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 going to win as fast as possible by building an amber and amethyst burn deck.
Gotta Go Fast
Hyper aggressive decks in amber and amethyst have been an archetype since Rise of the Floodborn and has gotten a lot of support since then. It mostly relies on cheap characters that can quest for a lot like 001-009, 001-048 or 002-056. None of these really fit our 20$ budget for this series so we had to get a bit creative.
To do so, we mostly rely on 3 pieces of early questing power. 006-002 is an amazing card as it can come back from our discard by paying 2 ink during your set phase (after we ready our characters, but before we draw our card for the turn). It comes in exerted when played this way but will still keep your opponent busy and represents a form of card advantage.
003-016 can give a big boost of lore by questing for 3 and being a 2/2 as long as we have 2 other characters in play. We don't want to exert it for one lore if can avoid it but the deck will usually be able to provide support pieces for it.
Finally, 002-035 is both lore gain and protection for your other characters as it can return a character to our hand, allowing us to replay them after they already quested and have them be ready or trigger their on-play ability again.
Along with high toughness 1 drops like 005-002 and 006-068, our questing characters aim to get across the finish line fast.
Burn, Baby, Burn
Questing agressively is definitely a way to get across the finish line, but since our characters don't have a lot of toughness, relying solely on questing would lead to the deck falling short most of the time. Luckily, amethyst has access to a lot of burn (a term borrowed from Magic: The Gathering that means to do direct damage instead of attacking. In Lorcana, it refers to gaining lore without needing to quest or for the beginning of turn to come on your locations).
007-048, 006-040 and 002-051 are characters that will gain us lore when entering play. In the case of 007-048, our opponent needs to have an exerted character, but that will often be the case since they are incentivized to remove our questers. Similarly, 002-051 will also give us lore when he leaves play, either by returning it to our hand, by being banished or by being sent into our inkwell. These cards can garner a lot of value, especially if we are able to return them to our hand and replay them using cards like 002-049 and 002-035.
In addition to those characters, we can also gain lore through some actions. 005-062 will give us 2 lore directly and 007-081 is a song that will give us one lore and replace itself in our hand by drawing us a card. To top it off, 006-027 and 004-008 both allow one of our characters to quest for one extra lore.
Can't Stop, Won't Stop
In order to ensure we don't run out of gas, we need our cards to stay on the board and we need to keep having threats in hand. the best way to do so is through the use of 005-066. Every turn, this 2 ink item allows us to draw an extra card for free. Our opponent also gets to draw one but when you're trying to end the game as quickly as possible, them having a lot of cards in hand becomes irrelevant, so long as we find the right answers at the right time. Cards like 004-048 and 007-081 also have the ability to replace themselves in our hand making the pressure even more effective.
But we also have to make sure our characters can stay alive and quest safely. 001-020, 004-008 and 007-038 allow us to have expendable bodyguards that will slow down our opponent's removal through challenge. 003-054 can threaten to remove their more expansiove characters if they dare challenge us and 001-062 can buy us time in the early game by returning an opposing threat to their hand or by allowing us to return a character like 003-016 to our hand after it quested and redeploy it in a ready state.
The Big Picture
We end up with a deck that can gain an early lore advantage, protect its threats and close the game with direct lore gain and can be pretty hard to interact with. While it may look like a very easy deck to play on the surface, the deck has some intricacies that requires to be patient at times, which is unusual for aggressive decks and relies a lot on knowing when to deploy your threats and when to quest, as well as in instoring a feeling of safety in your opponent that they have extra turns before gaining a lot of lore out of nowhere in one turn.
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. Due to its low costs, this archetype can usually get away with a higher uninkable count (15 to 16) but will be harder to balance for your inkables when mulliganing if you do so.
The main improvement that traditional amber amethyst aggro has is to have 4 copies of 001-009 and 4 copies of 001-048. Those are very good and still somewhat budget friendly, but were superceded by the more resilient 005-016. Like the chromicon, the card draw can be irrelevant if we win fast enough and in certain matchups that rely on items or actions, it might actually benefit us by putting removal to the bottom of the deck.
The other thing that can easily be upgraded is getting to 4 copies each of 006-002 and 003-016. Being very efficient inkable 2 drops, they're now a core component of the more competitive version of the deck and the Lilo even comes as a promo card with the Archazia's Island Gift Bundle.
Finally, getting a few copies of 002-046 will act as protection for our questers as well as removal for some of the opponent's threats thanks to it's rush ability and 4 strength.
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.
