I've been in the Army just about 8 years, with 4 being in the Guard. So here's my 2 cents....
If you join the guard and go OCS, they CANNOT deploy you while you are in the OCS program unless they commission you first, and I've never seen that happen. I was considering going through the program and talked with a bunch of officers who had gone through the State OCS program and they all told me the same thing. The reason they can't deploy you is when you first go into the program, they promote you to the rank of Cadet and pay you as an E5 or E6, I forget which. Well, no unit can take a Cadet to Iraq.
As far as the Guard on the whole, it greatly depends on the state. I'm in the Colorado guard, and have had nothing but trouble with them. Getting Tuition Assistance is obscenely hard, and mine never got approved. I rarely get paid on time. The full time staff has a 4 day workweek, and the joke is the workweek starts after lunch on Tuesday and ends around lunchtime on Friday.
On the flipside, I deployed with members of the Minnesota guard, and they had nothing but praise for their state. They get paid on time, they have good equipment, good leadership, etc. In addition to the normal army education programs, they have tuition reimbursement, which is purely a state thing.
Another thing you want to look at is the type of unit you want to join. Infantry is very different than Aviation and so on. It really depends on the type of job you want to do. I would talk to people in the unit you want to go into before you join and get the real deal.
And remember, everything the recruiter tells you is a lie unless it's in writing. Mine told me that guard aviation never deployed, but when I reported in, they asked me if I wanted to go to Afghanistan as half the unit was there already
