Master Theorycrafter – Big Ruby

Stepping off of the beaten path can be one of the true pleasures of a TCG.

In an interview, one of my favorite game designers said that he plays games to express himself. I think that, in many ways, this aspect of TCGs is one of the things that gets so many of us hooked. While it’s true that that the first thing that brought me into TCGs was competition, the second thing that brought me into the fold was finding interesting ways to try and say something new.

I’ve long liked to say that “design” is the wrong word for those of us who brew decks in games like HEX. It’s perhaps the case that we could say we are building a deck, sure. When we say we “build” a deck, we are putting it together, collecting the pieces, and assembling it. But the most accurate thing that can be said about the decks we might make is that we discover them.

All of the raw materials that we’re working with in the realm of deck assembly came to us from the painstaking work of the R&D teams who create the cards themselves. They spend countless hours piecing together the sets we play with, and so many of the concepts that we might think we are bringing into the world anew were thought of and discussed long before the set was even coded into early online versions.

As a word, “discovery” has a lot more to say to me about the joy and wonder of making a deck than “build” or “design.” Perhaps it is the romantic in me, but I find myself loving the term for other reasons too: it captures that moment you discover that the Boris Blastforge that is sending rabbits – pardon, Shin’hare – into the air might actually not appreciate facing down a Thorntongue Snapdragon or having a Lullaby drop their troops back to a reasonable size. Discovery is a great way to talk about learning that Reginald’s Riposte can do a lot of work when one Ruby deck fights another.

At the same time, trying to step down the path less traveled also comes with it a harsh reality. The well-worn path is less likely to end up being a place you’ll stub your toes.

It is with the overall spirit of discovery that I offer to you a deck I’ve had a lot of pleasure playing over the last six or eight weeks. I’ve been calling it Big Ruby or Big Burn, and it is a deck that, while a cousin to the Ruby Angus the Arsonist decks out there, is doing something altogether entirely different. Where Angus wants to go for the kill now, this Big Burn deck is more interested in inevitability rather than immediacy.

This was one of the three decks I used to build up to Cosmic on the ladder, and while it has some weaknesses, it is also able to be very scary. And, it is a hell of a lot of fun.





To really understand what makes this deck special, you need to know the breakdown of the somewhat signature card of the deck, Zakiir. First of all, simply put, the various Power of Zakiir cards are absolutely absurd. If you don’t know what they are, allow me to show you.