Hello and welcome back to Illumination, the Disney Lorcana podcast. My name is Max. And I'm Sam. And we are back at you. Episode 37. 37 podcast episodes in a row. And this time we are talking about a deck that will most likely be the deck we've talked about the most in the history of the podcast up to this point now, I think. Yeah. What deck are we talking about? Emerald Steel. Emerald Steel, you say? Why are we talking about Emerald Steel again, Sam? Because it's super
powerful again and still. Again and still. It did get a new toy for sure. I think a few things kind of aligned that made this deck come more into prevalence once again. We were already talking about this deck as a possible concern right after the Bands last set. Right. We were worried about Diablo decks being the blight of the format once something like Hiram went away, which knocked down the power of the more controlling decks in the format. Now we're seeing a bit of a different
set of reasons as to what's happened. So we're going to break down each one of them, but first let me give you a high level of what we're going to talk about. First and foremost, Beyond the Horizon. That is point number one. That's the new toy that the deck has received from the reign of Jafar. The next thing we're going to talk about after that is the fact that this is, in fact, a very proactive deck. I want to take note that I said proactive and not aggressive because
it is certainly not an aggressive deck. This deck is glacially slow, but it has a very proactive game plan. And that is what makes this deck so much a good weapon early in a format. It's trying to do a very proactive thing. And finally, it's a deck that, oddly enough, provides fantastic counterplay for Emerald Steel. That's right. This deck is one of the best choices in the meta when this deck is popular, which... breeds all kinds of problems because that's more reason
to consider playing it. So we're going to then finish off the episode with some best practices, things to think about, takeaways to maybe overcome this deck if you are not a fan. So let's kick it off. First and foremost, we're talking Beyond the Horizon. Sam, this was a card that we didn't really put on our top list for the set. Yeah, we kind of overlooked it and then we were starting to hear about other podcasters and other content
creators. talking about it. Right. This deck is A recipient of a strong card, it could have avoided it. This card definitely could have been a win more style card. This card could have been a less good version of some other effects that we've seen both in this set and cards like it that existed already in the game. So a hard card to identify just how impactful it's going to be. I do think that this card ended up being a little bit of a flash in the pan in the Ambersteel
decks. Yes. Where we tested a lot of this in Ambersteel trying to just turbo beyond the horizon. to take the opponent off of any semblage of a good starting hand and just knock them so far off of their game plan that they can't keep up with what we were doing. And I would say that that worked when it worked. Yeah. The old, like, what's the Anchorman quote? 60 % of the time it works every time. It just was very inconsistent.
Yeah, it definitely wasn't something that I was worried about every game because it just wasn't happening enough. No, not even close to enough. Even with more copies of the Two Call Singer 4s, things like that, it just wasn't. offering enough consistency out of the gate with all the tools coming together, even without the elements of disruption in a lot of cases. There was that one sweet game when I Ursuled you and then you top decked the Beyond the Horizon and just went
off on turn three anyway. But outside of that, it just didn't fire enough. But I do think that this as like a two of in the green steel decks is very, very strong. I think that it's a little bit of a better home. It doesn't really provide a win more effect. It in fact does something a little bit different. It actually kind of does more. The first thing it does is it gives you something to do with all of your small potato characters. Emerald Steel is a deck that is full
of small potato characters. One drop Diablos, two drop Ursulas, Peets. Things that they come down and do something very impactful and then don't do a whole lot after that. Which means that we have a lot of opportunity here to get a little bit more value out of some of these characters. And we use them to sing. So you can do this very quickly. with a Shift Diablo, obviously. We don't have to wait a terrible amount of time
to do it. So as soon as turn five, maybe, we can play our Prince John turn five, and then we can end up singing this card potentially. Our opponent's going to discard cards. We're going to draw cards. The Prince John effect will go into the bag, and then if your opponent discarded cards before they drew the three, you'll draw your three from... beyond the horizon, and then X more, where X is the number of cards your opponent
discarded. So even one or two cards means that they have three cards in their hand, and you have five, or four, depending if they have one or two, but you have card advantage, which is something that this deck is very good at utilizing, something this deck needs to utilize in order to win. Playing against the Emerald Steel deck, the early part of the game is defined by one card. What's that card? Diablo. Yeah, definitely. Early game, the fight and the Attention is over.
diablo and you'll see this across various trading card games one card or one type of card put down early the game becomes centered completely around that card it's the tension of keeping it on the board versus removing it from the board depending on if you played it or if you're playing against it diablo is definitely one of those kinds of cards it's very much the tension builder in the early game because if it's not dealt with it will generate a whole lot of card advantage if
it's dealt with efficiently it looks looks like kind of a worse version of the three -drop Maleficent from first chapter. So it's somewhere in between there, you're okay. But if it's just running away with the game, you'll never catch up. If it's done too little, you might actually be able to catch your opponent to where you can leverage an advantage. However, Beyond the Horizon stepped in now and goes, oh, well, are you at a point where you're low on cards? Do you have a Prince
John? Okay, excellent. Then I will provide you with this burst of cards out of nowhere in the
mid to late game. So even if you lost your D, Diablo, you still are able to then draw up effectively and put yourself in a much more advantageous position than your opponent even if you're just low on cards and they are low on cards you can still just make this a draw three and that's totally fine yeah and i think the beyond the horizon matched with the prince john is what's making decks that were able to beat diablo decks so punishing to play now because you wanted to
keep cards in your hand you wanted to be able to draw as many cards you could without triggering a bunch of diabolos but i think that's how you beat the deck and now it just kind of makes it Ten times worse. This sounds like somebody is an upset Ruby Amethyst player. Yeah. Yeah, so the strength in this deck used to be that you would always have more cards. Like, they could run your hand out, you'd refill your hand. You would answer the Diablo, you'd refill your hand.
You just always had more cards than your opponent did at one point or another in the game. And your cards, pound for pound, are way more powerful than theirs are. They're playing bad cards in a vacuum, but together create an amazing synergy engine where the Ruby Amethyst decks just play
singularly. very very powerful cards in a vacuum card for card so the tension when you're playing the emerald steel deck in turns seven and above was how much can i commit to the board before my opponent presses the be prepared button and that is what has changed so significantly with beyond the horizon especially with regard to be prepared decks is now we can go well i'm not going to add to the board instead i'm going to discard one card i'm going to have you do discard
some number of cards, and I'm going to increase the number of cards in my hand by a bunch. If you had three cards and I have one card and I have two Prince Johns out, you're not going to like the way this exchange happens of you going down to three cards, me going up to 11 cards, which is just crazy, right? They had four cards in hand, they discard four cards, you get two Johns in the bag for eight cards, and then the three from beyond the horizon giving you 11,
your opponent three. So they effectively discarded one card and you drew like 10. Yeah, and we saw this happen on Southside Game Stream. Like we saw... This was in the finals. Yeah, in the finals, the Emerald Steel opponent drew 18 cards because he had three Prince Johns in play and the opponent had five cards in hand. Right, five per John and then the three from beyond. How do you beat that? You're not beating that? No, when you go to three cards and your opponent is at 18 cards,
six times more cards than you have. Six times more cards. Doesn't matter how good that B prep is. I really think that Prince John is what makes
this deck so powerful. It's not necessarily the... be on the horizon i just think the two in combination is just right prince john is this very and we've talked about prince john a lot on this podcast and how powerful of an engine it is sitting behind its reasonable stats its strong questing ability and its ward keyword that makes it so powerful usually discard decks weaknesses they don't draw a lot of cards or they don't benefit any way other than you lose the cards prince john says
i don't know their loss is your gain and that is so much more impactful that way than if you just simply discarded the cards, which sometimes is just painful enough. In most colors, you're not doing anything about it because he has Ward. Emerald Amethyst, the Diablo -style version of that deck, doesn't really use Prince John in the same way that this deck does, but the discard is still sometimes pretty good. But it just is so significantly different when Prince John is
out. And that's really the difference maker here, is being able to use that card to be able to put you in such a distinct... advantage with cards that you will be able to handle grinding
out the rest of the game. It's just this ridiculous inevitability that the deck generates now where if your plan A of Diablo fails you're not too super worried because if you have to grind out a longer game there will be a point where you draw Beyond the Horizon and it'll get you back into the game pretty effectively on the whole. So a very strong gift with Beyond the Horizon even in just a small set of something like two copies. is enough to push this deck over the
top. Even being able to play a couple little silver bullets like we saw in the finals. The Emerald Steel deck that won was playing a singleton grab your sword and a singleton I find them, I flatten them. Able to pull that off because of the sheer card advantage that the deck can now generate. In addition to that, there's the other points that we all kind of know a little bit more intimately in the deck's lifespan at
this point is it's a proactive deck. It's got a very quick draw engine out of the gate with Diablo. It's got great disruptive elements by way of Steel and Emerald songs that are discarding cards or impacting the board. And it has a really, really strong endgame now that's gotten even more strength on the back of this new card. The deck can put down these gigantic characters now with the addition of the Space Pirate Pete's and the Beast. It's questing effectively. It's
singing songs at the end. Things like We Don't Talk About Bruno, which is unconditional removal
and all. lot of cases especially when they have no hand it's really good also one thing it can do oh you drew three cards awesome now i'm gonna have you discard all three cards and that's not hard for this deck to do you sing the beyond the horizon leave a singer up and then just play hypnotize hypnotize sing sudden show you have no card double sing it with her deck is so well designed to discard cards that it can very easily give you three and take them away in the same
turn. Very strong stuff. Very proactive. Again, not aggressive, because this deck is glacially slow to build a board through all of this card advantage, but it is very proactive in the way it's doing it. Then, of course, if this deck's very good, some of the very best cards against it are Ursula, Deceiver, and Pete, Games Referee, and the Space Pirate Pete. Some of the best choices you can make to play against this deck. What if I told you, Sam, that there's a deck that
already plays all three of these cards? Why wouldn't you play that deck, right? Right. I got bad news. It's this deck. Yeah. You're still playing this deck. I think the only other cards that counter it really effectively is what the new Ludwig von Drake and Bear Necessities. Yeah. You have the Gone to the Taxes that's also available in steel that can do a little bit of heavy lifting there. But there's very few cards that tax the
deck and are easily played. Ludwig and Bear Necessities is definitely strong, but that has to develop an entire new deck. basically from scratch, right? We don't have an amber sapphire deck that's on tap, ready to go. I think that there are pieces of one, but I don't know as though somebody's been like, nope, this is the 60 for sure. You have that small caveat. If you can work that part out, then you're golden. But otherwise,
there's not a whole lot of counterplay. And that kind of segues us into the final part of the talk going over this, yet again, deep dive into Emerald Steel. But how the heck do you actually beat this deck? outside of just playing it. Say I don't want to play it. This is also not a cheap deck to build, I will point out. Beast, Tragic Hero is definitely at a lower price point than it has been. It was still like 17 bucks or something. Diablo, Devoted Herald, same story. Like these
are not negligible cards. And of course, I'm sure they've seen a little bit of a tick up in price having this deck become the successful meta -defining deck that it is currently here in the early stages of set eight. Yeah, Ursula, Deceiver, all. We know she went, she's come down a bit. but she's also in it. There's a lot of legendary cards in this deck. Right. There's a lot of very powerful cards. Strength of a Raging Fire at a point was a ghastly amount of money.
I still think it's pretty expensive. Right. It's the premier removal in the game right now, I would say. I think Brawl was that card for a while, but I think that Strength has stepped in and go, by the way, you can sing this card. So it's very strong stuff and very expensive and not everybody can afford it, especially with rotation looming, right? If I'm a newer player, there's no way I'm dropping like $700 on a deck
that is pretty much going to be rotated. How many of these cards are actually going to be reprinted? Not Prince John, I can tell you that much. Negative percentage chance that card's reprinted. Diablo, no way that card's reprinted. Maybe an Ursula. Maybe. You get like Pete, Space Pete, and Beyond the Horizon that survive after rotation for this deck. So this deck has got a time limit on it. And that means that I don't want to outlay that kind of money on this deck
if I don't already have the cards. Yeah, definitely not a deck for new players. No, it is not a come into the game and pick this one up. I think you can do better in terms of using your money to continue to play the game post -rotation. So that is, I mean, I guess a silver lining to an extent. We only have to suffer for a little while longer if you're not a Prince John appreciator. I think other ways you can beat this deck, kind of one that is pretty resistant, and that's something
like an Ambersteel aggro deck. Doc sticking around, I'll have everybody know. I got my foils. And the quote unquote Doc piles, the decks that just rely on curving out very fast and then playing Doc to refill our hands. So we see this in purple steel. We see this in amber steel. We see this in the Kiwi Bird style sapphire steel decks. Their game plan, their plan A is to play a lot of things down quickly and then use Doc as a way to go just draw two cards, simply draw two
cards. One, three on the board for just two ink, draw two. cards. It's an insanely good card. And I think that those decks offer something that the Emerald Steel decks don't have a great answer to. Like this particular deck that won at Southside has one grab your sword to answer a deck like this. And all the threats now have resistance stuff. So it's like you have Cogsworth's out, you have the new Rhino. which is absurd. You have people playing Penny. You have people
playing Calhoun. These cards are everywhere. They all have resist or they all have big butts. Kiwi's deck is just full of big butts. Got Alice's in there. We got all kinds of goodies that are enormous and hard to remove. You got big boy Champo in there. That kind of a deck is a really good option. Obviously, we discussed all the disruptive elements. Ludwig, Bear Necessities, Ursula, Deceiver, Pete, all these things that really stop the deck. from humming as much as
it wants to be humming. Last set gone to that taxes actions, all of which are good choices to disrupt. Not all of them, unfortunately, outside of the sphere of Emerald Steel. Sticky threats. are great. Cards that are just hard to remove with Let the Storm Rage On. Cards that are hard
to remove if they have a small board. Locations are a good card that generally can give this deck a little bit of trouble because their stats are so anemic for the most part till towards the end if you get a beast with damage on it or a Space Pete. Do you think we're going to see an uptick in any steel deck playing Grab
Your Swords just to combat this deck? Well, I do know that generally one of the decks that's popular in this kind of a meta is is in fact sapphire steel, but more towards the old school style. Good old, a whole new world style where we can go Cogsworth on five, big tank on six, sing, grab your sword. Yeah. To deal three damage to everything and just wipe the board. Those kinds of board states are definitely good. Other board wipes are good if you can deploy them.
In addition, I mean, B prep's great. What do you have, seven or eight things out and finally be on the horizon? Guess you don't win now. Take out two of your Prince Johns plus five other characters is great. I think that those kinds of elements, you need to think about how good are they? How hard is it for them to answer if you're being proactive? Or how much does this impact their game plan on the whole? We see like the Diablo decks attack their hand and go wide.
We see some of the other style, the Sapphire Steel decks playing very impactful cards that wipe their board. So there's a lot of ways you can attack this in the mirror, learning how to play and advantage yourself in the mirror. mirror. You have about three or four flex slots in this Emerald Steel build to tech into what you think is going to be popular. If you think the answer is the mirror, then you need to make sure you're
tooled up and ready for the mirror. If you think the answer is blue -red items, maybe you want that copy of I Find on My Flat. So it's a lot to think about, but the fact that with the way the meta has started out of the gates for Reina Jafar, this is a good choice right now. It is a hard deck to deal with and is a deck that takes a lot of patience to learn, a lot of deep pockets to pay for, but if you can pay it off, no one will stop you from your ability to keep questing.