rock Bombardment: I may be thinking of swapping this out for something else but right now it's a good card I can set to scare my opponent its something bad for them.

Breath of Light: For those rare Mirror matches where my opponent normally plays Stunny Rocks, this card becomes a pseudo Dark Hole throws my opponent for a loop when his rocks are gone and I just bring mine back to life. Example: If Dyna's staring me in the face, BoL comes in and takes it out. I summon Gaia Plate and give my opponent the trollface. XD

Well there's the deck. Changes/Comments/Critique are welcome!

Don't take this offensively.

I think the whole Rabbit idea is terrible. It's really inconsistent and half the time you are going to draw shitty Vanillas. Magnet Warrior sucks and Giant Soldier sucks even more.
Like what in the hell are you going to do if you open multiple of them in your opening hand?

Rabbit.dek can at least protect them and slowroll into broken Xyz , this cannot.You don't run enough defense and your Vanillas suck, heck they don't even have the same level but that's beside the point.

Wouldn't run more than one tech Gaia Plate in this, because it conflicts with Block Golem and CoTH. You will rarely have 5 monsters for Grandsoil either.

Rock Bombardement is atrocious, replace it with better traps like a second Torrential for example which prevents you from getting shit on by Wind-Up/Geargia is just one of the best traps in general.

just run regular Rock Stun dude. If you like Grandsoil give the Grandsoil Psychic Deck a try.

Running suboptimal cards just to be different or creative is stupid.
The reason why people run Rock Stun is because it's the most efficient way to run Rocks atm.
You don't see anyone running Chamberlain of the Six Samurai in Sams. Why? Because he sucks.

By no means I'm a legendary YGO master genius but I'm decent enough to see when a deck is unplayable.

Normally I don't do "deck fixes" like this anymore and just ignore the deck, because 99% of the time people get all butthurt and won't listen anyway.

Yeah...I've got to agree with guts on this. It's not like Rabbit gives you access to Laggia or anything, just normal xyz's. And Gaia kinda messes up your graveyard so you can't regurgitate rocks like crazy, which is the point of Block Golem. Normal Rock Stun is just THE way to go. You always have something to summon, most of those things can negate stuff and have 1900, and you can keep crapping out +1's and swarming with Golem. Swarming in a control deck is just boss, and with that boost in consistency it makes one-for-one negation that much more potent. I can give you a build for it if you want but the engines as you have them now just don't connect well enough to justify even using an extra engine.

I know this was kinda harsh but I'm not here to attack people or anything, I just thought you need a push in the right direction. I have better things to do and if I didn't care about you or about your deck I wouldn't have posted here in the first place.
Always being nice isn't gonna help you.

Anyways, spamming a better version of Doomcaliber Knight over and over again sounds crazy good. Block Golem is what makes this deck competitive.

Thanks for the critique, guys.

@guts: Harper knows this already, but with me there's no such thing as "too harsh". I make some ideas, I show them to you guys. The reason I say "Comments?critique are welcome" is because I WANT you guys to run the idea into the dirt if you think its bad. Only way I'll get better at making new decks.

I want the idea to be different from the norm, but I also want it to be good. If you guys tell me it's not, I'm not gonna fight you about it. I'll just try something else with the deck. Not just with this deck, but any deck I make. So I'm not "butthurt" as you say. If Stun's the best way to go for Rocks, then I'll go that route for now.

@Harper: You're probably right on Rabbit. The main Xyz monsters I got out with the rabbit combo were Silvermountain and Pearl. I didn't get much else out because by that time I had Solidarity out as well, which kinda hindered my options a bit.

As for that deck build, I'll gladly take you up on it.

So based on you guys' comments so far:

-Grandsoil was more a tech card than Gaia Plate, who was the actual boss of the deck. I tried Grandsoil here, and like you said, I've only got him out once. So Axe Grandsoil. Gaia Plate and I were best friends in this deck, and he didn't argue much with Block Golem to me. I might keep him, but I'll drop him to one and see what goes on.

-Not saying I will, but if I could keep the Rabbit engine here, I'd probably take out Beta and keep GS so I can play Silver mountain for more Trap protection.

If I can't think of any other reasons then these to keep this and try again, then I'll just scrap it and make people dizzy with Rocks again.

On a separate note: Speaking of engines, you just reminded me that I have an Engines List here that DESPERATELY needs updating. Think you guys can help me with that?

https://i.imgur.com/AcX3J.png

The side isn't the real side but they're some other techs you could try, though i don't recommend adding too many more monsters, 15 works fine and seems to be optimal though occasionally you won't have a rock to reveal late game, which is the only real weakness the deck even has in the first place. So like maybe throw in some Jujus if you're having trouble drawing into rocks. Drain seems like it would be boss in the main because it barely even hurts you, only affects Mole and Dyna and your xyz's. Lance has been testing so well though and with constantly reviving Guardian, it does seem a bit extraneous. So i have Drain in the side. Call at 3 may seem a bit much but...it's not xD. Just trust me on that. If you really want to fit something else in you could cut it to 2 but yeah. This isn't a deck you can change much in. I mean, you could, but it would only hurt you really. And I hope we were able to show you why that is instead of just "it's bad right now" lol. If you don't get why from my last post I'd be happy to explain.

For the engine list, there's like an unlimited list and engines people haven't even thought of yet. But i did like the idea of it when you posted it a while back, it can give people some ideas. So yeah i can help haha

Harper7000 wrote:

And I hope we were able to show you why that is instead of just "it's bad right now" lol.

@Harper: Thanks for the list.

And yeah, I saw some of the things I could've and have fixed in the deck. You and guts are boss for helping me out with the deck. I'll play with Rock Stun now, but I do want to keep this deck and fix it up, with the hopes that (someday) down the road, I'll be able to play with it again. With some better cards, I really see something I can do with it.

And as for the list, once I start rewriting the list with Engines I know on paper, I'll redo the list on here. (I just hope I don't get in trouble for necroposting. )

I know I'm a tad bit late on this one, though I would say that there are a few issues that I do agree with that Guts and Harper pointed out.
Though, I will say that from my experience, you came out with a very decent general idea for how the deck should be built and your structure was on point. The way you went about it, not so much.

Harper is right when he said normal rock stun is just the way to go on this one.
Vanillas are just a little out of place nowadays, but I appreciate the creativity very much so. Dino Rabbit in its prime gave people the assumption that Vanillas had more use that just being printed for no damn reason. A lot of people ran with that and thus you started to see a lot of Vanilla Beatdown deck scattered throughout the YGO community, but during the last format it wasn't a decent idea simply because the format was gear based towards certain tier decks. This format, creativity (something I've been dying to see Konami push for) can actually be used. For Christ sake, some crazy, ludicrous "zombie" deck topped some tourney somewhere and there was a huge buzz about it, and I haven't seemed to see enough of that up until this format where all the Archetype Duelists chose to take a new direction when their decks got castrated by the BanList.

Personally, I like your approach. Just gotta work on the consistency.

Don't be creative for the sake of being creative.

Use it to catch people off guard.
Use it to make your opponents misplay and benefit from the fact that most players
don't know what the fuck your deck does and probably won't have a side deck for it.

In order to play rogue decks successfully you should know what the expected meta will look like. You have to know how every top tier deck works and choose a deck that is a legitimate threat to those decks.

Also keep in my mind that you will play against other rogue decks too.

The Rock-Rabbit idea is just terrible and inconsistent ,no matter how you twist and turn it.

Only use good cards/decks/strategies. ( I think Harper wrote that in article ^_^).Try out the top tier decks yourself , see which strategies are broken, find out their weaknesses,etc.
That will help you separate good cards from bad cards.

A lot of guys just slam a bunch of shitty cards together,don't know shit about the meta and think that they are superior to everyone else because they are "creative and original" ,which is just absurd.

The reason why people play top tier decks ( or what some of you call meta decks) is because those decks increase their chances of winning.

People who ridicule others for increasing their chances of winning and run bad cards/decks which decrease their own chances of winning are bad players.

If you play competitively, your goal is to win .The cards and decks are just tools to help you win.Knowing rulings is a tool to help you win. Creativity is just a tool that can help you win.

Use creativity like Jeff Jones,not like a random 12 year old scrub.


Edit:

I will only post competitive decks from now on,just to help people to get better.
Most of the decks I've posted were casual and just stuff I mess around with.

@NoUserName: I see what you mean. Now I know why Rabbit liked playing Fossil Fighters on his DS so much. XD

gutsberserk wrote:

Don't be creative for the sake of being creative.

The sad part about it is, I've had a lot of people tell me that. It's only now that it's finally making sense to me. My take on "creativity" did make my decks different from others. But like your recent article says, my take wasn't helping me win. I'll get a few lucky breaks but none are consistent enough where I can call the decks "good."

As for knowing the meta, I admit I do not at this point. I would check the top 8 of the latest YCS, then next thing I know more decks pop up outta nowhere so fast my head is spinning. In light of this, I will scrap my decks until I figure out what the new meta is, then try those deck out to see if I like any of them. If I don't , then I'll think about making a new deck.