Table of Contents
Whether you're starting your Lorcana journey, looking to build your first decks after playing with the Gateway or the starter decks, or just looking to play a new archetype without breaking the bank, there's a lot of reasons to try and build on a budget. In this series, we go through each color pair and try to build a deck on a 20$ budget, explain it and give you some advices on how to improve it. Today, we're looking at an emerald and steel deck built around the shift ability.
Shifting Into High Gear
Every deck starts with a concept, a core idea of what the deck should do. Sometimes it's a cool or powerful win condition. Other times. it's a specific interaction that the builder wants to showcase or play around. Sometimes it's just about playing 99 puppies. When we built this deck, the core idea was to use the strengths of the shift ability
Emerald steel is the perfect combination for this because they both offer very good, impactful characters to shift that have a chance of surviving thanks to abilities like evasive and resist, but mostly because because they provide an enabler for the strategy as well as a good payoff for it.
003-081-morph-space-goo is a card that any floodborn can shift onto, so having him on the field means we can run some floodborn characters without any other character with the same name and still be able to have valid shift targets.
On top of that, 002-175-chief-bogo-respected-officer makes every floodborn we play some form of removal by dealing one damage to each opposing character. Put both of them together and you have an engine that can bring the big threats really fast and deal with your opponent's board at the same time.
For Everything Else, There's Removal
In order to stay in the game while we prepare our game plan, the deck relies on a suite of steel removal cards like 001-197-fire-the-cannons, 001-200-smash, 007-202-double-trouble and 001-198-grab-your-sword to remove the characters opponents might have on board without needing to rely on challenges. If it has to challenge, either to stabilize or remove a location, 007-190-jafar-aspiring-ruler can give a nice boost of challenger +2 when played and 002-183-jafar-dreadnought can draw cards while challenging.
006-196-im-still-here Also ensures that challenging won't be detrimental to your characters and that they're likely not to get banished in the next turn while replacing itself in the hand.
If the opponents plays a lot of items, 004-171-aladdin-brave-rescuer can take care of them (while being a cheap floodborn, too) and if you want to ensure your opponent never has another character to quest with, the combo of 002-175-chief-bogo-respected-officer and 002-075-cheshire-cat-from-the-shadows makes every floodborn a chance to purely remove a character by dealing one with Bogo and then banishing it by exerting Cheshire.
The Big Picture
When put together, the deck packs a strong punch that can deal with just about any challenge and come out on top. While it doesn't have the most card draw due to its color pairing, it is able to capitalize by being heavy on removal and making its threats difficult to interact with before they can finish the game.
The Next Steps
If you like the archetype and have a few better cards lying around or a few dollars to spare, there are improvements that can be made to the deck. You want to keep the uninkable count fairly low (around 12) when thinking about it so it remains a balancing act if you don't want to have a lot of games where you run out of ink.
The most obvious improvement that can be made is in the removal. While the list we provided here works properly, cards like 002-199-let-the-storm-rage-on and [002-201-strength-of-a-raging-fire] can be sung by your characters and provide a better removal suite. 007-202-double-trouble should be the first card to cut here if you are going to replace some removal but eventually, all single target removal can be upgraded if you have the budget and uninkable flexibility
For characters, the floodborns of the deck is where a lot of the improvement can be made. Replacing 003-074-helga-sinclair-femme-fatale, 006-194-john-silver-stern-captain and 005-069-robin-hood-timely-contestant with cards like 005-084-clarabelle-light-on-her-hooves, 001-193-tinker-bell-giant-fairy and 003-190-robin-hood-champion-of-sherwood will have a huge effect on the deck efficiency and provide more effective repoval as well as decent card draw while lowering the uninkable count to help towards the removal cards.
In Action
You can watch the deck in action on our channel through the Inkling Adventures tournament where we put 16 of our 20$ decks against one another to see which one comes out on top and show you the play patterns and strategies that go with them.
