Hello and welcome to Illumination, the Disney Lurkana podcast.
My name is Max and I'm Sam and we are here to talk to you today about something that
a lot of Lurkana players will hopefully get a chance to experience and that is the store
slash set championships.
We wanted to go over a little bit.
What does the metagame look like right now for Into the Inclands set slash store championships?
Our goal here is to kind of help you figure out what you need to do, how you need to navigate
through this rather diverse and if you go back to episode five and listen to our metagame
episode, healthy metagame.
So Sam, what do you think is important about knowing what's going to be out there?
What are the key advantages for knowing what decks are popular, what decks are good?
I think the main advantage of knowing what other decks are most likely going to be played
is knowing what to play around and knowing what might happen to your board as well as
what the opponent may play.
Yeah, we need to know what our opponents are doing.
This is a big part of Lurkana.
In other games, there are ways to kind of interact with your opponent's plays.
While they're taking their turn, you can kind of interrupt their game actions and that's
a way for you to fight back and deal with the things the opponents are doing.
In Lurkana, you do not have that benefit.
It is much more chess-like in the concept of taking your turn, setting up attacks and
counter attacks and defending and protecting and being the aggressor and being the defender.
It's imagine chess, but you didn't know what your opponent's pieces were doing.
That's a lot harder, but knowing that there were certain sets of chess pieces that they
could use, that makes things a lot more approachable and that's what understanding this concept
of a metagame really helps you out going into a set championship, a store championship,
something a little bit higher than maybe your locals where you're just playing things you
want to play for fun or testing out cool little interactions and strategies.
We're trying to win.
We want that enchanted rock star stitch in the playmat.
I want the playmat that does not say champion on it.
Correct.
I want to come in second place.
Second place would be ideal.
We're going to talk about the tiers of deck.
Now what is tiers?
And if you get into trading card games, you're going to hear about this a lot and it's become
kind of a ranking system that a lot of different things have adopted.
That's what I typically refer to as tier one, tier 1.5 maybe or tier two.
Just to tell you why are the tiers important, it's not really an important thing.
It's what decks are being deemed to be the strongest right now against most of the other
decks that are available.
And the reason the tiers are there more than not is to tell you what you're commonly going
to see.
And when you see it, how strong is that current deck?
We have things like pixel born.
We have tournament data that gets shared almost immediately after a tournament is done.
So we can start to assemble lots and lots of pieces and start to see what are the things
that overlap in these different decks and what makes them strong.
What decks are consistently being listed out as top eight or top 16 deck choices that you
can make.
Those are the things that start to identify and break down into tiers.
So it's really important to know that this is a tier one deck.
So I'm going to see it a lot and it has probably been played very frequently by many, many
different people and refined each card choice within the deck is going to be specifically
picked out to serve a purpose.
It's going to be fine tuned.
It's going to be polished.
It's not going to be a, I know a lot of these cards do one thing.
I got to figure out what the other 20 cards in my deck really are and how they're serving
the main purpose.
All that's been figured out.
This is like you have room maybe to make between one and four card changes to tune it to your
play style, but the core engines of the deck have been refined.
The numbers have been pretty fine tuned.
So a lot of this is what are you going to see?
What are the key cards?
How do you deal with them based on their approach and their role in the game?
So I think it best to probably start with something like the tier one decks, which are
going to be the most common ones, right?
These are going to be the things you see the most.
So Sam, I'll let you describe the first deck on my list here.
That is Ruby Amethyst Control.
What is it doing outside of control?
What is it doing in the early game?
What's it doing in the mid game?
And what are some cards to keep an eye out for?
I think Ruby Amethyst's main goal is to draw a lot of cards and control the board.
You're doing a lot of playing characters that give you some sort of advantage and then bouncing
them to get more advantage.
Can wipe the board with be prepared.
So that's one you really have to watch out for.
And this one of the hallmark, the Madam Mim and Merlin package plus be prepared are kind
of the hallmarks of this deck.
If you're playing a Ruby Amethyst deck, things you need to watch out for is that be prepared.
Make sure you're paying attention to how much ink your opponent has and don't play into
the key cards that could potentially lose you the game.
I think another big one in that deck is Maui and any red deck, Maui.
So you don't want to when they're on for ink, you don't want to quest with a character
that could just get taken out by Maui.
I think we'll talk a lot about the Amethyst package of the Madam Mim and Merlin.
And I think Ruby has kind of adopted a package of its own with be prepared, Maui, and then
some number of like Lady Tremains and Madam Medusa's.
It's become the standard Ruby package.
You still see some different things tacked on here and there.
You'll see a scar, you'll see a dragon fire.
You'll see a few things that kind of accompany that overarching strategy out of Ruby.
And that's Ruby's role in a lot of these high tier, well refined deck lists.
Now keep in mind, Ruby Amethyst control also has the more controlling style where they're
not going to play Minnie Mouse, Stylish Surfer.
They're not going to play the location package with Jim Hawkins.
Then you're going to have other versions that are accelerated a little bit that are playing
Jim Hawkins and up to six copies of various locations.
You're going to see them playing Minnie Mouse as well.
So not only within each of these things I'll name, there are often going to be variations
in there as well.
So it is worth knowing that just because you've identified, okay, this is definitely a Ruby
Amethyst control deck.
It's not an aggro deck and I need to figure out still more layers I'm peeling back to
figure it out.
So it is definitely important in this game to pay attention and know directly what you're
dealing with.
You really want to know what to play around.
And so I think that's what's important about knowing each one of these decks.
Amethyst Emerald.
This is a tempo style deck.
It also plays the Madam Mim Merlin package.
It also is jockeying hard for board position.
So one of its key cards in addition to the Madam Mim and Merlin package is the Ursula
package coming out of Emerald of two drop Ursula Deceiver and three drop Ursula Deceiver
of all in order to get advantage by singing Mother Knows Best and Friends on the Other
Side two times instead of just one with the three drop Ursula and two drop Ursula Deceiver
being able to snatch out those key cards, like be prepared before they happen.
So that is really the role of the deck is trying to get on board and it's trying to
quest not as aggressively as an aggro deck, not kind of at all costs.
But what it's trying to do is stay front footed.
It wants to remain the deck that is questing more than the opponent.
That's its goal in this to retain enough resources that it's stopping the opponent as needed,
which something like Madam Mim Fox and Merlin Crab are very good at doing.
It also is very good at then going on the aggressive with cards like Cursed Murfolk
and Flynn Rider Charming Rogue card in there.
Yeah, it can be.
Yeah.
The Cursed Murfolk and Flynn Rider package slow the opponent down by stripping out cards
at a faster rate, even if they're being challenged.
Obviously a key weakness to this deck would be steel, right?
You can deal damage to all these cheap characters with cheap pieces of interaction like Baboom
or Fire the Cannons or a little bit later in the game, you can use stronger cards like
Grab Your Sword to deal to everything.
So understanding that this deck wants to end the game quickly and maintain an advantage
in play versus in the hand, as opposed to Ruby Amethyst control, which is very good
at maintaining an advantage in the hand and doing what it needs to do on the board in
order to maintain as many options as possible in your hand.
So card advantage versus board advantage.
Moving on from that one, I'll let you talk about this next one, Sam.
This is way more in your wheelhouse than mine.
We're talking about Ruby Sapphire.
Tell us about it.
It's another control deck.
It's my favorite color combination that unfortunately I will not be taking to set slash store championship,
but I love this deck.
I just can't get it to work for myself.
Anyway, the key cards in this deck, again, it's Hyrum, it's Popsicle, it's Be Prepared,
Fishbone Quill I think is the number one card in this deck.
You want Fishbone on three or Mickey at very minimum, but you need that ramp.
Some lists play one jump ahead or the two drop Gramatala to ramp.
Some decks play some number of a lot of those.
Right.
So this deck is basically ramping to play big stuff very quickly.
Yeah.
We talked about that Ruby package of interactive cards and those come with a price.
When you're stapling, deal with a character in some way onto a character itself, they're
going to cost six plus ink.
So it's really, really important to make sure that you can get to that number quickly.
So I think the big plan for this deck is to play Tamatoa and Lucky Dime very quickly.
Or Gaston Lucky Dime.
Gaston Lucky Dime.
Lucky Dime is kind of the wing condition of this deck.
So once your opponent has nine ink, they can easily slam down Lucky Dime, turn it and get
whatever character they have on board, the lore that they have.
Bell is another one that could potentially be in there, some builds.
Absolutely.
It's really disheartening when your opponent is at 12 and you have out Gaston Lucky Dime
and you go, okay, they can quest with Gaston Lucky Dime.
They're only at 18 and then they play Bell.
And then all of a sudden you've lost the game on the spot.
They can, the reach this deck is able to attain is huge, but it cannot do it without the ink
advantage that it gains through the ramp pieces of the deck.
The early part of this game is extremely soft.
Its only interaction is typically Teeth and Ambitions or the Red Rush Queen.
Sometimes you get the Cruella, the 3-2 that can gain evasive.
There's a sprinkling of cards and that's most of them.
Predominantly, your bread and butter is just ramping through the early stages of the game.
So I think if you're playing against this deck, if you can, if you have the ability
to blow up a Fishbone Quill, do it.
Right.
This deck you want to attack your Amethyst Emerald.
This is where you want as many copies of Curse of Merfolk and Flynnrider as you can get down
because those will quest so fast.
Generally your Sapphire Ruby opponent will not be able to deal with it.
They're not able to catch up.
So all you need is a couple characters or some goat bounce in the late game to cheer
it up where if you're playing something like Ruby Amethyst control, it gets a little bit
trickier because you're both trying to jockey for position, but the Ruby Amethyst decks are
going to do it from a position of a lot less ink.
So that's where the card advantage comes in.
Trying to disincentivize them or punish them for playing things like Flavisham via a Madam
Medusa or a Maui to mitigate how many times that they can activate Flavisham's questing
ability is really, really critical to the deck's success.
And not too dissimilar from that is the Sapphire Steel deck, which is kind of a ramp mid-range
style deck, more than a straight flat control deck in a lot of cases.
But I would say it's mid-range definitely puts it in the position of being a control
deck more than an aggro deck.
But sometimes you just have like three Mr. Smee's in your hand and you can just go ham.
This deck does, unlike the Ruby Sapphire deck, actually have an early game.
It can do what it needs to do.
It's not worried about playing one jump ahead because Mr. Smee is a solid two drop for this
deck.
Popsicle, Captain Hook, and Develop Your Brain are solid one drops for this deck.
It looks really good on the one drop.
It's two drop, I think, is one of its weakest with just Mr. Smee, I think, occupying the
bulk of the two drop.
And then moving into the three drop, you still have your Detective Mickey and your Fishbone
Quills.
So you have a lot of things you can do and then you still set up that same Flavisham
Popsicle engine.
You're still using Lucky Dime to achieve victory with a heavy questing character like Gaston.
It's just very good.
It's very flexible and unlike the Ruby Sapphire builds, this Steel Sapphire build actually
can deal with characters that drop quickly, which makes it a much more robust threat.
It also is very good because of the ramp elements at just completely dumping its hand and then
using a whole new world to refill its hand.
That's something that the Ruby Sapphire decks tend to miss out on.
I know in that matchup, the Ruby Sapphire players tend to count on the Steel Sapphire
players to refill their hand.
Yeah, like please just give me seven more cards, just please.
You can see kind of how that works a little bit differently.
Both decks have a specific difference.
Obviously, key cards for the Sapphire Steel deck include more like Whole New World and
Cogsworth Grandfather Clock.
Cogsworth is messed up.
It is Cogsworth in a lot of the Steel matchups, whether it's some of the other ones we'll
describe later or the Mirror match.
It's generally a race for Cogsworth.
A lot of cases it boils down to that.
It is a key card, no doubt.
There are not many of them in these decks, but those ones, it's definitely worth a call
out and we're going to continue on the Steel Train with my favorite deck, probably of the
ones listed here, which is the Amber Steel Song deck.
This is a deck that I've been playing since chapter one.
If you listen to the podcast, you know I'm a big fan of this.
It's definitely a mid-range style deck.
There are three current different but very similar versions.
There is the Lantern version, which tends to play higher end things like Tinkerbell
and Stitch Carefree Surfer.
There is the Flute build, Sleepy Flute.
Sleepy Flute generally is paired with smaller characters who can quest more aggressively
and then Shift.
You'll often see Queen, you'll often see Robin Hood, you'll see Cinderella Shift, and sometimes
you'll even get Rockstar Stitch Shift in here.
Then the third version is the Pride Lands version, which is kind of the newest version
of the deck, which is leveraging Simbas, the one-cost Simba from Steel, Future King, I
believe, to loot and find things and then move over to Pride Lands to get your characters
more willpower and also make them cheaper so that with Rockstar Stitch out, you can
just start drawing a ton of cards and flood the board out of nowhere.
Really cool, interesting deck there.
Key cards in that matchup, obviously a whole new world is a major player for them.
Ariel, Spectacular Singer is in every version of the deck.
Robin Hood, the one drop, Robin Hood the five drop appears in every version of the deck.
These are really key cards.
Spare Necessities is a great new song addition to the decks.
It can strip out fishbone quills, it can strip out grab your swords, it can strip out be
prepared, it can do a lot of heavy lifting in these decks and I think people are finally
starting to catch on that these are really, really powerful cards that have taken a little
while in a metagame to settle a little bit to be chosen.
So moving on to kind of like tier 1.5, I guess I should call it, because they're kind of
in-betweens, would be the first Ruby Amber Mufasa.
One of my favorite decks in the game.
This is an aggro deck that is also kind of really a mid-range deck.
It can be built in a couple different fashions, like a lot of these decks you can season it
to taste.
This deck is trying to leverage cards like the four drop Yellow Tinkerbell, Mufasa, Pongo,
in order to gain card advantage and then play either fast characters and use Perdita to
recur them in the late game or they're using big comes into play effects like Maleficent
and Stitch Carefree Surfer to gain you an advantage when they come in.
The kind of key cards I'd say that really make this deck hum are the Mother Gothel,
Rapunzel lines.
Mother Gothel on two comes in with three damage and then Rapunzel comes in on four and is
able to heal Mother Gothel and draw three cards.
So be aware of that synergy.
The other one on this list is the Emerald Steel deck.
I think these decks are varied and also very potent.
These are generally mid-range versions of the deck and there's a few different variations
in there.
You can get the discard style decks that are playing Bucky and Floodborns.
You can get the new specimen style decks that are also discard but they're a little bit
more traditional leveraging new card Friar Tuck and some of the past discard options
like using three drop Ursula Deceiver of All to sing Sudden Chill and make you discard
two cards.
Some use Lucifer, some do not.
All of them tend to carry the same mid-range package.
This build you'll see a lot of the card morph because they want to try to shift a surprise
Floodborn or do the very fast line of Morph on two, Beast Tragic Hero on three.
So definitely key cards to watch out for as this deck grinds you down and makes you discard
your hand while it's adding board presence by way of these Floodborn characters.
Ones you will see most likely but may not see completely.
Some are a little bit more popular in Pixelborn than they are in paper.
So I wanted to knock them down a peg to kind of a tier 1.5.
And then to send us home here at the end we have a few more decks to cover.
There is Amethyst Steel.
This is a control style deck for the most part.
Also has kind of a combo flourish if they're playing Jafar which is the striking illusionist
that lets you gain lore whenever you draw a card so long as he's exerted.
So they use him to sing a whole new world and gain seven lore out of nowhere.
Even more sometimes if you can follow it up with cards like Friends on the other side.
There are a lot of ways in purple we all know to draw a lot of cards and this deck leverages
those.
A lot of the times you'll see Blue Fairy because so many cards in this deck are steel cards
which we just noted shift a lot.
So there are a lot of floodborns and they use the Blue Fairy evasive to gain themselves
a little bit of lore as well as draw a bunch of cards as they play these floodborn characters
for no cost.
This one caught me off guard at SCGCon.
This is a tough deck to play sometimes especially if you're not ready for it out of the gate.
Then there is the Amber Amethyst or we're seeing some Amethyst Emerald Hyper Agro builds.
These decks are very very simple.
They are aggressive decks that are trying to win the game as fast as possible.
Your key cards here are going to be Leelos, they're going to be the Maleficent Biding
Her Time, they're going to be Curse Murfolk, then you're going to start using things like
Arthur to start to pick up those characters, put them back down.
Two Drop on Incable Pinocchio is a common card to see in a lot of these builds.
They're trying to close out the game as hard as they can early and then use a finisher
that's either evasive like Pascal or using the Madam Mim and Merlin Goat bounce package
to close out the last three to five lore that they need to end the game before the opponent
can really get started and get their engines turning.
And then the last one here is the Amethyst Sapphire decks, also affectionately known
as Blurple.
They are a ramp deck pretty much exclusively.
They're not really a control deck so much as a ramp deck trying to make board presence
and leverage some of the strong purple board cards like Elsa, Spirit of Winter, using that
to exert some of the characters and quest for a whole bunch of big numbers before the
opponent can really stop them by way of utilizing the ramp.
So opposed to ramping to use a lot of cards with whole new worlds and empty your hand
and leverage that or ramping to use powerful Ruby removal, they're ramping to use powerful
purple board presence cards and continue to quest for a lot of lore right away.
So I think that's the rundown of a lot of the decks that you're going to see as you
go around.
So if you want to build your own deck as they call it, make a rogue deck, I think even if
your plan is that you have to know what these decks are doing because you can't go in
with a deck that's not able to deal with some number of this.
You're not going to find a deck, most likely if you do this, you've accomplished a heck
of a goal nobody else has been able to find a deck that beats them all.
But you're going to want to find a deck that can navigate at least a reasonable win percentage
across most of these decks.
And all the decks I named tier one tends to do that the best where the tier 1.5 and the
tier two decks do have some matchups where they're like, oh no, not this one.
There's no auto wins.
There are definitely favorable matchups.
Some decks get that more so than others.
Some people would rather leverage the great example.
This is the Emerald Steel discard decks.
Some games I'm just going to get Bucky Bucky and completely win the game.
Like it's not going to be a game.
I'm just going to completely wreck my opponent.
There are going to be other times where I struggle to gain two lore over the course of
the game because I cannot keep up with what my opponent is doing.
Other people would rather go and grind every round as hard as they can using decks like
Ruby Amethyst where it's I want every decision to matter and I want to make sure I can leverage
any mistake I made by using the deck strength to pull me back into a game.
So there's a lot of variation and a lot of choices to be made.
So definitely worth thinking over what you're going to see across the table from you.
Do yourself a favor and do some research.
Watch some Twitch, watch some YouTube videos, play some Pixelborn or with a friend, you
know, in paper and just practice against these different decks.
Yes.
If you want to do well in these store championships, do yourself a favor and learn the decks.
Yeah.
You have to know even if you don't want to play against them, even if you don't like
the style and there are many on this list, I don't care for the way they play.
I'm looking at you Sapphire and that's okay.
You still need to know how they function and ask your play test partner.
What's the worst thing I could do to you right now?
What's the nightmare scenario?
Remember testing games are a lot different than you guys just jamming games, right?
Like testing games are wait, let me try that a different way now.
Help the other person out.
Go wait, do this instead now.
See how much better that is.
Yeah.
No, it just knowing what is what the worst thing that can happen to you if you make a
decision is going to help you in the long run.
Absolutely.
You're not just being aware of what your opponent's doing.
It's also fine tuning and understanding if you sequence something a little bit differently,
like, Hey, I actually draw a card if I do it this way or Hey, if I do this, if I damage
a character and then challenge them with Robin Hood, I get to gain two lore.
Take out Prince Eric before you play your character that you want to survive.
Right.
And this comes to something that I learned when I was playing Android Netrunner a lot,
which is plan your entire turnout.
If I'm going to leave you with any piece of advice outside of what we're talking about,
cause this is close to unrelated.
I want to give you this advice going into set championships.
Please think out your turn.
You know, you're going to do these things.
Set the card face down.
Okay.
I know this one first, this one second, this one third, and I know I'm going to quest now
sit there and go, okay, I know I want to do these four things.
What is the right order to do them in?
Cause it does matter.
It matters.
Maybe, but most of the turns it matters.
Yes.
It's so pivotal that you learn those fine choices, those micro decisions help you win
or lose a game.
And then the next step is exactly what we've been talking about for the past like 20 ish
minutes, which is knowing what your opponent's doing and how you counter that based on the
cards in your deck so that you can achieve victory.
Well, let's be honest.
The simplest way to win a game of Lorcan is to keep questing.