Archazia’s Island’s Ruby/Sapphire Starter Deck – Best Cards, How To Play

With Archazia’s Island, Disney Lorcana finally introduced multi-ink cards. These two-ink cards can only be used in decks with both colours, but in exchange you get effects that are the best of both. As a perfect example of that, look no further than the Ruby/Sapphire starter deck.

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This deck features the Beast and Belle in an item-smashing tag team duo. One wants to throw them away, while the other will pick them back up and use them to buff her lore value to an absurdly high amount. It takes a bit of setting up, but this deck features a terrifying value engine you’re going to want to put together.

Every Card In The Archazia’s Island Ruby/Sapphire Deck

Key Cards

Belle is perhaps the card that most singularly drives the entire rest of the deck. Without Belle, your deck doesn’t do anything, so keeping her in play should be your top priority.

Questing with Belle can net you a whopping six lore, provided you have enough item cards in your discard pile. And at seven willpower, it’s not likely that Belle is going to be banished in a challenge any time soon, giving you the opportunity to storm ahead and gain advantage long before your opponent has the chance to catch up.

The problem with Belle is that she needs a continual supply ot items. If you’re not drawing items and getting them into your discard pile, her effectiveness is practically halved. Every item card counts, and this deck doesn’t have enough of them.

Beast, Frustrated Designer

It’s rare that both face cards for a starter deck are so closely aligned with each other, but Beast fits nicely into Belle’s strategy of having items in your discard pile. Beast takes items and throws them at your opponents’ characters, turning two items into five damage to any character.

This not only lets you snipe out problem targets and keep Belle secure, it offers a great way to get items into your discard. Only two each turn means Beast can’t keep up with Belle single-handedly, but topping it off with other sources of item banishment should be simple.

Monsieur D’Arque, Despicable Proprietor

While plenty of the items in this deck have built-in ways to banish themselves, having a reliable, repeatable method like Monsieur D’Arque is always handy. While he does have to quest, which puts him in harm’s way, you’re rewarded with additional hand advantage, and seeing Belle up for the biggest possible quest at the same time.

Despite costing only one ink, holding D’Arque for when you have items to banish is a smart play. There are enough one or two-drop cards in the deck that D’Areque can be used elsewhere instead of shoring up your opening hand.

Medal Of Heroes

Medal of Heroes takes an already great Belle and makes her even better. You can pay the cost and banish this card before Belle quests, giving her an extra two lore value and putting an item in the bin for her to turn into even more lore.

As Belle can gain lore equal to the number of items she returns to your deck, Medal of Heroes can be used to catch up if you don’t have enough items in your discard pile. Otherwise, fi you’re already returning the maximum of three, Medal of Heroes turns Belle’s terrifying six lore into a game-winning eight with ease.

Kida, Creative Thinker

Kida may not directly contribute to playing items or putting them in your discard pile, but she does provide a crucial service to the deck: card filtering.

The deck has a few ways of putting cards face-down into your inkwell, and having any of those be an item could be catastrophic. By using her Key to the Puzzle ability, you’re able to both ramp up your ink to get Belle into play as quickly as possible, and also work through your deck to find the items before another card puts them in your inkwell, where you can’t reach them.

Regardless of how you use it, Kida gives you an additional ink every single turn, which is nothing to sniff at.

Ruby/Sapphire Playstyle

This deck is focused chiefly on two strategies: items and ramping lore.

Items

This is the primary win condition, and the majority of the deck is dedicated to it. The goal is to find any way possible to get items into your discard pile, whether that be through discarding or banishing.

Beast, Frustrated Designer sets up a great synergy with Belle, Mechanic Extraordinaire, with him banishing items to deal direct damage, before Belle takes them out of your discard pile to quest for massive amounts of lore.

This deck has a lot of cheap items, like Gold Coin and Medal of Heroes, as well as extra ways to get rid of them, like Monsieur D’Arque, Despicable Proprietor.

Ramping Ink

Between cards like Belle and Lyle Tiberius Rourke, this deck has a very high ink curve. You’ll be wanting to play some high-cost cards, and to get there you’ll need to be ramping your inkwell hard.

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to get additional ink into your inkwell, keeping ahead of your opponent. Kida, Creative Thinker is the most consistent, letting you do it every turn, but there are also cards like Donald Duck, Focused Flatfoot and All Is Found to speed things up.

It’s not having ink to play expensive cards, though. This deck rewards you for the simple act of playing the ink itself. Lyle Tiberius Rourke deals two damage to each character once per turn when an ink is put into your inkwell, and Ruby Coil charges a character up with two additional strength every time you play an ink.

This won’t push you to victory as quickly as the item theme, but it does provide a good stalling package to help slow your opponent down while you assemble your item engine pieces.

Your Opening Hand And When To Mulligan

Though this deck does suffer somewhat from ahving lots of expensive or uninkable cards, it does make knowing how to mulligan for your first hand a lot easier.

Sir Kay, Marie, Gaetan Moliere, Edgar Balthazar, and Chaca don’t add anything to this deck beyond just being bodies on the board, but they are inkable. Keeping a few of these in your opening hand as inkwell fodder is a great idea.

After that, focus on having items in your hand. In the early stages of the game it’ll be easier to banish them through thier own abilities than any other way, so playing and binning them as soon as you can sets up your discard pile ready for when Beast or Belle finally land.

Weaknesses

Compared to some of the starter decks we’ve seen for Lorcana, this is a very focused deck with a clear gameplan and the means to pull it off. However, it does have a few key weaknesses to keep in mind when playing.

Primarily, just having one copy of Belle, Mechanic Extraordinare is a huge threat. One well-timed removal action can completely destroy your value engine, forcing you to rely on grinding out the game instead of making use of those items. Belle is your key lore generator, so protect her at all costs.

The other weakness is how few items this deck uses. For something so central to the deck, you’re perilously close to not having enough items, and might find it hard to set up your discard pile. If you’re upgrading, swap a few of the dud cards like Chaca and Balthazar and swap them for other, cheap items to help speed it up.

Finally, the deck’s focus on ramping can remove key items you need. Getting cards back out of the inkwell is almost impossible, so accidentally putting even one in there can severely limit Belle’s potential.

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