Budget Magic: Build-a-Bogle (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic. This week, we're heading to Foundations Standard to try to build-a-Bogle! If you're not familiar with Bogles, it's an infamous Modern deck built around the creature Slippery Bogle, with the idea being that you can load up the hexproof one-drop with auras, trust that your opponent won't be able to kill it because of hexproof, and smash the opponent to death with huge chunks of combat damage. The challenge with building Bogles in Standard is that Wizards has (rightly) stopped printing Bogles because hexproof on cheap creatures is super annoying. So, rather than just playing a Bogle, we need to build one by using cheap ward creatures like Toadstool Admirer and Tomakul Honor Guard, load them up with even more wards from Sheltered by Ghosts and Royal Treatment, grow them as big as possible with auras like Ethereal Armor, and then beat our opponent down! Is building a Bogle in Standard on a $100 budget possible? Let's get to the video and find out!
Budget Magic: Build-a-Bogle
The Deck
How can we build a Bogle in a format where cheap hexproof creatures don't exist? It all starts with two cheap ward creatures in Toadstool Admirer (my spirit animal) and Tomakul Honor Guard, both of which have ward 2. While ward 2 definitely isn't hexproof, it does slow down our opponent's removal by making them pay two extra mana to target the creature. In practice, this means if we play a Toadstool Admirer on Turn 1, the earliest our opponent could target it would be Turn 3 or, if they have two-mana removal rather than one-mana removal, Turn 4, which is nice, but not enough...
To build a real Bogle in Standard, we need to keep increasing the ward on our creatures. For this, we have Sheltered by Ghosts, which is not just removal but also adds ward 2 to the creature it enchants, and Royal Treatment, which can fizzle a removal spell and also adds a Royal Role to the creature, giving it ward 1. The trick here is that wards stack, so if we can get a Sheltered by Ghosts on a Toadstool Admirer, it will have ward 2 twice, which means our opponent will have to spend four mana to target it. Toss in a Royal Role, and we're up to ward 5. Basically, if we can stack up enough wards on a creature, we end up with a real Bogle since it costs so much for our opponent to kill the creature that it practically does have hexproof!
The final piece of the puzzle is growing our Bogles into game-ending threats. For this, we have a few plans. Optimistic Scavenger and Calix, Guided by Fate both put a +1/+1 counter on a creature whenever an enchantment enters the battlefield, quickly growing our Toadstool Admirers and Tomakul Honor Guards, while Calix, Guided by Fate can also do some super-explosive things once we start getting in combat damage with enchanted creatures by copying our most powerful enchantments.
We also have Grand Entryway // Elegant Rotunda, which might not look like much but works really well with Calix and Optimistic Scavenger since it adds two enchantments to the battlefield with a single card. We can cast Grand Entryway (which is an enchantment entering the battlefield to trigger Calix and Optimistic Scavenger), and then the 1/1 Glimmer it makes is also an enchantment, giving us even more counters. Then, if we have nothing better to do, we can open Elegant Rotunda to add a couple of +1/+1 counters to our creatures.
Finally, we have some enchantments to grow our Bogles. Ethereal Armor is the best of the bunch, often adding +4/+4 or +5/+5 to the creature for a single mana, which is absurd. Meanwhile, Feather of Flight and Audacity both grow the creature while also offering evasion to help us get through blockers.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we went 5-5 with Build-a-Bogle for a 50% win rate, which is fine for a budget deck. In general, the deck felt like it had an incredibly high ceiling but also a fairly low floor.
When things go well, the deck actually feels a lot like Modern Bogles. We certainly had games where we were able to stack up enough wards on a Toadstool Admirer or Tomakul Honor Guard that we ended up with a real unkillable Slippery Bogle, which let us run our opponent over super quickly with combat damage. On the other hand, we also ran into some super-bad matchups, like the discard deck playing Liliana of the Veil and Sheoldred's Edict, which easily let our opponent kill our Bogles even through the ward.
Basically, Bogles felt pretty competitive, especially for a budget deck, but it more or less needs to get quick kills because it doesn't have much card advantage. This means we're unlikely to be able to win in the late game if our opponent can deal with our initial rush of ward creatures and auras because we can't draw enough cards to keep up. If you like Modern Bogles, slinging auras, and building the most hilarious Toadstool Admirer of all time, this just might be the Foundations Standard budget deck for you!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
