Hearthpwn

Oil Rogue

Oil Rogue is one of the trickier decks to master in Hearthstone, but it's also one of the most viable for Rogues in the current metabame. Even if you don't plan on playing it much yourself, it pays to have an understanding of what makes this powerful deck type tick, so that you're always prepared to counter it.

For today's deck spotlight, we've chosen the most popular current incarnation of Oil Rogue. Read on to gain some important insight into how the deck plays out.

Editor's note - November update: A few important changes have been made to this deck since the last season. First of all, the Annoy-o-Trons are out in favour of Bloodmage Thalnos and a Southsea Deckhand, the former giving the Oil Rogue back a little bit of its original flavour. A single Violent Teacher also makes way for an Antique Healbot, in order to provide you with just a teensy bit of emergency healing.

Oil Rogue strategy guide

The early game is all about removing the opponent's minions as efficiently as possible - think of cards like Backstab, Eviscerate, SI:7 Agent, and even your dagger loaded up with a little Deadly Poison. It's absolutely fine to engage your Hero Power dagger on turn two, rather than playing a card, but resist the urge to spend even a point of its damage unless it provides the efficient removal of something.In the mid-game, it's cards like Piloted Shredder, Azure Drake, and Violet Teacher that will keep you in the game and building up the pieces of your ultimate end-game puzzle. The solution to that puzzles lies in utilising cards like Blade Flurry and Tinker's Sharpsword Oil to build the ultimate game-ending volley of weapon damage output.

Oil Rogue Mulligan guide

For the more aggressive opponents out there, look for all of your most obvious removal tools like Backstab, Fan of Knives and so on. A Hero Power dagger boosted with Deadly Poison can be detonated with Blade Flurry to devastating effect as well. SI: 7 Agent is a very strong play as it allows you to - often - dish out some removal while also placing a body on the board. Southsea Deckhand should help push back a little in the early game as well, and give yourself more time to beef up your hand.If you're in a very control-orientated metagame, look for those same cards but value SI:7 Agent even more, and hang on to your stronger mid-game minions like Piloted Shredder. This should give you plenty of power to bite back with, once your opponent starts laying some bothersome minions onto the board.

Oil Rogue combos and synergies

As you'd expect from the queen of card combos, that are quite a lot of synergies to keep in mind with the Oil Rogue deck. Here are the most important ones that you should commit to memory, and make second nature as quickly as possible.

- Tinker's Sharpsword Oil is your big blade and minion-boosting spell. Don't forget that you can hit the enemy Hero with one charge, then use Blade Flurry to hit them once again for the same amount of damage (subject to charges on your weapon)./p>

- Preparation reduces the Mana cost of all other cards by a total of three, but is most powerfully combined with Sprint for a shockingly strong card draw effect on the cheap.

- Azure Drake can be used to boost up the damage effect of Fan of Knives very nicely.

- Sap's a strong card indeed, but it's often hard to make a solid play alongside it. Preparation will typically give you the chance to both remove a troublesome minion, and get something of your own out into play./p>

- Use Deadly Poison with your Hero Power and Blade Flurry to create a relatively cheap method for dishing out strong area-of-effect damage.