Hello and welcome back to Illumination, the Disney Lurkana podcast. My name is Max. And I'm Sam. And we are back at you with another episode. Shimmering skies is upon us. The sky is shimmering above us and that only can mean one thing. Agro. There's no correlation there. Could mean many things. Probably not aggro, but aggro is back and it is better than ever before. So the old style of aggro was often referred to as like a hyper aggro style.
Typically we refer to the Amethyst Emerald decks as more of like a tempo style deck. And then you got more into the Ruby Amethyst, which were control, but kind of more felt mid-rangey, especially in this past meta. And then you got into the true blue hardcore control decks, like the Ruby Sapphire style decks. And I think that aggro often got flushed out pretty easily and was often ignored.
It was usually like you had a deck together maybe and you let somebody play it if they were going to go with you to the league and you had an extra aggro deck floating around just because a new player can definitely win with an aggro deck, right? Yeah. It can catch you off guard for sure. Right. And a lot of decks as a meta evolves, and we're going to talk about this more as the episode evolves, but as the meta evolves, things start to gray into fighting what's good in the meta.
And oftentimes an aggro deck can come at the end of a set and catch everybody off guard because nobody's prepared for it because they're all putting in tools to fight against mid-ranging control decks. So their deck slows down significantly and can get caught off guard by an aggressively slanted deck. So we're here talking aggro. Sam, why are we talking about aggro? What has happened? We got Daisy Duck. Daisy Duck.
This card is an absolute nightmare for anyone who likes to cast things that are expensive. Yes. Daisy Duck is, if you're not familiar, this is a newer card. She's Donald Duck's date, I believe, and she is a 1-4 that quests for two. That's right, a 1-4 that quests for two. She costs one. She is uninkable, and she has an ability. Whenever she quests, each opponent reveals the top card of their deck. If the revealed card is a character, they put it into their hand.
If it is not, they put it on the bottom of their deck. Goodbye brawl. Goodbye along came Zeus. Be prepared. Be prepared. Grab your swords. Whole new world. Whole new world. Any answer at all to this card, put that one on the bottom. You may have a character requesting today. That's what Daisy Duck does. She is so very good, and I don't want you to think just the 1-4 stat line is what makes her good. She makes her very good, right?
We're used to a 1-1-2 for one uninkable as the aggro gold standard, right? Debbie Lilo making a wish or Maleficent biding her time, I believe. Those were kind of the gold standard one drops for a long time. Then Curse Murphok came out and kind of upped the ante a little bit with how good these one drops could be. Now we're in a Daisy Duck world, and we're all just winning our teddy bears.
It's really difficult to assess fully immediately what her impact is going to be, but having seen a lot of different games and aggressive cards, this card is very, very powerful and is very potent. Being able to use her ability to push key cards down and not allow you to draw them is really impactful to being able to try to top deck your way out of the problem. Yeah. I played her today for the first time, just a couple quick games with not even my deck, and she was nuts.
You don't play long games. They're always quick. No. We're over by turn four and then turn five. Yeah. I'm going to play a couple of quick games because there's no choice there. If you are a frequent bathroom visitor, aggro decks are great for you because you have plenty of time in the round to go use the bathroom because even if you lose, you know you're pretty much done by about turn five.
She is just so effective at not only questing hard, she's also putting cards in the bottom and that four willpower is such a significant number for steel based removal. The soonest you can remove that, barring multiple cards is, and then along came Zeus on turn four. Smash on turn three does not do it. That's a really big ask.
I think that as we work through the episode, we're going to talk more about combating Daisy, but now let's talk about playing Daisy because I think that's going to be step one is you're going to want to build a Daisy duck deck. Minimally, even if you hate aggro decks in Lorikana, you're going to want to build it to test against. That is absolutely important. What does Daisy pair with very, very well in the format? She pairs well with steel, like always, right? Amber steel aggro.
We saw a version of this when pride lands came out where you would hook a Simba or a Benja on the pride lands and then kind of go quote unquote infinite with rock star stitch drawing you a card as you played one drops for free. So that's kind of cool. Steel definitely has a new tool. Steel has arguably the best card in shimmering skies depending on where you stand on the Daisy duck Pete debate, but it is Pete games referee.
That is a three cost inkable three, three, one with an ability when Pete comes in until your next turn, your opponents cannot play action cards, which is extraordinarily oppressive shutting off the ability for your opponent to play removal, especially on a key turn is really, really impactful. If they're going to do that, Pete says no. Obviously that payers very well with the aggro decks shutting off key turns for grab your swords or be prepared.
I think that another really good pairing is the Emerald pairing. We've seen this before. Now you get access to cursed merfolk as an additional one drop to work alongside Lilo and Daisy duck. You get a new card as well. Remember who you are. There's a four cost uninkable action in Emerald that allows you to draw cards equal to the cards in your opponent's hand. So the Clara bell that lets you draw a card if your opponent has more cards in hand.
So if your opponent has five cards in hand and you have one, you would draw up to five. So that remember who you are can be quite a comeback machine. And as Sam pointed out, cards like Clara bell now actually grant a little bit of replacement effects because your biggest problem with these aggro decks is you'll often run out of gas, right? You'll play all the cards in your hand. Your opponent will find a card that does like one for seven and then you're out of the game as they continue to play.
But these green cards that do card and hand difference, or if they have more cards do something, you get to draw cards and keep your hand nice and full. But it's really good to pair with green. And of course we've had some other different variations of Amber and Emerald together with the sing together decks. I think that's going to be a little bit different than this style of deck.
But I think that that lemon lime aggro was definitely a popular choice in the first chapter meta and I think we're going to see a resurgence of that certainly. Then the third and probably most likely pairing at least out of the gate is going to be with Amethyst. And there's two main reasons, one to get Maleficent biding her time. You get the madam Mim package. The other big main reason is another new card. It's Amethyst Chromicon.
This is a two cost item that has the ability of exerting and letting each player draw a card. Now normally symmetrical effects aren't good, right? You're letting your opponent do the same thing you are doing. So you're making a declaration typically that my cards are going to be better than yours with a card like this. Not in the aggro deck. It's just, hey, I need to get over the finish line.
I don't care how many cards you have in your hand because on turn five you're losing this game and it doesn't matter if you have nine cards in your hand. So it's not symmetrical when your deck is much more expensive than your opponent's. They get to play all their cards to the table and you play none. That is in fact a tempo advantage. This is the version I played today and it was very powerful. Yes, it is absurdly powerful.
You get to combine it with cards like Merling Goat, the new card gathering knowledge and wisdom which just gains you two lore. There is a plethora of things you can do to get more. The version I was playing was also playing turn a box followers and the brooms so that you could have some extra card draw if you needed it. Absolutely. And more questers. It's just very strong pairing because of the natural card advantage that Amethyst offers you, which is really neat and very oppressive.
So a lot of options. I think those are going to be the most likely three that you see if I had to take a stab at it in the dark here. So now we're talking about kind of how do you pair this? Like what are your options? What do you do to stop it? You built your deck, you're testing it or you're trying to refine it and trying to make the best version you can. What happens on the other side of the table to stop this process from happening?
Sam, is there anything that you want to call out as your first thought of? They played a daisy duck on one. Now I know what my line looks like. It's going to be this or this is a card that I know I'm going to play in this matchup. I'm definitely not inking this one. Or what do you think? What comes to mind? The first thing that comes to mind is just making sure in my deck construction, just period.
Thinking about daisy duck being in the meta would be making sure that I'm playing as many characters as I can so that I'm not getting punished for the actions and the items that are in my deck. Right. It's a great call out. And I think you made the most important observation about this is that you want to make sure step one isn't what are you keeping? What are you doing? It's knowing daisy duck exists in the format and knowing a lot of people are going to be playing daisy duck.
So you need to come to the table ready for that inevitability. Now this is Lorcan and core constructed is not have sideboards. So you're not going to be able to alter your deck in any way between the games. So once you know you're playing against a daisy duck deck, you're stuck trying to figure out how do you beat it. Now it's going to help you in game two. If like Sam said, you're prepared to do so. I think there's some key ways you can build your deck.
I think we're going to see an increase in fast singing. I think we're going to see that Prince Navin, the new legendary for Amber is going to help a lot singing songs very, very quickly. I think we're also going to see an increase in shift to characters, ones that can go play on one shift to, especially ones that shifts to for four. That's really an important thing there. I mean, obviously the ideal is the queen, right? The queen is just the goat, the graceful time, not Merlin for shifting onto.
She is the OG. She is still very good. She can just smack a daisy duck. She doesn't care. She's the queen. Not every character is the queen though. So you have to worry about how do you deal with it? And I think the reason we're going to see this increase in shifting and shifting to four is because we can sing. And then along came Zeus sooner. We can sing B King undisputed sooner. It's really important.
So I go play my one drop pass, you play daisy duck, and then I go shift sing, take care of daisy duck. I'm in a really good position in that game because now I have a character with reasonable stats and I just removed one of the key threats. Like daisy duck on average is probably going to be good in a game you're winning with daisy duck to get you between six and eight lore. It's just kind of crazy to think about, but that's what's going to happen.
So being able to mitigate daisy duck and keep her lore gaining to two to four is key. Like especially like the less daisy duck gains, the better you're going to do. And I'm talking specifically term one daisy ducks. And I think that's going to be really important. I think the other thing that's going to be very, very important is making efficient drops. This is going to be your big bulky characters.
We're thinking like if you're playing Sapphire steel, we saw Argus in the last meta to try to mess up Plinrider. I think Argus is going to be just as important now as it ever was. I think that the efficient three drops are going to be really important, whether it's little uninkable Sisu, because she's not, as Sam pointed out, an action. If it's brawl, if it's Madame Medusa, if it's something along those lines, something that comes in and can deal with it, especially the things that are cheap.
And the problem is there's not a lot of those, right? But we know that there's one inherent weakness daisy duck has and that she has to quest. So little Sisu is great and all, but if you're not playing Ruby, you still need to be able to do something. So once she quests, if you play a one drop pass, they play daisy duck, excuse me, they play daisy duck on one pass to you. You play a one drop pass. They quest with daisy duck for two.
Then you get to play something like your Mickey Mouse standard bearer to give a challenger plus two. You now have the ability, if you're talking like a Rafiki or a captain hook to be able to take out the opposing daisy duck. So one, one drop characters that can hit hard are going to be important again. Captain Hook's going to come back Rafiki, the purple Rafiki is going to come back. I think those are going to be very good characters because with any one other card, they suddenly matter more.
They compare with hard removal, like fire the cannons to get rid of daisy duck. There's nothing wrong with going turn one captain hook pass. They quest with daisy duck. You go challenge daisy duck, ba boom. That's fine. That is an acceptable line for you with their daisy duck. You don't have to deal with the follow-up character, whatever it may be. I think that that is a fine place to be for a daisy duck early. So keep that in mind. Merlin crab is going to be really good.
I turned slower than Mickey Mouse standard bearer. Your opening line matters so much. There's so much importance placed on your opening line in a daisy duck meta. So thinking about these drops are important. And the good news is a lot of these cards we're talking about, thankfully, especially the ones with challenger end up being inkable. So if it doesn't matter in the match, you just get to ink it, which is really, really nice. We might see a resurgence in Pinocchio's, the purple Pinocchio.
It's a very good card. I think that being able to leverage an advantage that way, it's very good. I think that we're going to see a lot of one drop characters, I think a lot of the green cards that you get to pay more ink into. That's the card I'm trying to think of is the one drop where you can play one ink and it pumps a character to strength. Merrywether, I believe it's one of the godmothers. That was very good today.
I was playing that, but that would be great if you had a one drop, a two, two, one drop on one and then on two, you play that and pay the kicker cost and then you can take out the daisy duck. Right. That's a really important effect.
Mother Gothel style effects are going to be pretty good because you can play her early, bulk her up with one of these challenger effects if you want to, or you can in the late game use her as a five drop to use her mother knows best ability to bounce one of your opposing characters in the mid game. So a lot of efficiency is going to be important. And I think the reason we saw a lot of these kicker style effects, which is when you pay more for something, it does something additional.
We're seeing it now specifically because daisy duck requires it. I think you need a card that is important early just because it is a body that can hit daisy duck. And then I think you need an effect where you can pay more and keep the card relevant in the mid game. Like that style is very important when you're talking about there's such an onus now on kicker.
And also in Lorcan because of inkable, you have like three modes now to one of those cards like mother Gothel's one, three, I believe for two. And then she is a five cost that has a bounce effect or she's ink three modes to a card like that. Same with merry weather. I think they're all very important cards in the meta. And I think you need to make sure you're keeping your eye on your efficient characters and make sure character typically over action is going to be the line of it.
I don't know how good one jump ahead is going to be anymore. I don't know if we're going to favor detective Mickey or TPO because they're characters that can do something like TPO on to Madam Mim Fox is not the worst way to accelerate and still be able to smack into an opposing unit.
Maybe blue purple becomes playable now, depending on how the configuration is over time, being able to use a card like chicha to be able to draw more cards when you ink in addition to the card draw power of amethyst and then being able to set off tempo might be really good. So I think that's a good point on five and to shift Elsa on six can win you a lot of late games just by the nature of how it quests and acts.
It's going to look a lot like a big version of the emerald amethyst decks that we saw in the very end of the into the Inklans meta. Another character to help against aggro that I was talking about earlier today is Tinkerbell to get rid of all the one ones that they're playing. So maybe having you might see the smaller Tinkerbells come around so that you can shift it earlier. Absolutely.
So if you're playing against smaller Tinkerbells and tiny tacticians, if it's paired with green, it's a great morph shift. There's a lot of options to get characters down fast and you need to be able to get characters down fast. The emphasis on shift is high. She shifts on four, right? She shifts on four.
So being able to do that is pretty critical, especially in like a blue steel style, maybe ramp into that tiny tactician to turn early and then be able to get or use your ramp to be able to accelerate that shift and be able to get things moving a little bit more efficiently or quickly. So in a way, it's really, really important and kind of looking as things go, and I know a lot of people may not love the style of playing an aggressive deck. So how do things evolve from here?
Well, typically when you look at a meta where aggro is very good and usually aggro was the first deck to make it, that's like the day one deck, right? For any format, typically is a more aggressively slanted deck. It's proactive. It's not answering threats in the format because we don't know what those are fully yet. It's not understood. So one of the easiest ways to get wins is to bring a deck that doesn't care about those mid to late game threats because it's winning before then.
So you will often see aggro be a very viable option early in a format's lifespan. As time goes on, we are going to find a mid-range deck that can deal with daisy duck. Whatever it may be, there's going to be, whether it's steel-based, whether it's ruby-based, there's going to be something that comes out amethyst-based that answers daisy duck pretty well. Then there's going to be another mid-rangey deck that can also deal with daisy duck and maybe answer that first mid-rangey deck pretty well.
And then finally, after there's a few mid-range options, we all know what's coming and that's hard to control. Then hard control beats mid-range. So it's all pretty much cyclical, right? The aggro deck can easily outrace a control deck because they're too slow, but they can't beat a mid-range deck because a mid-range deck can play better cards but still get multiples for one with their stronger cards and also play into a later game.
And the control decks prey on that because your cards aren't as quick to get down and win you the game and the control deck has the biggest, baddest cards of them all, but by proxy, also the slowest and most expensive. So that's how things likely are going to shake out over time. We'll see how things go. I know there's a lot of people brewing hard trying to get different strategies off the ground.
So I think there's going to be a lot of cool options that we're going to see as this Shimmering Skies meta evolves. But I'm pretty happy to see aggro, especially in light of the Bucky Aratying, because that did kind of smash an archetype that was developing out of the gate. So being able to make discard look more like the Sing Together style decks we've been seeing, like the Prince John engines, is fine. I think that's a healthy place for the discard style to go.
But I'm happy to see that there will be a deck that's coming out of the gate and can almost like need to be answered the way the Bucky style decks needed to as well. So that is what's up with aggro. What's up, duck? Literally. Until next time, there's going to be a lot of people who keep questing.