Lorcana Deck Guide - Amber Amethyst Encanto!

Hello, everyone!

It's the end of the year season, lots of festivities, and for many it's an opportunity to be with the family and celebrate the new year that has arrived.

With that in mind, today we're going to have fun and showcase a deck based on this family gathering theme, with a list focused on the characters and cards from the movie Encanto. Let's go!

How to build a deck within a movie theme?

If you've never watched Encanto, in short: it's a 2021 Disney film based on the story of the Madrigal family, a family blessed with gifts. Each family member has a different fantastic ability - super strength, talking to animals, curing diseases, and even foreseeing the future! However, one member of the family - the young Mirabel - for some reason did not receive a gift, and the movie shows her quest to understand her role in such a fantastic family.

Back to our TCG, in Lorcana we have several cards representing the Madrigal family, not only the characters, but also locations and events in the film. However, just putting together a bunch of cards, even if on-them, would be really cool, but wouldn't necessarily produce a playable deck. The first task, then, was to come up with an idea, a game plan, for the deck.

While searching the cards within the Encanto theme, one that came up and seemed to have great potential was Bruno Madrigal - Undetected Uncle! The ability allows you to draw a card and obtain 3 Lore every turn, and it also has Evasive, which means it is naturally more difficult for your opponent to interact with. While thinking about ways to increase its potential, the deck was assembled to combine several cards that manipulate the top of the deck, and guarantee that Bruno's ability will hit, thus gaining full bonus from the effect!

So let's see the deck list and understand the role of each card:

The Main Gameplan - We'll need to talk about Bruno

Yes, it's well known that We Don’t Talk About Bruno. But since this is an Emerald card, and our deck is Amber-Amethyst, let's make an exception, right? But also let's not get too carried away, or it could bring bad luck...

Jokes aside, Bruno Madrigal - Undetected Uncle and Alma Madrigal - Family Matriarch are the main pieces of the deck.

Bruno, as we have already mentioned, has a very strong ability that combines drawing cards with gaining Lore, that is, advancing the win condition at the same time as increasing our resources.

The beloved Abuela, in perfect tune, provides consistency to the deck - it guarantees Bruno's ability will always hit jackpot! If you already have Bruno Madrigal - Undetected Uncle in play, and then play Alma Madrigal - Family Matriarch, you will be able to choose which card to put on top of the deck - and Bruno will then be able to immediately draw it and gain Lore. In order to fully abuse the synergy, you can use the ability to search for another copy of Alma Madrigal - Family Matriarch, and repeat everything on your next turn!

In addition to this synergy with Bruno, Abuela also has several other uses - for example, if you don't already have Bruno Madrigal - Undetected Uncle in your hand, you can play Abuela on the third turn and ensure that you'll have Bruno to play in your fourth turn! The fact that we can search the deck for any Madrigal also allows us to use several single-copy of a few cards, so we can use Alma Madrigal - Family Matriarchs ability to find the right card at the right time.

While these two Madrigals are among the most important to our game plan, the rest of the family will also help with the strategy:

Support from the Family!

The other members of the Madrigal family help with our plan, combining effects that control the pace of the game while Alma and Bruno lay the path to 20-Lore.

Agustin Madrigal - Clumsy Dad, Mirabel Madrigal - Prophecy Finder and Felix Madrigal - Fun-Loving Family Man allow the deck good on-curve plays on 1-2-3 ink, being able to help both with gaining some Lore and countering the opponent's initial plays.

Julieta Madrigal - Excellent Cook and Dolores Madrigal - Easy Listener help with card draw, giving the deck more consistency.

Luisa Madrigal - Entertaining Muscle costs a hefty 6-ink, but is our strongest character, and can also generate a lot of Lore on her own when necessary - essential for longer games, where you need a very resistant character in the board.

And finally, Mirabel Madrigal - Gift of the Family works as a Plan B when the Alma/Bruno combination ends up not working - with Mirabel, all Madrigal characters will generate 1 additional Lore, making even our low-cost characters a true threat, being able to win the game in a few turns.

The One-of Madrigals

These 3 characters, each one with only 1 copy in the deck, are aimed at specific game states and can be searched by Alma Madrigal - Family Matriarch as needed.

Isabela Madrigal - Golden Child is a strong option for games where the opponent constantly removes your characters, since she is evasive and alone generates four Lore. It also pairs well with Bruno Madrigal - Undetected Uncle, as his ability is not a Quest, so it is not affected by Isabela's Quest.

Pepa Madrigal - Weather Maker helps against decks that rely on just one or a few Lore-generating characters, for example those that focus on Tamatoa - So Shiny!.

And Mirabel Madrigal - Family Gatherer should be used against decks that try to generate Lore faster than ours, as they normally don't try to remove our characters. This allows us to fulfill Mirabel's condition of having 5 characters on the board to be able to play it, and once we have our turn back, Mirabel alone is capable of completely turning around a game where we were behind in the Lore generation.

Other Support Cards

Here are some cards that'll help the Madrigals on their Lore mission!

Magic Broom - Illuminary Keeper and Be Our Guest are redundant card draw effects, which helps with deck consistency, as well as being good plays in the early turns when we don't find other characters to play - especially other Madrigals .

Merlin - Squirrel is another card that interacts well with Bruno Madrigal - Undetected Uncle when we don't find Abuela, in addition to allowing a little deck manipulation when we're searching for a a specific card.

Finally, The Bare Necessities remains one of the best tools in Amber for dealing with non-characters, especially removals like Be Prepared or Brawl.

A Slight Touch of Locations

Rounding out our deck, we have a small Locations subtheme.

Casa Madrigal - Casita combines an interesting Lore generation effect with a low cost, ensuring that even characters whose ink hasn't dried still contribute to reaching the magical 20 Lore. If the opponent spends resources to remove Casita from the board, your characters still remain, so it's a good tempo play to consider.

The Underworld - River Styx also keeps the theme of passive Lore generation, and in a long game will help to recover key characters that were previously discarded or banished.

Finally, Magic Carpet - Flying Rug combines the evasive effect - important for dealing with early cards like Diablo - Devoted Herald - with mobility between Locations, which saves you ink in the initial turns, helping a lot in the early stages of the game.

Sequencing and Turn Strategy

All right, so let's understand how we should sequence our plays and follow our gameplan throughout the stages of the game:

Starting hand and turns 1-4: avoid keeping high-cost cards on the starting hand, especially uninkable ones like Mirabel Madrigal - Gift of the Family and Luisa Madrigal - Entertaining Muscle. The exception is, of course, Alma Madrigal - Family Matriarch, as she in turn guarantees that we will find Bruno Madrigal - Undetected Uncle. The idea is to establish some low-cost characters, to ensure the board stays under control, while we look for our Madrigal family synergies for the mid-game.

Mid-game, turns 4-8: ideally, we will establish Bruno Madrigal - Undetected Uncle and within a few turns dominate Lore race, without losing cards in our hand if the opponent deals with our combination. If this doesn't happen, we should have the second option to play out Madrigal characters and use Mirabel Madrigal - Gift of the Family to generate a lot of Lore.

Long game, turns 9+: eventually, some opponents may be able to deal with our large family, and then we should switch gears from go wide to go tall. Focus on playing individually strong or evasive characters - i.e. Luisa Madrigal - Entertaining Muscle and Isabela Madrigal - Golden Child, to gather the final Lore points. Luisa can also be used to fight strong opposing characters, and as an option Pepa Madrigal - Weather Maker can paralyze them for a turn - sometimes that can be enough for the deck to regain control of the match!

Conclusion

And thus we come to the end of our showcase theme deck for the Madrigal family!

Hope you all enjoyed it, and also that all your end-of-year celebrations are enjoyable as well!

Here's to 2025 bringing us all a lot of success and a lot of Lorcana - remember, right at the start of January we'll have the NA Championship to review!

Hugs and see you next time!