As usual, I’ve been digging into the Top 64 deck lists from this past weekend’s Disney Lorcana Challenge, and while I’ve got a lot of insights to share about the top decks, the meta shifts, and the overall shape of the tournament, the first thing I need to address is this totally bizarre Amber/Steel aggro deck with 28 locations. Alvaro Jirau climbed all the way to the Top 32, just one game shy of an invite to the NA Championship, with a deck no one has ever seen before.
I got to watch Jirau play his Top 32 match against Alvin Hernandez’s non-standard Amber/Steel “Steelfasa” deck, and while Jirau wasn’t able to close out the third game, his location aggro deck was indeed formidable, which is a lot easier to understand once you’ve actually seen the deck in action.
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It starts with a lot of the standard aggro pieces we’ve come to know and loathe this set. Daisy Duck, Donald’s Duck has indeed infiltrated the meta and, just as I predicted, made aggro viable for the first time in Lorcana history. Okay, maybe not just as I predicted, but aggro is stronger than ever in Shimmering Skies.
An Aggro Deck Unlike Any Other
Like my other favorite aggro deck, TFM’s Amethyst/Steel “Doc” deck, Jirau’s list utilizes Fire the Cannons! to protect his side of the board in the early game (and deal with pesky Diablos) and Doc, Bold Knight to refill his empty hand. Mr. Smee is a fantastic aggro card that trades well into more expensive threats as well, especially with a Captain Hook, Forceful Duelist on the board to protect him.
After that, things get real weird, real fast. The deck has eight one-cost locations, 16 two-cost locations, and if that wasn’t enough, a full set of three-cost Pride Lands, Jungle Oasis. The idea is to flood the board with low-cost locations behind your high-value questers to push your lore total from two angles and force your opponent to split their attention. Evidently, this strategy worked for Jirau a lot on day one, and nearly got him a championship invite on day two.
It’s kind of genius in its simplicity. Rather than try to combo characters with locations for powerful effects, this deck tries to play locations off-curve as an additional source of lore gain and a distraction for the opponent. Most of the time the location’s ability, if it even has one, isn’t ever relevant. You’ll be too busy playing out your hand and questing to worry about moving characters. But when you eventually stall out, as aggro decks tend to do, the locations with abilities give you something to do with your ink. If used wisely, as Jirau frequently demonstrated, those often-overlooked locations can be a game changer.
Few Decks Are Prepared For A Flood Of Locations
In his match against Hernandez, we saw Jirau move a character to The Bayou before questing just to see if the card on top of his deck gave him a better out than the one in his hand. A John Silver with a couple of locations in play can be game-ending, while a Doc or Fix-It Felix, Jr. (a card I’ve never seen played in any other deck) can help you find the extra cards you need to keep the pressure on. If you draw dead, moving a character to The Underworld gives you a chance to draw one more card, which might be all you need to seal the deal with a deck like this.
More often than not, though, those locations are just sitting there, gaining lore each turn. This proved to be an incredibly effective tactic in the current meta-game. The popular Steel decks like Amber/Steel “Steelsong” and Emerald/Steel Discard and good at dealing with wide boards, while Ruby/Amethyst and Ruby/Sapphire can remove one big threat at a time, or hit the panic button and clear all the characters in play with Be Prepared. But what do you do when the opponent has four locations in play? Sapphire decks may run a copy or two of Hide Away or Kuzco, Selfish Emperor to deal with a troublesome Queen’s Castle or McDuck Manor, but absolutely no one is set up to deal with four locations at the same time.
Playing against Jirau’s deck is like playing whack-a-mole. Every little threat you take out gets replaced by two more the following turn, and if you can take control fast enough, this location deck will surely run away with the game. It’s one of those decks that’s well positioned simply because no one else is playing it, so no one else is prepared to play against it.
We saw another location-focused deck find some day two success in Las Vegas last month as well. Phillip Quiett’s Ruby Steel deck only featured eight locations, but it had a similar full-aggro approach that puts the opponent in a difficult position. I like decks like this, not because I think they’re particularly meta-breaking, but because they inspire people to think outside of the box and try new things. Who ever thought we’d see Nottingham and Fix-It Felix, Jr. in a top 32 deck? No matter how well-established the meta is, Lorcana is never fully solved, and players like Jirau and Quiett encourage us to keep looking in bold new directions.
Disney Lorcana
Lorcana is a trading card game developed by Disney and published by Ravensburger, featuring iconic characters, settings, and more from the studio’s long history. As an Illumineer, you must build your deck and help protect Lorcana.