Budget Magic: $84 (40 tix) Bogle Horse Green (Standard)

by SaffronOlive // Jul 24, 2018

Sho'daache, Budget Magic lovers, it's that time once again! Last week during our Instant Deck Techs, we looked at a deck called Bogle Horse Green that was looking to load up hexproof creatures (like Vine Mare) with auras (like Blanchwood Armor). Well, this week's Budget Magic deck is based on that deck, but with a handful of changes that not only make the deck cheaper but perhaps even better! The basic idea of Bogle Horse Green is simple: make a massive trampling hexproof creature and use it to smash the opponent to death. If that doesn't work, we can always just cast Gigantosaurus on Turn 3, make it unblockable, and kill our opponent in just a couple of attacks! Can a Bogles-esque deck work in Standard on a budget? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we'll talk more about the deck!

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Budget Magic: Bogle Horse Green (Standard)

The Deck

Bogle Horse Green is basically a subspecies of Mono-Green Stompy, with a focus on hexproof creatures and enchantments to make those creatures massive. This being said, the game plan is similar: play really powerful threats every turn and smash the opponent with huge creatures before they get a chance to recover!

The Bogles

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Vine Mare is the centerpiece of our deck, being the cheapest hexproof creature in Standard. While a four-mana 5/3 isn't a great deal on its own, when you add hexproof to the mix (along with the ability to sneak past black creatures), Vine Mare becomes a real threat. Normally, auras don't see a lot of competitive play because it's really easy to get two-for-oned by removal spells, but hexproof solves this problem, making it safe to load a creature up with auras, make it huge, and swing with impunity!

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Beyond Vine Mare, we have a couple of backup Bogles as well. Carnage Tyrant is a bit expensive (although we do have some mana dorks to ramp into the Dinosaur) but is extremely powerful in conjunction with auras because it not only has hexproof but trample as well. One of the problems with Vine Mare is that even if we make it huge with Blanchwood Armor, our opponent can simply chump block it with small creatures, Carnage Tyrant's trample solves this problem while also giving us a main-deck answer to the endless counterspells presented by various control decks. Meanwhile, Bristling Hydra is more of a pseudo-Bogle. Since we aren't an energy deck, we can't use Bristling Hydra's hexproof ability repeatedly, but the energy that Bristling Hydra generates is enough that we can protect it from one removal spell, and if we can make it huge with Blanchwood Armor, we can usually kill our opponent quickly enough that protecting it once is enough to close out the game.

It's also worth mentioning that unlike Vine Mare (which dies in combat to things like Goblin Chainwhirler and Knight of Grace without help), both Bristling Hydra and especially Carnage Tyrant are good threats on their own, even without any support. While enchanting our hexproof creatures is our main game plan, we can win some games by just attacking with big, hard-to-deal-with green creatures.

Bogle Support

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While hexproof is a fine ability on by itself, our Bogles become even scarier with support. When it comes to turning our hexproof creatures into massive threats, our main plan is Blanchwood Armor. Since our mana base is just 24 Forests, by the time we play a Blanchwood Armor on a hexproof creature, it's often giving that creature +5/+5 while also scaling through the late game as we make more land drops.

This means if we can play a Vine Mare on Turn 4, untap, and play a Blanchwood Armor on Turn 5, we are immediately attacking with a 9/8 that dodges nearly all of the removal in Standard. This quickly turns into The Abyss, with our opponent being force to chump block with a creature every turn just to stay alive, and when you throw some of our other support cards into the mix, the chump-blocking plan suddenly doesn't work!

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While both Cartouche of Strength and Rhonas the Indomitable have additional upsides, the primary reason why both of these cards are in our deck is to give our huge hexproof creatures trample so our opponent can't simply chump block forever with random small creatures or tokens. Thanks to its enters-the-battlefield fight ability, Cartouche of Strength also gives us some removal and is actually very good in our deck thanks to the hexproof nature of our creatures. On a normal (non-hexproof) creature, Cartouche of Strength is a risky removal spell, since our opponent can always kill our creature in response, which not only puts us down the creatures and the Cartouche but saves their creature from the "fight" as well. However, the risk is greatly diminished when we are enchanting a hexproof creature like Vine Mare or Carnage Tyrant.

Meanwhile, Rhonas the Indomitable gives us another way to trample up our big hexproof creatures while also being a casual 5/5, indestructible deathtouch for three mana, which is a pretty insane deal. We've got a ton of big creatures in our deck, which means Rhonas the Indomitable is almost always in creature mode, and in a pinch, the indestructibility makes Rhonas a fine target for a Blanchwood Armor (although not as good as our hexproof creatures, since exile-based removal like Vraska's Contempt and Cast Out do answer the God).

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Key to the City is the biggest new addition to the deck since the Instant Deck Tech, and it's absolutely absurd in Bogle Horse Green. Most obviously, Key to the City gives us another way to make sure our huge hexproof creatures get through for damage by making them unblockable, which means that we can often just kill our opponent with a Blanchwood Armor-wearing Carnage Tyrant or Vine Mare in just a couple of attacks through any number of blockers. However, Key to the City solves another problem with our deck: it gives us a way to stay in the game when everything goes wrong (for example, with our board being swept by Settle the Wreckage or Fumigate). The ability to discard extra lands and turn them into more threats is actually very important in some games, where apart from Key to the City, our deck doesn't really have any source of card filtering or card advantage.

Mana Dorks

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Llanowar Elves and Druid of the Cowl are pretty simple: they help us ramp into our expensive hexproof creatures a bit more quickly. While playing Vine Mare on Turn 4 is fine, playing it on Turn 3 is even better. Plus, our mana dorks help to make sure we can cast cards like Carnage Tyrant, even though we only have 24 lands in our deck. Normally, the downside of playing cards like Llanowar Elves and Druid of the Cowl is that they are pretty weak off the top of our deck in the late game when we already have plenty of mana, but Key to the City helps to solve this problem. If we draw either of our mana dorks late, we can always discard them, make one of our creatures unblockable for the turn, and then use Key to the City to draw a new (and hopefully more impactful) card on our next turn.

Other Stuff

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In a deck that's playing exclusively Forests in its mana base, Steel Leaf Champion and Gigantosaurus are simply too big and powerful to pass up. While neither of these cards is especially good with our auras since they die to removal, they are both big enough that they don't really need to be enchanted by Blanchwood Armor to be massive threats and close out the game quickly. Steel Leaf Champion is especially good with Llanowar Elves, since we can cast it on turn two; plus, it does have some sneak value (especially against decks like RB Aggro), as it is very difficult for the opponent to block. Meanwhile, sometimes we cast Gigantosaurus on Turn 3, and if our opponent doesn't have a Vraska's Contempt or Cast Out immediately, it's usually enough to win the game, and that doesn't even include the potential to make it unblockable with Key to the City!

Wrap-Up

All in all, Bogle Horse Green was solid. We finished our video matches 4-1, although our overall record was 5-3, considering we beat a Goblin Gift deck where I had some video problems and lost rematches to Storm and Red Aggro. Regardless, this is a super-solid record for a budget deck! More importantly, the deck felt extremely strong. Perhaps the best example of this was the game where we played Gigantosauruses on Turns 3 and 4, but we also managed to build some massive hexproof creatures with Blanchwood Armor. Key to the City was a great addition to the deck—a lot of opponents were pretty helpless when we started attacking with an unblockable 10/10 Gigantosaurus.

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As for changes I'd make to the budget build now that we've played some games with the deck, I'm not sure there are any. Sneaking in another Rhonas the Indomitable would be nice, but at $13 a copy (and with rotation only a couple of months away), it might not be worth the money. I'm not completely happy with the sideboard, but I'm also not sure what I'd change, especially without increasing the budget. One card in consideration for the main deck is Ghalta, Primal Hunger, but since Bogle Horse Green can't really support Heart of Kiran like normal Mono-Green Stompy can (in part because Heart of Kiran doesn't work with our auras), it might be too inconsistent. Still, it might be worth testing a copy or two, since a 12/12 trample for (potentially) two mana is pretty scary—and even scarier with Key to the City making it unblockable.

In the end, Bogle Horse Green seems quite solid. Against aggro, it can simply overwhelm the opponent with bigger creatures, and against control—assuming we can dodge the sweepers—all we need to do is sneak a Vine Mare through our opponent's counters (or draw a Carnage Tyrant) to win the game. It's also worth mentioning that while the deck does lose a few fringe pieces, the basic shell of Llanowar Elves, Steel Leaf Champion, Vine Mare, Gigantosaurus, and Carnage Tyrant survives rotation, so if you end up putting the deck together, you should be able to play it with minimal changes for the next few years! Give Bogle Horse Green a shot if you like annoying opponents with hexproof and smashing with massive creatures. It might be the perfect budget Standard deck for you, not just for the rest of the summer but for Guilds of Ravnica Standard as well!

Bogle Horse Green can be built extremely cheaply with just a couple of changes: by dropping Carnage Tyrant and Rhonas the Indomitable. If we drop these mythics and replace them with Prowling Serpopard (to help out against counterspell-heavy decks now that we don't have Carnage Tyrant as a trump card) and the fourth copy of Cartouche of Strength (to mimic Rhonas the Indomitable's ability to give our Bogles trample), the deck's price drops all the way down under $40. Technically, you can keep the copy of Rhonas the Indomitable if you want to and still get the deck down to $50, but I figured we might as well cut the price as much as possible while still keeping the deck functional. While these changes do drop the power of the deck again—specifically against control, where Carnage Tyrant is perhaps the single best card in all of Standard—in general the deck should play just like the one in the videos, and you won't even notice the changes in most matchups.

Honestly, there isn't much to change for non-budget Bogle Horse Green. Adding a second Rhonas the Indomitable makes sense, since the God is really good in the deck, and we're still unlikely to get Rhonas flooded with two copies. We can change up the sideboard a bit by adding Thrashing Brontodon and Vivian Reed to deal with artifacts and enchantments (which are better than Naturalize) and another Carnage Tyrant for when we run into the mono-counterspell control decks. While I think these changes probably make the deck slightly better, they are small enough that I almost didn't include an updated list this week.

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. 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.