How to win more games with the Oil Rogue.
Oil Rogue doesn’t tend to get seen much action in the middling ranks of the Hearthstone ladder at this stage of the Season. It’s a comparatively complex deck to play, after all, and it’s easy to throw matches or miss lethal damage in the heat of a burning rope!
It’s a deck that it pays to understand well though, as you’re sure to face off against it often at various points throughout your Hearthstone career. We’ve put together some important tips that will help fans of the deck get to grips with it faster, and also shed some light on its strengths so that opponents can gain a little more insight into where the greatest threats lie.
Got some useful tips of your own? Let us know in the comments section at the bottom of this article and we’ll add them in.
1. Understand that your main win-condition with this deck involves devastating burst damage, and so you’re not as reliant on small combo bonuses as you are with other Rogue decks. Don’t feel compelled to squeeze that extra two points of damage out of SI: 7 Agent, for example – it’s a perfectly legitimate vanilla Turn 3 play if you’ve no other way of getting onto the board.
2. Having said that, SI: 7 Agent used in conjunction with Backstab can be devastating for your opponent and is a dream play to make in the early game. Pull off this combo and you’ll be able to remove a pair of two-Health minions, while also leaving something on the board for yourself!
3. Think carefully before playing Blade Flurry. Can you get all of the damage you need out of its detonation, or should you feed it with more power first? If you have two or more charges left, how best should you spend the excess charge before blowing it up?
4. Sprint and Preparation is, of course, a powerful combo, but you should never play it at your earliest opportunity if you’re able to put a mid-game minion out onto the board instead. It’s better to have some kind of board presence, and then refill your hand – particularly if you can put something sticky like Piloted Shredder out onto the board.
5. Consider your biggest plays and understand how much damage you can put out if you play your cards together. A killer play is to activate your Hero Power, put Southsea Deckhand out onto the board, throw your Tinker’s Sharpsword Oil onto the blade, hit the opponent’s face with everything, then detonate your weapon with Blade Flurry. You can boost this sort of damage output even higher though, so think very carefully before committing to even a single move in each turn!
6. This may seem obvious, but we’ll say it anyway. Think very carefully before wasting a charge of your Hero Power agains the opponent’s face. You’ll almost always gain more value by holding both charges of the weapon for a future turn. For a start, you might get to buff two uses of the weapon, rather than one. Secondly, you might not have the Mana available on the next turn to re-arm yourself with the vanilla blade.
