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 pillaging our way to a ruby and steel pirate deck.
Rascals and Scoundrels
Let's address the elephant in the room first. Building a pirate deck presents a challenge in Disney Lorcana. There are several good cards to support the archetype but they have been split into 3 inks instead of two. So while this guide focuses on ruby and steel, there are valid arguments for anyone wanting to replace one of those colors by emerald to take advantage of key cards like 006-081-daisy-duck-pirate-captain.
With this out of the way, why did we decide to go with ruby and steel as the two inks for this deck? To put it quite simply, because they were the most explosive combination, starting in the early game. Playing a 006-117-moana-self-taught-sailor on turn one and a 003-184-mr-smee-bumbling-mate on turn 2 gives players a very strong quester that needs to be answered right away. Adding very cheap captains through 001-174-captain-hook-forceful-duelist and wendy-darling-courageous-captain means that our early plays can get the support they need to either start questing fast or banish threats that the opponent might be playing
Once our early threats are established, we can focus on keeping control of the board through the use of more pirates and some locations. 006-181 will prevent the agressive decks from questing with their best creature and set up a shift target for our biggest character, 006-194. Coupled with 003-135, it can also challenge an opponent's character the turn it comes out and shift the tempo of the game in your favor or you can send him to 004-204 to gain lore while challenging.
Similarly, shifting 006-176 or questing with 006-103 can both be used as removal for your opponent's characters while you deploy cheap and efficient locations like 003-134 and 006-136 to prepare for the finishing touch of the deck.
If an opponent's character turns out to be too troublesome or isn't exerting, we can always rely on our targeted removal. 003-196 will deal 2 damage to any character or location and 002-131 will let us banish any character by banishing one of our cheap villains.
A Pirate's Life for Me
To keep the cards flowing in a color pair that can have a hard time doing so, we mainly rely on 2 cards. 006-110 can be sent to a location (ideally one with a higher willpower like 004-204 and every turn, during your Set phase, she will draw you an extra card and gain an extra lore. If we have an opponent that exerts their characters a lot, we can rely on 004-132 to make our pirates bigger and draw us some cards in the process.
The way we win the game revolves a lot around 003-176. The more locations we play, the harder he becomes to banish and the more efficient his questing becomes, putting a serious clock on the game and forcing the opponent to start attacking our locations, which we can then recover from the discard pile using 006-120 to play them again.
If we need an extra boost to finish the game or need to slow the opponent down, 004-128 can enable that and can be sung by multiple characters at the same time.
The Big Picture
What we end up with is a deck that can dish out some serious damage and put pressure on its opponents to find answers to both characters and locations, but can struggle a bit to draw cards at times. It's still a very fun deck to try out the interactions with locations and will prove a serious challenge to any deck that relies on characters with low power to quest to the finish line.
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 main thing missing from the deck is card draw and there are a few ways to achieve it, but none are perfect in that color combination. The best steel card draw is 001-195 but it will also draw your opponent 7 cards in the process. Given that your opponent will often have more cards in hand than you, this should still play out to your advantage. If not, some steel songs that have an effect and replace themselves in your hand like 006-196, 002-199 or 005-197 can be useful.
If you want to improve the quality of your locations in the deck, the first one to add should be 003-136. It combines a high lore yield, high willpower and the ability to protect your character through the Evasive keyword. Locations like 006-204 and 004-203 can also be swapped in if you feel that some of the other ones are too low on willpower.
Finally, swapping in 004-179 or an extra 006-194 can make a huge difference in ending the games fast enough to prevent your opponents on more controlly matchups from dealing with your board and leaving you stranded on a deserted island.
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.
