Test-Piloting #12 - Djmarcus’ Viktor Rumble

Today we’re testing Viktor Rumble, a machination of its creator Djmarcus, who took it to Masters a couple of seasons ago. Will the deck keep up with all the new cards and changes? Let's find out!

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Aug 19, 2022

Today we’re testing Viktor Rumble, a machination of its creator Djmarcus, who took it to Masters a couple of seasons ago and even wrote a guide about it. How does the deck keep up after newer and stronger cards have been released? Let’s find out!

Link to decklist

Our testers:

jott skoplin, who took the deck to Platinum and came out slightly ahead with about 20 games,
Treasured Trash editor regularbird, who played more than a dozen games in both Normals and the Gold ladder,
and Yondy, who came out even after ten games in Diamond.
We’ll even be joined by the deck creator himself, Djmarcus, who shared some thoughts on our testing back in the RIWAN Discord.

About the Deck

regularbird: This is a midrange deck built on cards that create cards to use as discard fodder for Rumble and his fabulous friends or to be played as created cards to generate value for Augment units and Viktor. This deck offers a very flexible play style that rarely bricks and can be suited to the cards in the player's hand or adjusted to respond to the opponent. Unlike most Rumble decks, it feels very stable and offers wincons other than a turbocharged Gundam raccoon and a posse of Mecha-Yordles. Though it tends to win more often simply by going wide and beating down the opponent, Sumpworks Map is the key to the finishing threat in this deck. Simply apply Elusive to a big unit (preferably one with Spellshield) and click attack. Repeat if necessary.

jott skoplin: I agree, midrange deck.

Yondy: Well, I disagree. I played it as a combo/aggro deck that wins by granting Elusive to either Rumble or a big enough unit, or through chip damage from all of your cheap units plus burn. I don’t think that the very (very!) low curve offers you enough staying power to go for a value game plan in today’s meta, where every deck will either kill you or outvalue you by turns 6-7, even with all the Mecha-Yordle goodies that you can get. The only exception to this is probably when you face aggro decks, as you cannot (and should not try to) outrace them.

That being said, the deck is really fun. Rumble and Viktor are two of the most fun champions in the game, and a deck built around them was bound to be tons of fun.

Djmarcus: If I could interrupt here, I personally don't call this a midrange deck. Sometimes it's better to take slightly suboptimal trades early to get bigger flame chomper attacks in later. This tip could help with some of those rare games where you don't find a good way to finish the game.

regularbird: I loved the flexibility of the deck. Picking a line based on the starting hand and always seeming to have the right tools to get to a desirable late game situation with a wide board of cheap, juiced up units and one of the Champions. Ferros Financier also thrives in this deck, and always seems to generate a wincon when played.

jott: The things that felt good to me were Otterpus and Ballistic Bot, although I prefer the former much more in Shellfolk decks. As for the latter, I loved that at some point in the game you start firing off your Ignitions and your opponent has to just kind of sit there and watch it.

There is, however, a tension in this deck. On the one hand it wants to deal a bunch of Elusive damage and some chip or burn, on the other you have the many ways of generating trash and upcycling it for some value. While the deck functions well, I still find myself wanting to play burn in the early game, proper Discard in the midgame, and Shellfolk in the late game.

Yondy: I agree with that sentiment. Its flexibility comes at a cost, and I feel like there are other decks that do or did some of the things that this one tries to do, but better. They’re arguably less fun to play, though.

regularbird: The only thing that felt off to me about the deck: The rare game where I wanted either more Discard or needed more created cards. Without a flipped Rumble on board by the end of Round 5 or 6, some matchups (Kai'Sa) felt miserable.

Yondy: I’m glad you brought that point because this is one thing I wanted to comment on: Kai’Sa. Both Viktor and Rumble feel like an older, worse model of her. While I love both champions, and find them infinitely more fun and fair to play and to face, it’s clear to me that time has caught up with them.

While I actually went 2-1 in the Kai’Sa matchup, when I won it felt like I was pulling some crazy high rolls:in one game I game I rolled Ferros Financier into Sputtering Songspinner into Unspeakable Horror into Moonlight Affliction to silence both Kai’Sa and her Overwhelm follower when they were going to win the game and I won on the next turn. I don’t even want to know what the odds of that were. Kai’Sa’s ability to kill you on 6-7 is much more consistent.

So I’m left with a feeling that without some support or significant buffs, Viktor and Rumble are just going to be worse versions of new keyword-oriented champions. That doesn’t mean it’s any less fun to play this deck, though, as long as you don’t expect it to be competitive any time soon.

Mulligan

regularbird: Cross your fingers for Rumble. Take Djmarcus's advice in his guide: look for one Champion and cheap generators (Otterpus, Squire, etc.). Discard Mecha-Yordle generators since you won't need them until mid-game.

jott: This deck is a great example of the principle: if you need it to win, don’t mulligan it away. And what you need are your Champions and Elusive granters.

Yondy: Mulligan with this deck is pretty straightforward. You need Rumble, and damn the rest. If you don’t see a Rumble, blast your hand away. Viktor might be the only exception to keep, but only against decks that can’t hard remove him from the board. As regularbird said, once you see a Rumble, you want units that create discard fodder for your Rumble turn.

Djmarcus: I disagree. Aggressive mulligans can cause value issues. I wouldn't give up a hand with three fodder generators in order to find Rumble. Hard mulling for Rumble can actually make the deck slower if you don't get the early units. Viktor is also not too bad into hard removal since removal costs more than Viktor in most cases. I run a lot of cards that do similar things to improve the consistency of the deck. I really want to play Rumble on curve without losing value. From my testing, improving the consistency of playing units and Rumble on curve allows the deck to have more value without losing speed.

Possible Tweaks

jott: After the first day of playing this deck I started tweaking it because I wanted to have less copies of the random value 2-drops. My thought process was: “Why are we running seven one and two-ofs that do the same thing as each other? What is this, some kind of Subpurrsible deck?” Then I thought: “WAIT, this deck CAN run Subpurrsible!” This is the list that I came up with:

Turns out we can only fit one copy of Subpurrsible, though, as drawing two might feel too bricky.

regularbird: Like jott pointed out, this deck has a lot of two-ofs that do similar things and I am tempted to condense the list into three copies of more reliable cards. I would like three copies of Squeaker (especially since its second buff in Patch 3.13) and Bilgerat Rascal. Rascal has a perfect home in this deck: the Spellshield Mecha-Yordle it creates provides serious tempo. One copy of Darkbulb Acolyte is funny on paper, and it's the most tempting card to cut, but it's gotten me out of more than one jam.

Yondy: I took some ideas from jott’s tweaks and decided to modify it so that it actually felt like a midrange deck. That means we need more staying power, especially if we don’t draw our Champions, and we need some ways to refill our hand to not run out of value so early. Staying power can be solved by massaging the curve to a more evenly distributed one, which is done by getting rid of many of the units that are cluttering the 2-mana cost slot.

It also means it’s a good idea to slot in some removal, so you can protect your board and Nexus from threats. I also replaced a Viktor with a Vi, which is a lesson we learned from the famous Aphelios pairing: You rarely want to clutter your deck with Viktor’s spell, and you rarely want to play a second Viktor after the first one has been removed as it sets you behind by a lot, but a 10/4 Tough Challenger is always welcome in decks that play lots of cards every turn. The result means going from this:

To a bit of a flatter curve, like this:

You might be wondering what those two 7+ cost cards are, which brings us to the second thing I wanted to get from my tweaks: Value. As you might know if you’re a frequent reader, we at RIWAN absolutely love and cherish one card above all others: Treasured Trash. Treasured Trash means that even if you completely deplete your hand, you will have some insane asspulls that can get you out of trouble and win you the game. This deck is pretty good at depleting your hand, with all the discarding and low-curving, so Treasured Trash feels like a natural inclusion.

Other than that, I’ve added jott’s Subpurrsibles (two, actually, because it’s not really hard to proc with this deck and it draws a card which you always want), and I’ve added a couple of Aloof Travelers to snipe out key cards while keeping our hand repleted. The result looks like this:

I don’t mean to say my version is better, it’s just a version that’s adjusted to fit my playstyle by removing some obstacles I encountered when testing, but that still respects Djmarcus’ original vision.

jott: I’d say both of our versions are missing 3x Papercraft Dragon, but I have no idea how to fit them in.

Yondy: Uhh… me neither.

Closing Thoughts

regularbird: This is a really great midrange deck that's fun to play. Every game plays out a little differently based on how you use created cards, but not in a "swingy" or risky way, more of a "pleasant surprise" sort of way that's just shy of feeling high-rolley.

Yondy: This is a really great aggressive/combo deck that’s fun to play. All jokes aside, I always love to see passionate and brilliant deck builders put out never-seen-before brews that turn out to be really good, and that is definitely the case with this deck. While it is sad to see that the continuous nerfs that this deck has indirectly received over the course of the seasons (Conchologist, Ferros Financier, Ballistic Bot, Viktor, Boom Baboon, Ambush have all been hit at some point), I believe there’s still something worthy about the core of the deck, and it really is only a few support cards, buffs, and/or brilliant deck building ideas short of being competitive again.

jott: RIP Boom Baboon.