101 Cards - Rocco, Storm Chef
Rocco, Cabaretti Caterer by Chris Seaman
"Rocco, hurry up; we have two pepperoni pizzas, three arancini, a carbonara, and one 'Cabaretti Special' coming up!"
You rush through the kitchen, juggling between half-baked doughs and bowls filled with variations of tomato-based sauces. With one hand, you throw some pancetta in a pan with your favorite olive oil while the other hand is already picking pepperonis from the fridge.
As your brain goes a thousand miles per second, juggling all the dishes you have to prepare, a thought pops into your head: "Do we put linguine or tagliatelle in the Cabaretti Special?"
You drop the pan and start running to your cookbook for the answer. You start furiously scrolling through your recipes. A floating paper flies from your book to the floor as pages turn. You drop on your knees to pick it up when you hear your boss from across the kitchen.
"ROCCO, PEOPLE ARE WAITING!'
"Comiiing", you say, as the tickets stack grows bigger by the minute.
You manage to grab the note. You notice the writing isn't yours, and the yellow tint of the paper indicates it's been here for decades.
"How to cook a storm -- Ma' Cabaretti"
Could it be that your grandma gave you this recipe? Unfortunately, you can't remember when she would have given it to you.
The recipe is as simple as it is cryptic:
"To cook the perfect storm, you'll need:
-- Something that makes mana
-- Something that makes you draw
-- Something that makes you exile
-- Something that makes you close."
Intrigued, you start looking around the room for ingredients: time to cook a storm!
What is this deck about?
This is a storm-cooking deck -- our goal is to assemble all the ingredients to make the perfect storm and serve it to our friends around the table. While we're cooking, we'll be punishing our opponents serving appetizers to our friends to make sure we have time to finish our recipe.
To understand how we're going to assemble those ingredients, let's take a look at our chef for this evening:
- Rocco's first ability provides card advantage to everyone on our end step by forcing an impulse-draw on the table. While this will seem good to everyone at first, this will allow us to force decisions on everyone to either play the exiled card or lose it forever -- and that's if they can even play it (exiling an Avenger of Zendikar on turn 3 feels really good). To that extent, our deck is entirely optimized around playing cards costing 4CMC or less (with only 2 cards at 5 CMC), meaning we only have a 2% chance of losing a card to our impulse-draw compared to the table.
- Rocco's second ability rewards us for anyone playing cards from exile by giving us a food token and a +1/+1 counter to put on a creature we control. While this will appear innocuous, we will leverage these two resources hard and turn them into all the ingredients described above to play our entire deck. Since we don't want to be dependent on others playing cards from exile, we'll need to assemble an extra engine to be able to play multiple cards from exile per turn and end by playing our entire deck to kill the table.
This makes Rocco an extraordinarily versatile commander with group-huggy type interactions that makes it super fun to pilot (we're even running political cards like Spike Weaver or Hopeful Initiate to encourage the table to play from exile in exchange for control).
TL;DR, you'll enjoy Rocco, Street Chef if:
- You like storm decks and complex trigger sequences
- You like politics, and you're not afraid to negotiate with the table
- Your pod is comfortable with long turns
- You enjoy saying "Mamma Mia!"
- You just want to make sure your friends stomachs are full
Let's Cook Up A Storm!
To cook the perfect storm, we need to make sure we have all our ingredients ready for our guests: in this section, we'll go over the four main ingredients for our recipe and how they work together.
Something That Makes mana
This is the base ingredient for any good storm: we need to find a way to keep having mana to burn as we cast our entire deck for the win. To do so, we will leverage our two primary resources: Tokens and +1/+*1 counters.
Tokens
This list runs many cards that can turn tokens into actual mana, making every spell we play from exile mana neutral or positive. This includes:
- Academy Manufactor: Turns our food tokens into food + treasure + clue)
- Jaheira, Friend of the Forest: Turns all our tokens into Llanowar Elves
- Inspiring Statuary: Allow us to pay for every generic cost of non-artifacts by tapping our tokens
To support our token strategy, we're also running cards like:
- Mondrak, Glory Dominus & Doubling Season: doubling every token we create, making every 0-1 mana cast from exile mana positive
- Pia Nalaar, Consul of Revival + Phyrexian Altar: Creating creatures we can sack on each cast for exile and netting us mana
+1/+*1 counters
On top of the tokens, we're going to abuse +1/+1 counters using creatures who can turn their power into colored mana:
- Kami of Whispered Hopes: Probably one of the strongest dorks in this list since it can tap to generate its strength worth of any color of mana AND adds an extra +1/+1 counter.
- Incubation Druid: Can tap for three mana of any one color as long as she has at least one +1/+1 counter on her -- making her the best turn 2 play in this deck.
- Runaway Steam-Kin: Can remove three +1/+1 counters from itself to generate RRR -- With 1/4 of the cards in our deck being red, most cast will result in adding two +1/+1 counters on him to support our storm.
- Heronblade Elite: Similar to Kami, it can tap to generate its strength worth of any color of mana. Our deck runs 15 humans, allowing us to add two +1/+1 counters on all these casts.
- Crystalline Crawler: By far the best engine to leverage +1/+1 counters since it doesn't need to tap to generate mana -- every cast from exile is an extra mana of any color we can use to keep the storm going.
To support our token strategy, we're also running cards like:
- Hardened Scales & Doubling Season: adds extra +1/+1 counters for each counters put on a creature we control
- Rosie Cotton of South Lane: turns our token creators above into an extra +1/+1 counters
Since these two engines live next to each other, it's common for us to have a massive amount of mana by turn 4/5 (generally when the deck starts getting out of control). Due to the sheer redundancy of pieces that allow us to generate mana, it will be difficult for opponents to assess what to remove to stop the engine from running.
Finally, we're running multiple dorks to help us cast Rocco, Street Chef by turn two (which includes 7 elves in total, making Priest of Titania another incredible mana source in the deck).
Something That Makes You Draw
Once we've assembled the mana to make sure our storm is brewing, we need to find a way to continuously draw cards from our deck to feed the storm. To do this, we will use a similar strategy -- leveraging our tokens and counters to turn them into draw.
Tokens
- Peregrin Took: doubles our food token and sacks them for card draw -- do I need to say more?
- Quicksmith Genius: Every food token entering the battlefield becomes card filtering, allowing us to discard a card from our hand to draw a new one. In the next section, we'll see how this can become one of the best engines in the deck.
+1/+1 counters
- Dusk Legion Duelist: Amazing new addition to the deck; this card can make you draw up to four cards per turn rotation (assuming other players want to play the card from exile) while pumping into a massive vigilance creature that can both hit and defend on every turn.
- Mindless Automaton: The greatest draw engine in the game -- if you get a counter doubler on the board, each card cast from exile will allow you to draw another card.
- Greater Good: Since this deck goes wild and tall, greater good allows us to sack some of our large mana dorks to keep the storm going. On top of this, we run a big discard subtheme (more on that in the next section about exile), so discarding is a massive advantage for our build.
Finally, we run more generalist draw engines to ensure we can keep our hand full:
- Skullclamp: synergizes exceptionally well with the 16 1-toughness creatures we're running and can be used alongside Pia Nalaar, Consul of Revival to sack the thopter tokens created when casting a spell from exile.
- Sylvan Library: Needs no introduction, and because we're going to end with a massive amount of food tokens, we don't really care about the life loss since we have the means to crack food to get back to a higher life total if needed.
- Esper Sentinel: good old rhystic buddy doing the lord's work
Something That Makes You Exile
Getting cards in exile is critical in accessing our food token and +1/+1 counter and keeping the engine going.
Looking through this list, you might be wondering why we don't play cards like Knowledge Pool or Uba Mask since it will give us easy access to exile and could potentially lock our opponents.
The reasons are double:
- Our main exile engine (and the most powerful engines in these colors) is discard-dependant, which means we actively need to have cards in our hands to keep the storm going
- Not having access to a hand limits our capacity to interact and defend our engine during our opponents' turns
Instead, we're going to leverage three main tools to get our cards from our hand into exile:
- Birgi, God of Storytelling // Harnfel, Horn of Bounty: The strongest exile engine in our deck, discarding one to allow us to play two cards from exile. With any of the draw + mana engines described above on the board, we can cast anything to get mana and draw another card to continue the loop. Of course, if it hits the board, you must ensure you have enough gas to close out the game since people will actively try to remove it.
- Invasion of Kaldheim: 70% of the games I've won with this deck have started with me casting this and closing out the game. This is basically an "exile 6 / draw 6" card on its front face, allowing us to dig into our deck and turbo our engine with 6 cards. On the other side of this card, we have a mini-version of Birgi, God of Storytelling // Harnfel, Horn of Bounty, where discarding a land card both deals 2 damage to any target (effectively locking the board) AND exiling a card from the top of our library to play. Like Harnfel, once this is turned face-up, it's game over.
- Quicksmith Genius + Conspiracy Theorist: This is the most obscure engine in this deck -- whenever a food token enters the battlefield, discard a card that you want to play to draw another one. Conspiracy Theorist puts that card into exile, and you can rinse and repeat to cast your entire deck (assuming the mana part of the engine is online). Once Conspiracy Theorist is on board, we can also leverage Greater Good or Faithless Looting to actively refill our exile while drawing.
On top of these three engines, we're also running other lighter tools to exile cards:
- Jeska's Will
- Light Up the Stage
- Soul Partition: Acts as both control and a great way to re-trigger an ETB from Dockside Extortionist or any of the ETB tutors (Imperial Recruiter, Recruiter of the Guard...)
- Professional Face-Breaker: synzegizes with Academy Manufactor and all our token doublers. Since this is not a treasure deck, he's less relevant than in Prosper, Tome-Bound but still compelling in case you need just a bit more gas to keep things going.
Something That Makes You Close
Alright, everything is in the oven. Now we just need to find a way to turn all of this casting from exile into closing the game. To do this, we will use multiple tools that can turn all our shenanigans into actual damage to our opponents.
These include:
- Walking Ballista: cast it for 2 and see it grow into a massive threat locking out the board and killing opponents. If you managed to storm enough, you should have +1/+1 doublers on board, which means that every cast makes it even deadlier.
- Reckless Fireweaver: Once our storm is brewing, every cast triggers one damage to each opponent. This grows increasingly deadly as you cast Academy Manufactor, token doublers, and other token generators (as you increase the storm, most cast will trigger 6 - 10 damages to each opponent).
- Hedron Detonator: It's a mini Reckless Fireweaver which comes with a nice util to exile the top card of our library in exchange for two artifacts.
- Ghirapur Aether Grid: in many games, you'll end with 200+ tokens on board (which is probably the most painful part of running this deck). Once Ghirapur hits the board, you can expect most opponents to scoop.
- Passionate Archaeologist: Turns all the CMC we cast from exile into damage to opponents.
With these engines online (you'll typically have 2-3 of them on the board as you storm), you'll be able to close out the game the way god intended: by dealing food-based damage to your opponents and getting their life points down to 0.
Protecting the Engine
To ensure our cooking is not interrupted, we will run multiple protection & recursion cards on top of a high redundancy of critical pieces for our engine.
Protection
- Allosaurus Shepherd: Say nope to nopes
- Mother of Runes: Her flavor text says, "My family protects all families", and she'll do her best to protect the Cabarettis
- Sylvan Safekeeper: As we build up, lands become irrelevant to our mana generation, and having her on board means we can keep going no matter the number of control opponents cast on our creatures
- Heroic Intervention / Teferi's Protection: Simply say no to board wipes
Recursion
- Noxious Revival
- Sevinne's Reclamation
- Invasion of Ikoria: acts as both a tutor and a reanimation spell to get a creature from our graveyard on the battlefield
- Samwise Gamgee: Sack our food tokens to get any historic cards from our graveyard back to our hand -- the strongest recursion engine in our deck.
Fishing For The Engine
Looking through cabinets for the right ingredients can take some time. Hopefully, we have a way to accelerate that process. The deck runs a high number of tutors that will allow us to fetch the right cards as we build up our engine
- Enlightened Tutor
- Eladamri's Call
- Worldly Tutor
- Altar of Bone
- Imperial Recruiter
- Recruiter of the Guard
You've Been Served
Looking across the now quiet room, you can't help but smile.
Your guests' stomachs have expanded beyond their original function, to the point where food is slowly dripping from their mouth.
Ma' Cabaretti would be proud.
Rocco, Street Chef
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