Rockdrake Over the Line Pilot's Guide

Overview

The Rockdrake OTL deck is a Midrange Aggro deck that attempts to blitz out Rockdrakes from turns 3-6 to kill the opponent with overwhelming pressure and damage. The deck uses Rockdrake Egg and cards that immediately destroy it, such as Untold Greed and Fleshbind to immediately summon a 6/5 Rockdrake multiple times throughout the early game. The Rockdrakes push damage into the opponents’ god and eventually finish them off with Over the Line.

God Power

Neferu’s Sacrifice should be your God Power of choice to increase your hand size. This is the main condition to spawning Rockdrakes from their eggs. Drawing your combo as quickly as possible is the key to winning most matchups. Damaging yourself also helps you reduce Deathwish Thanetar’s cost to 0.

Blood Ritual can be taken in certain matchups such as against Aggro or simply if it fits your playstyle. Some decks will include more draw so that they can choose Blood Ritual without running into hand size issues.

Mulligan

The 2 cards you always want in your mulligan are Rockdrake Egg and Untold Greed. This is the best opening hand you can have. The other card you are searching for is Burrowing Scarab when fighting against Control decks, and Siren of the Grave when facing against Aggro decks.

Mulligan priority

1) Rockdrake egg

2) Untold greed

3) Fleshbind (if Untold Greed is not in hand)

4) Burrowing Scarab – vs. Control

5) Siren of the Grave- vs. Aggro

Key Cards

Rockdrake Egg - The core of the deck. All combos require that this card is drawn. You will hard- mulligan for this card.

Untold Greed - Rockdrake Egg can only spawn Rockdrakes if you have more than 6 cards in your hand. Untold Greed is the primary card that enables the Rockdrake to be summoned on turn 3. Keep this card in your mulligan.

Fleshbind - Another activator of the Rockdrake Egg activator which also heals you . Very strong card in the combo and mandatory in every list.

Canopic Hoarder - After the Rockdrake eggs have been played, Canopic Hoarder allows you to repeatedly summon Rockdrakes from your void by triggering the egg’s afterlife.

Over the Line - The deck’s finisher Key finisher of the deck. Gives you OTK potential

Necronomics - Enables the combo by replenishing mana to summon Rockdrakes and OTKing your opponent Over the Line.

Deathwish Thanetar - This card allows for extra reach when attempting to OTK the opponent with Over the Line. They can be played for 0 mana in most cases.

Siren of the Grave - Allows you stall the game while continuously summoning out Rockdrakes and pushing damage.

Serris, Arbiter of the Trial - Very flexible card that allows you to push damage and heal enough if you do not have the health to Necronomics.

Main Strategy

This deck is reliant on card draw, which allows you to cycle through your deck as quickly as possible to enable the OTK combos with Over the Line. Do your best to spawn Rockdrakes every turn. If you are unable to do this, you have several tools to stall with sleep from Siren of the Grave to continue to cycle through your deck. As the Rockdrake OTK pilot, you are the aggressor, even against Aggro decks. Your 6 damage connecting to your opponent's god is usually 1 less combo piece that you have to draw to finish your opponent. Force The opponent to trade into you. The more attacks you connect into your opponent’s god with Rockdrakes, the further ahead you are. Keep sleeping the board while adding damage towards the opponent’s’ god.

Key Combos

Rockdrake Egg + Untold Greed or Fleshbind - The Bread and butter combo, allows us to summon Rockdrakes.

Canopic Hoarder triggering Rockdrake Egg and Siren of the Grave in the void - This allows you to develop board presence while preventing your opponent from pressuring you.

There are several combos that are enabled at 6 mana. I have listed 2 below that are quite common for finishing off the opponent:.

Canopic Hoarder activating 2 Rockdrake Eggs + Necronomics, + 2 Deathwish Thanetar + Over the Line: 22 damage combo from hand.

Canopic Hoarder activating 2 Rockdrake Eggs + Necronomics + Over the Line, Necronomics + Over the Line: 28 damage combo from hand.

Cards to play around

Gleamweaver - if you are able to see your opponents deck and are aware they are playing Gleamweaver, never play more than 1 Rockdrake Egg in your void at the same time. This is the only way to play around this card.

Eucos in Eclipse - If you are playing against Light, never leave a Rockdrake Egg on board because they can give the egg Soulless, which prevents us from activating it later with Canopic Hoarder. Send Rockdrake Eggs to the void the turn they are played.

Place in the meta

This deck thrives when the decks in the meta are much slower. The OTK potential of this list allows you to punish decks that do not put out any pressure. The main weakness of this deck are fast Aggro decks and anti sleep decks that can kill you before you are able to draw all your combo pieces.

Sample Deck list

[8M] SamBam- This list achieved a top 10 finish on the weekend of 09-09-2022 to 09-11-2022 by Infinite Mana’s own [8M] SamBam

Conclusion

The OTL Rockdrake deck is a very strong and challenging deck to play. Every game has so many different lines to explore and multiple different ways to pull out a victory. The deck has a very high learning curve, but when mastered, is a very formidable deck in the meta. There are several genesis cards that are used in this list. The meta deck is currently estimated at 0.2819 Eth.