Goat Format Championship 21 Deck Tech: Roghnach's Earth Turbo

The first major tournament of 2024 is live with 232 duelists fighting for glory! Earth Aggro all star Cormac "Roghnach" Newton is among those present, and he's brought an interesting twist to the deck that he helped put on the map in goat format. 

Deck List

Overview

Earth aggro is all about throwing some of the format's biggest 4-star beaters into a deck and chucking them at the closest opponent. Goblin Attack Force, Gigantes, and Giant Rat are some of the most commonly played monsters in the lineup. Roghnach is one of the original pioneers of the deck as far as competitive lists are concerned, and together with Shaggypowers, basically shaped it into the meta relevant threat it is today. 

​This new list, while still playing many of the hallmarks of the strategy, is just spicey enough to get featured here. With a higher than average star count, its got some similarities to modern monarch and zombie decks. The sideboard is also something to note with the additional Skill Drains and spicey Hallowed Life Barrier. While it might seem like some crazy 4-D level chess play, Roghnach notes that the absence of Heavy Storm was indeed because he, "Literally just forgot" to include it. Happens to the best of us. 

Player Insight

Newton has been playing in online Goat events for years, and has made top placements with Earth-centric decks for about just as long. So, the core of this list shouldn't come as much of a surprise to those that have been paying attention. That being said there's definitely enough about this list that's unique enough to warrant some explanations. Luckily for us, when asked about why he chose to play this deck, and what his thought process was for his card choices, Newton was more than happy to oblige. 

Element of surprise mainly, and always trying to freshen up the metagame so Goat can be more than just Chaos mirrors.

Standard Earth beat which evolved from this list was a success, so I wanted its direct ancestor in this form to succeed too. First built this back in 2019, so I've dug up an old artifact to see how it still works today.

Started out as some Earth Monarch deck with Bubonic Vermin and weird stuff like Blindly Loyal Goblin. Eventually it was clear that it won mainly by assembling pieces for a quick 1 punch combo, so the deck took shape accordingly.

The more it went on, it started to seek even more simplicity and streamlining by just sticking to the Lv4 beat gameplan, and that's how Earth beat was born by around late 2019. But at least at this stage in its development, it was effectively a Monarch OTK deck with no actual Monarchs.

Also, this is only about as faithful a reconstruction as I was able to make from memory, as not only did I never save a separate list for this variant, but last I checked I wasn't able to find my replays from 2019. So it's maybe 80% the same as it was. The Zombie stuff and Drains are a recent addition.

I threw the side deck together in 5 minutes before the event started, as I wasn't even planning on joining today but it randomly turned out I was able to in the end. It's just stuff I've liked from other Earth variants' side decks, with a little more ceiling in mind, such as the Decrees.

​Basically Earth beat but with a higher ceiling. Randomly reaches for game out of nowhere much more often than Earth typically does, thanks to Trunade, Brains, Dust Spirit etc.

Very capable of handling the Goat package side plan a lot of players have for Earth where they bring in Goat/Meta/Swap etc which can sometimes slow Earth down too much when it needs to be taking advantage of its quick start, to the point of losing its momentum entirely.

Drains completely shut down that whole plan, and other than more obscure stuff like Rivalry, Drain is one of the only ways to not just try to counter Thousand-Eyes but to actually punish it and make your opponent regret trying to use it.

Definitely some cool tech here! For something that Newton claims was "thrown together", he's certainly got the primary and side gameplans all figured out. It's showing, too, as he currently sits at a clean 4-1 in the event! We asked him how the tournament has been so far, and this is what he had to say. 

Pretty comfortably. Felt like it had a normal amount of luck and wasn't desperate to draw specific cards in order to survive. So many of the cards are interchangeable. They're just categorised as beaters, sweepers, stealing spells, backrow removal, etc.

Just did its thing by punching hard and surprising the opponent. They have a much harder time feeling safe against this version. And again because of the cards being so interchangeable, the wins are pretty similar stories across the board, nothing too exciting even.

My loss vs Chaos Turbo involved too many things going wrong, Trinity stuff, we know how Chaos is. But it certainly always felt winnable regardless, just didn't work out.

​That's everything I can think of. Play it for yourself because it's funny, and hopefully you'll have your opponents paranoid of losing out of nowhere every turn.