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Some ofDisney Lorcana’sstarter decks are incredibly strong. Just make a few changes, and you’re able to easily have a competitive deck ready to clear up shop. Shimmering Skies' Amethyst/Ruby deck isn’t one of those.
This is a complex puzzle of different gameplans, and knowing when to put the pedal to the metal on one strategy and when to pump the brakes on another can make this a hard deck to pilot, and an easy deck to counter.
Retrosphere (x2)
The Library, A Gift For Belle (x2)
Key Cards
Compared to the other Shimmering Skies starter deck, Amethyst/Ruby struggles with a lack of focus in its strategy. Pinning down key cards can be tricky, because the deck wants to do so many things: control, challenging-matters, and location-matter all vie for pole position, and step on each others' toes as a result.
Wreck-It Ralph, Demolition Dude
One of your easiest early-game lore generators is Wreck-It Ralph, Demolition Dude. Keeping him at three damage is deal to ensure you’re getting a whopping four lore per turn, but this also means he’s going to be a prime target for challenges.
Once you’ve built up enough lore, you’re able to use The Nokk, Mythical Spirit to keep taking off little bits of damage from Ralph to prevent him being banished, or the Retrosphere to bounce him back to your hand. But when he comes into play, Ralph should be questing every single turn to make the most of his ability before it goes away.
Gale, Wind Spirit
Frozen 2 gets a lot of love in this deck, and Gale is quietly one of the biggest threats in it. For the same cost as Ralph, you get a character that can quest for two lore each turn, and never stays out of play for long.
If it is banished in a challenge, Gale bounces back to your hand next turn to be played again and again. This doesn’t prevent it from being permanently banished by other methods of removal, but, considering the other starter deck in this set only cares about challenging, there’s a good chance this will be a persistent problem for your opponent.
King Of Hearts, Monarch Of Wonderland
As mentioned, one of the many plates this deck is spinning is a control theme, with ways to exert your opponents' characters and keep them down. Most of the time this is a big, one-off effect like with Anna, Mystical Majesty; but King of Hearts, Monarch of Wonderland provides a smaller, but more consistent way of keeping exerted characters in their place.
This lets you easily set up challenge targets, or keep characters with powerful abilities that need exerting from using them. There’s nothing stopping you from just focusing on one target either, as it’ll still be exerted when it comes back to your turn and the King can do it again.
The Library, A Gift For Belle
Another loose theme of this deck is locations, with cards like Taffyta Muttonfudge, Sour Speedster and Taffyta Muttonfudge, Crowd Favorite both caring about having locations in play. If focused on, this theme could be a scary one, but the deck has one big problem: it’s only got two location cards, and they’re both The Library.
If you don’t want an entire theme of your deck to sit unused, you’ll need The Library, A Gift For Belle out in play. Its effect is fine for its cost, but its real strength is in its cheap move cost to synergise with Sour Speedster. If you get both Libraries out, Taffyta can bip between them each turn to generate an additional two lore without putting herself at risk of challenges.
It needs a lot of setup, but this deck needs every possible way to victory it can get.
Amethyst/Ruby Playstyle
Because this deck wants to do so many things, it never really commits to doing any of them fully. That being said, there are a few focal points to work around:
Multiple cards in this deck scale up with each opponent you have, making it much better in multiplayer formats than one-on-one. The Sword Released makes you more lore, and Olaf, Happy Passenger could potentially come into play a lot earlier.
The lack of focus makes this deck more like agrindy midrange deckthan a laser-focused and aggressive one. You’ll want to keep an open mind to how you play; not going all-in on one strategy only to have it be shut down and leave you without another path forward.
You’re in it for the long-haul here, and if you canuse the Strength buffs to knock out your opponent’s key pieces, you’ll usually be able to slowly accumulate enough lore to win once your opponent’s deck has run out of gas.
Your Opening Hand And When To Mulligan
The key to a good opening hand in this deck is getting thefoundational pieces- namely,characters you can shift onto later on.A lot of the most powerful cards in the decks are Floodborns, so getting their shift targets into play as soon as possible not only gets pieces on the board, it alsokeeps your options open for which strategy you press into.
Taffyta Muttonfudge, Crowd Favorite is a great early play, although it does rely on you both havingThe Library, A Gift For Belleout first and your opponent having lore to drain. Then, you can shift Sour Speedster onto her to go ham on the location theme.
Anna, Eager Acolyte can shift intoAnna, Mystical Majesty,one of the bomb cards for the control and exerting subtheme of the deck. However, Eager Acolyte isn’t inkable, sobe careful when keeping it in your opening hand that you have other cards to ink.
Outside of shift targets, you’ll need to rely on characters that otherwise don’t feel connected to the deck for your early plays. HavingDaisy Duck, Spotless Food-FighterorMaleficent, Vengeful Sorceressin your hand gives you nice early-game challengers, and Maleficent can even get the ball rolling on your questing.
Weaknesses
The biggest challenge when running this deck is how it never commits enough to one strategy. Instead of having one gameplan and seeing it through to the end, it hasa number of different threads that can easily be shut down by your opponent.If your locations get banished, Taffyta Muttonfudge is usless; if you can’t exert your opponents' characters fast enough, Olaf doesn’t see play until the endgame.
Aggressive decks are lethal.You need to work to set up your different strategies, and anything that can outpace you is going to likely be in an unbeatable position before you’ve had a chance to really get going. you may drain lore to try and close the gap, but, once again, the deck doesn’t offer enough drain tools to make this particularly viable.
