Much Abrew: Bogles (Modern)

by SaffronOlive // Nov 7, 2016

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the new and improved Much Abrew About Nothing. Last week during our Instant Deck Techs, I made the mistake of not only posting a deck tech for Bogles (one of my three most hated decks in all of Modern) but also asking people not to vote for the deck. Human nature being what it is, this led to hundreds of comments, including many saying, "I voted for this because you asked me not to," and as a result, today we are playing Bogles in Modern.

So why is it I dislike Bogles so much? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, I've lost to the deck a lot of times over the years, and it generates its own special kind of helplessness thanks to hexproof. Also, even though I've never really played the deck, the play style doesn't really appeal to me. It seems like you pretty much just slam your Slippery Bogles, play some auras, cross your fingers, and hope for the best. Will Bogles be better (and more importantly, more fun) than I think? Let's see!

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Bogles Instant Deck Tech

Bogles vs. Elves (Match 1)

Bogles vs. Kiki's End (Match 2)

Bogles vs. Titan Shift (Match 3)

Bogles vs. UW Control (Match 4)

Bogles vs. Ad Nauseam (Match 5)

Bogles (Wrap Up)

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Discussion

It's pretty obvious that something went wrong with our attempt at Bogles, considering we went 1-4 in our five matches, but I'm not quite sure what.

Did we get unlucky? Probably a little bit—a surprising number of our opponents had answers for our hexproof creatures.

Did I play the deck poorly? Perhaps. I'm sure my sequencing could have been better in some cases, although I can't really see any game-losing punts.

Is Bogles just poorly positioned in Modern at the moment? It seems like it.

These matches didn't really do much to change my opinion of Bogles. There isn't much play to the deck—we pretty much have to slam our stuff and hope for the best. Unfortunately for us, our opponents had a lot of answers. We had games where we missed on umbras to protect our creatures and got punished by double Anger of the Gods and also games where we drew our umbras and our opponent had Engineered Explosives to kill them. This might be a product of our matchups: some decks can answer hexproof creatures, some decks can't, and we ran into a lot of decks that had some number of answers.

The bigger problem seems to be that Bogles is a bit slow for Modern at the moment. A year or two ago (when Bogles was one of the best decks in the format), the fast decks were looking to kill on Turn 4 and many decks went slower to disrupt the Turn 4 decks (primarily Twin). Now, a huge percentage of the format is looking to kill on Turn 3, which makes the format much more hostile for Bogles. Basically, Bogles is a really hard to disrupt deck that can kill consistently on Turn 4 or 5, which is okay in a removal-heavy Turn 4 format but not great in a goldfishy Turn 3 format.

Our main plan for beating fast decks is making a huge lifelinker, but this plan only works sometimes. We have games where we simply don't draw a lifelink aura, and there are some matchups where all the lifelink in the world isn't going to save us (a good example of this was the Ad Nauseam matchup, but Infect is similar).

As far as the build of Bogles we played, by far the worst card in our deck was Suppression Field. I'm not sure it was good in any of our matches, and we had some games where it hurt us way more than it hurt our opponent. It might be fine in the sideboard, but as a main-deck card, it felt extremely lacking. I'm not sure what to replace it with, but just about any random hexproof creature or aura would have been better.

Otherwise, I don't really have many suggestions for the deck. Apart from a handful of flex slots, most of the list is optimized and there isn't much to change. As a result, it's hard to recommend Bogles in Modern at the moment. If things shift more towards removal-heavy midrange decks, Bogles could rise again, but right now I'm just not sure that Bogles can keep up with the faster goldfish decks in the format.

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. Don't forget to vote for next week's deck by liking, commenting, and subscribing to Instant Deck Tech videos! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive, or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.