Hello and welcome back to Illumination, the Disney Lorcanah podcast. My name is Max. And I'm Sam. And we are back at you with another episode and we are talking over the deck that won DLC Las Vegas. Very cool stuff. Shout out to Zanside. I know we bring him up. Well, I bring him up quite a bit on the podcast, a great online contributor to the game, a wonderful ambassador to the game and now DLC winning player. And we want to look at the deck because it's kind of the new tech on the block, right?
Were you surprised to see this deck in the, especially in the finals, putting a good number of people into the finals? I don't know that I was surprised to see it just because we did see a lot of green steel decks represented at Las Vegas. I think it's a good thing that we're seeing another deck come out and it doesn't have Bucky in it, which is nice to see.
Yes. The deck does not have Bucky, but it is still around in a very similar form, kind of marrying the mid range Bucky style that we saw in the Ursula's Return set championships, along with some of the key synergy engine pieces that came from the Into the Inklands green steel deck married into what is this current iteration or current style of the deck. And we did see a few decks come in with this same game plan and a similar, but not exactly the same list.
And all of them, well, not all of them, but a good number of them ended up actually placing into day two because it was a pretty unknown quantity, I think going into what's popular for the most part. Right. I think we've been seeing green steel kind of pop up a little bit here and there over the past few weeks, but I don't think that it was really polished. Right.
We saw some lists coming out of the collectibles show that was a little bit more mid range without the discard package playing things like beast, relentless, more copies of Tinkerbell ways to answer the board, babooms and the like, while lacking the ability to really deal with a deck like the Ruby Sapphire decks. So not really being able to strip out the key resources made that a really tough match because the mid range decks do fall prey typically to the control style decks.
And you'd really need that discard to be able to get through the late game threats of the Ruby Sapphire decks. So I am glad to say that I did call that out when I was play testing with some of these more mid range decks out of the collectible show and saying, I really wish I had my discard back in the deck. So it was cool to see that I wasn't too far off base from what a lot of players were in fact doing.
I think given a little bit more time, I would have ended up probably testing at least some of that package in a deck. So I was pretty excited about that and pretty excited to see somebody that we think is a really good player of the game. And again, a great content creator for the game do well. We wanted to do a breakdown of this deck.
We've done this a little bit before with the Ruby Amethyst style decks, and we wanted to do a similar thing, but a little bit more specific to this exact list since this is the list that took down the entire Vegas tournament. So pretty exciting and pretty new and a good chance to really zero in and get a very micro focused style of episode. So jumping into it, I do want to apologize off the bat. You may have already heard some ums or uhs from us.
This episode is going to be a little bit less polished than usual. Sam and I are just getting back from vacation and we don't have a ton of time to get out a good polish on this in terms of content. We of course, we'll clean this all up from an audio fidelity perspective, but from an actual editing for content perspective, this one's going to be a little bit raw or than usual.
So if you're new to the podcast, please excuse any little rough around the edge kind of bits of speech, maybe like this one. If you are here and you've returned, you know that we tend to turn out a little bit more in the way of polish, but we didn't want to skip the episode either just because we were on vacation and we were really pumped to talk about the Vegas tournament, which we did sneak in during vacation watching bits and pieces over the course of our travel and our vacation in earnest.
So it was fun to watch that all unfold as we got to enjoy ourselves. So what is the game plan for this particular green steel deck? What's an ideal start look like? How does it proceed to the mid game and how does it win? Well, I mean, it's a Diablo deck, right? So we know the ideal start is probably going to involve shifting Diablo and we saw no shortage of that from the content in Vegas.
We saw a lot of Diablo shifts and I do think it's a card you want to fairly aggressively mulligan for so that you can get that shift out in front early. An ideal start for this deck obviously being turn one Diablo, Maleficent Spy into turn two Diablo shift into a either Ursula to clear the way for Diablo shift and obviously the turn one Diablo giving you a lot of information on how you want to navigate.
And then ideally you strip any removal that's a song with your Ursula or you play a morph and you set up another possible shift line. If they deal with Diablo, you could know the following turn on three, be able to shift something like a beast tragic here to continue to get some form of card draw online for the game plan to evolve in the mid game. It could be a little bit different than that.
Obviously you're going to use this card advantage in tandem with the card with the card draw of something like a Prince John. And when you combine that with the synergy engines that the deck has using Prince John to draw every time you discard, you can end up with many more cards than your opponent can have left in their hand.
And then you're going to leverage that advantage by questing with some of the more heavy hitters finishing out the cards in their hand using things like Ana and the beast tragic hero to quest for the wind, close things out and kind of keep things flowing because you have an answer at that point to everything. Because the cards in your hand are so robust.
We saw several games conclude with the winning player holding probably like 33% of their deck in their hand because they were just so flush with options. But this deck does have more, I don't want to call it a weakness, but a more obvious difficulty for the game in that it is in that one ink per turn category, just like Ruby Amethyst. It is not accelerating its ink in any way whatsoever unless the opponent does it for you, I suppose, but it is not jumping up the ink count itself.
So it does have some trouble at times deploying multiple cards per turn if it's not a song specifically. And we have seen some of the plays and I'll call out game one of the finals where Zansai was able to leverage a card like the Muses to very heavily out tempo his opponent. While his opponent had many, many cards in hand, his opponent just wasn't able to deploy them back down fast enough because the curve of this deck basically is all three drops. Like it's got Maleficent and Kovom one.
It has Ursula and Sudden Chill and Morph on two. And then basically a million D things on three. It's got Muses on four. It's got Beast and like kind of technically if you want to counter to make the curve a little better, kicked Ana on five. And then we don't talk about Bruno on five. And then six is Tinkerbell and just a couple copies of that card in Zansai's list. So the curve is like heavy threes to the point where turn five.
Sometimes you just can't deploy two things and you can't use your ink as efficiently as you necessarily would want to. And this deck can't always ink in the earlier turns, turns three, four and five. Sometimes you miss your ink drop, especially like four and five. You might miss the opportunity to ink every now and again using Diablo to give you a card to hope to ink the following turn. So it's not uncommon for this deck to top out around six cards or six cards in the ink well specifically.
Right. Yeah. With shifting Diablo, you're getting rid of a card. So it definitely makes it more difficult. It does. Absolutely. Let's get into now we kind of know what it's doing and we're talking over the pieces. Why are the cards that are chosen in here? If there's such a big bump on three? Well, obviously there's a removal package, right? We're talking about the usual steel removal package, especially when paired with Ursula Deceiver of All. She's kind of the critical piece, right?
You want to get her down so you can take a singular piece of removal and turn into a multi-piece removal spell in just like we've seen decks in the past.
The key card here when you're talking about removal is Ursula singing predominantly Let the Stormrage on because Ursula can take Let the Stormrage on read, divide for damage as you choose amongst one or two target characters, draw two cards, which is crazy for exert one character like that's just a ridiculous amount of value in something like a mirror or a mid range to mid range style match up that kind of escalating advantage while putting your
opponent behind can really, really cement the victory for the deck. And when we saw the muses out, so you sing with Ursula banish two characters and then bounce another character. Right. Pretty nuts. Yeah. You're doing so much for so little. And that's the real key of this deck is everything this deck tends to do. It puts the opponent down resources while it simultaneously pulls you up resources singing Let the Stormrage on while knocking out characters on on board.
It is growing cards in hand at the same time and preventing them from having an on board answer to your Ursula. Extremely powerful synergy that's going on in the deck and that escalating value is mirrored across the list. We see it with the next part of this, which is kind of the draw engine slash discard package hypnotize Prince John's sudden chill. All of these things lose your opponent cards while they grow cards in your hand.
So it's very, very strong and it has a lot of pieces that work with this. Anna helps feed into this. We have other cards. We've seen other lists. I've seen lists playing Lucifer and Bibbidi Bobbidi boo to try to take advantage of things like this. The fact that you can flush the opponent's hand out while growing the size of your hand has been a critical piece in the Amber Emerald style sing together decks. That's been the one of the key pieces to their success. No different here.
And we saw it all the way back to set three with the green steel decks during the set championships initially and the success people were having on the back of the strength of that kind of a synergy engine. So again, you just pair that with the muses and you can just watch the fireworks start to happen.
And then you have, of course, some of the strongest card draw singular card draw engines in the game with Diablo and beast tragic hero and having the ability to go shift Diablo on to play morph shift the beast on three. And now I'm drawing extra cards on everyone's turn is so very, very oppressive. Even if you're playing a piece of removal, where are you pointing it at the beast and charging it up? Or are you trying to just knock Diablo out of the sky?
And then then you have to figure out a way to deal with the other one while turn three or turn four, you could play Prince John sing a sudden chill and knock a card out of your hand and draw a card and potentially even two. So that's really scary if they hypnotize and then use that angry beast to sing sudden chill.
You probably have no cards left in hand and they're going up two cards there are going up three cards because you get the card from hypnotize the card from John and then the card from John. So very, very strong stuff. And then of course, we have the flex options that are in the deck, right? We discussed Ana already, but holy cow, is she good? She can pump up a character to deal with the location. She can destroy a character that has damage on it.
We saw that answer Tamatoa over the course of the weekend. Let the storm rage on, play Ana. That's really good sequencing that green didn't have direct access to before. It's a card kind of with let the storm rage on and it's a card kind of with Ana's ability, but it's not a full card in either case really. So it's really awesome that you can leverage something like that for some of the tougher to remove pieces of the puzzle than what we've seen before.
One thing I noticed while we were playing tonight a little bit is Ana gets around Pete. So like she can do certain things that, you know, pumping or making you discard and ignoring that Pete because I had played Pete against you and you were able to honor me back and it was kind of, so I think she's a really good flex option.
She absolutely is being able to do what you need to do, especially when you can like pump with the Cove, pump with the Ana and then hit something that you shouldn't is crazy powerful. Discard the last card in your hand draw, a card off John. It's just so flexible.
And then of course you have Tinkerbell that mops up an entire board almost on her own or comes down on a morph and surprises the heck out of everybody with that Tinkerbell coming down on four and being able to just take out multiple units. It's really impactful. And Tinkerbell of course being one of the better cards in the game because if you don't need her in that matchup, it's not very good. Yeah, ain't could tank. Really good stuff and that's kind of moving into the game plan.
It's very obvious what we're trying to do here. This isn't very fancy. We've already talked over ideal lines in the early game. You want to establish one of these draw engines or one of these synergy engines, whether it's John beast or Diablo.
And then from there you're using your plethora of cards to answer a variety of different things from the opponent and trying to preserve one of these engines as long as possible because it is going to be a card advantage engine that's going to end up winning you these games and then finally being able to quest with some of the heavier questers in the deck.
Ana being able to use Tinkerbell, being able to use these two questers, sad beast amongst them, being able to quest with these characters and then close the gap. And I think one of the toughest issues this deck faces from a player standpoint, who's played a lot of green steel is the ability to close out the game can often be difficult, but the addition of cards like Ana really helped just her as a two, three for two on turn three in some matchups can be really good.
Like there's nothing wrong with that card. If you're trying to race something like a Ruby Sapphire deck, just putting it down and just pedal to the metal, you've seen their hand, maybe you knocked out a song and you're just trying to quest as hard as you can to gain as much lore as you can so that you can squeak out the last few. Once they really start rolling is totally valid. Being able to honor to take a card out of their hand and then use her to start questing.
You take the knock the last card out of their hand after a hypnotized sudden chill with John out. You're now flush with options. You play the Ana knock out the last card, her and John are questing like maniacs. You know, it's not unreasonable four to six lore per turn that those cards are sitting on board and the Ruby Sapphire decks really have trouble answering that kind of stuff because they just don't play a lot of rush characters anymore.
And even if they did Queen of Hearts can't take out Ana. So I think that one of the biggest problems you have with this deck is kind of sometimes you have to mulligan a little bit more aggressively. It's definitely a higher risk, higher reward style deck. But the good news is you kind of have game, a game plan, I should say into just about any style of deck. If you're playing against a more controlling deck, you're obviously going to want to leverage the discard elements of your deck more.
If you're playing against a more to the board style of deck, you're going to want to leverage that steel removal a little bit more, but it gives you a clear path of what to ink. I think this is one of the easier decks in the format to ink with. Not always, but it can be because it's fairly obvious, right? If I'm playing against Ruby Sapphire, I'm going to be inking my strengths of a raging fire because I why? Why do I need those?
But if I'm playing against something like Ruby Amethyst, well, now I'm going to keep that steel removal because it is very, very important that I knock out key characters along the way. While on the other side of it, I want to make sure that I'm getting the critical pieces I need. Things you just, there are things you just don't want to ink unless you absolutely have to. Beasts, while in your opening hand can certainly be ink, you don't want to be inking them.
Obviously this deck's critical mass of threes does come at a cost of a lot of the threes are uninkable. So sometimes hands can be a little awkward and sometimes you do have to ink something you really, really don't want to. Like I've definitely had to ink Sudden Chills and then play Prince John, which looks like really awkward, but it's like, I kind of need this and next turn I'm going to play a Hypnotize. So I need this here so that I can do that.
Or you have to discard your discard song to be able to shift Diablo. I don't want to do that in certain matchups, but I do need the Diablo on board because critical thinking, I have a lot more discard cards in my deck, so I need to find them and being able to leverage that card advantage is very, very important. The deck is susceptible to going down to a low number of cards in hand, so it is a very tough mirror match depending on what the opponent does and what you do.
It can be a very frustrating mirror when you're playing against discard based decks, whether it's the Amber Emerald version or the mirror version. So those things can be difficult. It also lacks the ability to close a game really efficiently. You don't get any free wins, right? We're not playing Goat, we're not playing Lucky Dime, we're not playing a lot of our location doesn't gain us any passive lore. So we got nothing. We got nothing.
We got to turn a character sideways in quest if we want to win the game. So you have to be able to set up multiple turns ahead, so you have to start to think in like a chess-like strategy to be able to plan ahead in those ways. So those are kind of the weaknesses to the deck. Sam, is there any other weaknesses you wanted to call out or did we cover most of them at that point I think? I think we covered about everything. Awesome. Well, let's talk about flex slots then.
I think this deck is playing 4 and more. If you may be able to shave on that number, Ana might come out depending on how the meta shifts like you might want just a Lucifer instead. If the meta ends up shifting heavier towards Ruby Sapphire or more controlling style slower decks like that. Tinkerbell similarly, if the game moves away from a lot of onboard presence, you can shave Tinkerbell. Obviously, Sam was going in with wanting answers to a variety of different deck types.
So he made sure he really covered his bases and had some, it wasn't stone cold to anything, which has a lot of strength. In and of itself, I think the Cove's are a potential again, depending on how the meta looks, but Cove is so important in the Diablo mirrors. Being able to make your Diablo a 3-3 and beat their 2-2 up and keep yours is really, really important. And obviously you could potentially go up those Lucifers for control.
I think you might want to possibly go into some un-Ur-Sol-able removal potentially. If the mirror becomes very big, you want to be able to answer that first Diablo. Diablo babooms or fire the cannons become a lot more attractive. If the mirror is going to really take over Diablo decks become the order of the day, you're going to want those unsnatchable answers, right?
Like you want to be able to make sure that you can get your Diablo quests in and not get interrupted, not get knocked down in any way. So that's pretty much everything I think we wanted to call out in the kind of the deep dive into the deck. Let us know what you think about the deck. Let us know if you hate this deck. If you love this style of deck, of course you can find us on Facebook illumination podcast and you can find us wherever you just found us.
If you're listening to this, you must have found us so you can continue finding us there, which is really important. So this deck is a really cool one. Again, congrats to Zan and the one drawback, I'd say the biggest drawback to this deck is you don't get free wins in order to win with this one. You gotta keep questing. Thanks for watching.