Lorcana Deck Guide: Amber-Sapphire Princesses

Hello, everyone!

Building off-meta decks is never easy… and building successful decks is even harder! After all, every deck needs to be tested and show, in practice, that it can effectively face those considered tier 1 decks in a given metagame.

Recently, in DLC Richmond, we saw how a deck designed and fine-tuned to combat the metagame ended up leading to a final that was almost a complete mirror – a clear demonstration of how approaching the metagame analytically, looking for weak spots, can yield many results.

It also happens that some results attract much more attention than others, which in no way diminishes the value or merit of any given achievement. Our article today will cover an extremely fun and competitive deck used by Yoshi Espino to reach Day 2 of DLC Richmond: Amber-Sapphire Princesses!

Today's deck reached Day 2 of DLC Richmond, finishing with an 8-4 record, meaning 8 wins and 4 losses. A good result, especially considering it was the only player using this ink pair on Day 2 of the event!

The is the list used by Yoshi Espino:

On a first glance, this is a deck designed to be aggressive, looking to fill the board with many cheap characters, and it also includes accelerators like Aurora - Holding Court. The abundance of characters that can Quest for 2 Lore points is combined with several Bodyguards, which significantly delay the opponent and thus allow for more turns of Lore accumulation.

As you can see, the deck features several different themes, the main one being Princesses, with highlight to Aurora and Tiana; the Heroes theme, which kind of blends with the Princesses, and has Anna as the main highlight; and Puppies, which is a smaller theme, but it's there and the main feature is Thunderbolt.

Let's analyze these themes a little more and understand how they combine and work together for a very synergistic strategy!

The Princesses

The Princesses are the main theme of the deck, and although it's not 100% focused on these character type, their number is sufficient to turn on some important synergies.

The main one, of course, involves Aurora - Holding Court, which, with its Quest, allows you to accelerate Princess or Queen type characters – more on that last one in a moment! – and thus flood the board in the early turns.

In addition, a very important interaction is that Aurora - Holding Court can reduce the Shift cost of Aurora - Dreaming Guardian! With this, you can even have a 5-cost character on the board as early as the second turn.

In addition to the acceleration brought by Aurora, it's also worth mentioning the two princesses with Support: Eilonwy and Rapunzel. First, remember that the Support ability is an excellent way to challenge bigger characters with your smaller ones. Second, Rapunzel ensures that it will be extremely difficult for the opponent to counter your board using Challenges.

Finally, it's necessary to highlight Tiana - Restaurant Owner. A very powerful ability that makes it immensely difficult to remove any of your characters with Challenges, and even protects itself. The "cost" to remove her is your opponent practically wasting an entire turn! She manages to put the opponent in a difficult situation and secure an initiative in the Lore Race.

Heroes

Although slightly fewer in number, cards designed to interact with Hero-type characters are also very important.

The two Anna cards, for example, generate more Lore with heroes on your side – in this case, 1 more Lore with Anna - Braving the Storm, and 1 more for each of your heroes with Anna - True-Hearted. Furthermore, it's important to remember that both Anna cards are Queens, so Aurora - Holding Court also reduces their cost!

Lady and Alice don't have any specific interaction, but they are two excellent cards for the deck's 3-mana curve, helping in this regard and increasing the number of Hero characters on your side.

It's also worth remembering that several of the Princesses mentioned in the previous section are also Hero-type, which further enhances synergies with Anna!

Puppies

Although it's only a few cards, 4 copies of Thunderbolt means the deck sometime dominate a board of minor characters thanks to Bodyguard, which enters the game quickly via Shift.

Patch is the deck's shift-target for this, and it has the crucial Ward ability. Therefore, even being a 1-cost card, and thus more fragile, it is still perfectly viable to become a Thunderbolt on the following turns!

Rounding out the Deck

Lastly, we see here some cards that interact and create small synergies within the deck's other themes, and also provide a certain variety to the game plan.

Daisy Duck is the most efficient way to quickly generate Lore, and playing it means that, sometimes, the deck will simply have a constant character with high Willpower available to pressure Lore generation from the first turns.

Mowgli and Ludwig interact by removing threats directly from the opponent's hand – in this case, not characters, but any Locations, Items, or Actions will hardly have an easy time against the deck.

Jim Dear and Rajah, along with Thunderbolt, form the deck's defensive line, thanks to the Bodyguard ability. The idea is to protect all the smaller characters, thus gaining time to close out the game. Restoring the Heart also contributes to this – the deck's only Action helps keep high Willpower characters on the board.

Finally, Alice - Growing Girl is an alternative win-condition that takes advantage of the abundance of smaller characters to accumulate many instances of Support, resulting in a character that can generate 5 Lore with a single Quest.

The deck analyzed today perfectly combines fun and competitive, and shows how Lorcana manages to bring a lot of variety from deck building to support for specific strategies.

Furthermore, even though it was designed for a competitive environment, the deck's developer, Yoshi Espino, didn't shy away from adding character diversity and working with a number of copies that met the needs of each card.

I hope you enjoyed this analysis of a somewhat different deck, but at the same time a very promising one! And don't forget to leave your feedback in the comments below.

Cheers, and until next time!