There are many combinations and deck variations that can win you a Disney Lorcana match. Of these, one of the most popular (and among the top tier Lorcana decks in the game since the beginning) is the Ruby/Amethyst Bounce Control deck.

As Lorcana has grown and matured as a game, there’s one deck archetype that has been there through everything – thick and thin. While Ruby/Amethyst is a bonafide staple in the Lorcana metagame, it has also changed greatly overtime, and continues to evolve and even improve with each passing set

In this guide, we’ll be looking at the latest and greatest way to play Ruby/Amethyst as of Lorcana set six – Azurite Sea.

2 Be Prepared
4 Brawl
4 Chernabog's Followers - Creatures of Evil
2 Dragon Fire
4 Elsa - The Fifth Spirit
4 Flynn Rider - Frenemy
4 Friends on the Other Side
3 Genie - Wish Fulfilled
2 Lady Tremaine - Imperious Queen
4 Madam Mim - Fox
4 Madam Mim - Snake
2 Madame Medusa - The Boss
4 Magic Broom - Illuminary Keeper
2 Maui - Half-Shark
2 Maui - Hero to All
4 Merlin - Goat
3 Merlin - Rabbit
4 Sisu - Emboldened Warrior
2 Sisu - Empowered Sibling

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Ruby/Amethyst Deck – Strategy Guide

The Merlin/Madam Mim bounce package is one of the strongest combinations in the game – strong enough to be the backbone of not one but many top tier Lorcana decks.

The bounce strategy – removing cards from play into your hand – adds a significant level of difficulty to the Ruby/Amethyst deck compared to what this deck looked like way back in The First Chapter format. While it was strong then in its basic control form, the added bounce mechanics add a lot of possibilities to outflank your competition, and beat them flat out in the race to twenty lore.

Additionally, this deck runs plenty of characters capable of dishing out damage via challenges, making it a worthy adversary in the early game while you build up to your stronger card removal characters and songs.

Turn One

Bounce Control is one of those decks that gets stronger as the game drags on. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have any early game plays. Indeed, this deck boasts plenty of those which is also what helps it be one of the more well balanced control decks.

Depending on your matchup, you can adjust your strategy. For example, when playing against other control decks, you can focus on building up your hand since they won’t have a ton of characters you’ll need to challenge early on. To that end, you have two one-cost characters who can help you.

Chernabog’s Followers is a handy card because you can use it to quest and draw a card and bolster your hand or just attack into opposing characters who aren’t exactly exciting to have in play.

Meanwhile, the Illuminary Keeper is another excellent card draw support. Building up your hand early on in the game will help you dominate once you hit your higher powered cards.

Turn Two

Flynn Rider – Frenemy has emerged as a staple in Bounce Control, giving you something of a free pass to get a ton of lore easily. As you will likely be fielding plenty of strong characters, you can really benefit from Narrow Advantage against decks that don’t bother with playing equally strong characters. This helps you from falling too far behind aggro while also overachieving against opposing control decks like Ruby/Sapphire.

Leverage Amethyst’s strong bounce mechanic to offset your opponent

Madam Mim (both Fox and Snake) can be used quite effectively for a plethora of a strategies. In this deck, they are used for just about everything from gaining resources, to challenging foes, to recycling powerful banishment cards like Madam Medusa. Both boast powerful strength stats relative to their costs making them ideal to keep your opponent from building up a strong board early on.

Pair Madim Mim with Merlin

Madam Mim is just one end of the bounce package that makes up the backbone of this deck. While you can pair her with many of your characters to unlock strategic advantages, one of the ways she works best is to combine her with your two Merlin characters. These are Merlin Goat and Merlin Rabbit.

These two Merlin characters are some of the handiest in the game, granting you additional cards or lore whenever they are played and whenever they are removed from the field.

Late Game is Where Ruby/Amethyst Bounce Really Shines

While it’s easy enough to focus on all the good things this deck has going for it early game, it is in the late game that it really shines. If you can get to this point of the game and effectively inhibit your opponent from outpacing you on the race to twenty lore, most other decks just simply cannot keep up.

The turning point in the game starts typically around turn five when you can play Maui.

Maui has to be the most effective Rush character in the game right now. He’s remarkably well-rounded: he’s Inkable, only costs five Ink to play, has six strength, five will power, and has Rush!

That’s pretty insane and makes him a staple in virtually any Ruby Lorcana deck.

Elsa also gives you additional options

It’s been very interesting to watch Ruby/Amethyst evolve over time. In the early days, Elsa – Spirit of Winter was a staple in this deck strategy. Today, however, another Elsa plays a very vital role. That’s the Elsa we got in Shimmering Skies – The Fifth Element. Using her you can quickly take out Evasive threats like Diablo.

Not only does she have Rush and Evasive herself, she’s got a unique ability that exerts a chosen character, making her capable of helping you take out readied characters who you don’t want your opponent having access to the next turn.

Turn six unlocks your strongest characters

If you thought all of those cards we’ve covered up until now were impressive, just wait until you see what comes next. Once you’ve hit six Ink in your Inkwell, Ruby/Amethyst starts to get scary strong. Let’s look at the cards and plays you can start using once you’ve hit this point of the game.

As a quick note, how well the rest of your game goes at this point will partly depend on how well you’ve managed to build up your hand. If you’ve built up a strong hand with plenty of cards to play, you’ll fair well. If you don’t have any cards in your hand, how well you do will be determined by how lucky you get on your draws.

In reality, if you don’t have any cards in your hand you really shouldn’t give up as this deck has a crazy number of solid draw options for you.

Madam Medusa – The Boss

Let’s start with one of this deck’s most useful cards first. Madam Medusa is so powerful that in many ways she has helped shape the meta into what it is today. A litany of would-be powerful cards and combos are quietly rested in untested graves due to Madam Medusa alone. Her ability is that strong. Effectively, she can banish anything that doesn’t have more than three strength. In Lorcana, most played cards lack more than three strength, making her as powerful a weapon in the Azurite Sea format as she was up till now.

Lady Tremaine – Imperious Queen

I think of Lady Tremaine as Madam Medusa’s counterpart. While Medusa is arguably your stronger character, her one downside is that she can’t target characters with the powerful Ward keyword. Lady Tremaine is largely here to help you get around that Keyword when you need to.

“Be Prepared” for turn seven and Maui

Now that we’ve covered the essentials of what makes Ruby/Amethyst the powerhouse it is today, let’s go over a new combo that’s shaking up both the Lorcana meta and how this powerful deck is played.

While we’ve had the incredibly effective Maui – Hero to All character since The First Chapter, the Lorcana team decided having one overpowered Maui character in Ruby just wasn’t enough – we needed a second and perhaps even stronger character to compliment the first one.

That character is Maui – Half-Shark, and he helps make Ruby/Amethyst even stronger.

Just look at that card. It’s an absolute demigod-of-a-card with Evasiveness, seven strength, five will power, and two unique abilities that single-handedly uplift Ruby/Amethyst as a deck. While one grants you an added lore when you play an action (cause…why not?) it’s the Cheeehooo! ability that really makes this Maui broken. Whenever he challenges another character, you get to recycle an action, bringing it from your discard into your hand.

Not only does this help you get around Ruby/Amethyst’s huge weakness to discard decks, it also lets you get away with running less copies of Be Prepared and Dragon Fire without hurting your strategy.

Playing Be Prepared

Assuming your opponent hasn’t been silly enough to give you any extra Ink in your Inkwell, turn seven is when you can really start shaking things up. Be Prepared remains today one of the most broken cards in the game, letting you reset the game to your advantage. This deck really leans into that particular card by letting you load up on cards that benefit you from being banished before slapping down a Be Prepared: cards like the Merlins that grant added resources when banished.

Be Prepared is so strong that playing it at the right time can singlehandedly win you the game. Thanks to the new Maui character, you aren’t even limited to playing it four times anymore, assuming you can challenge enough characters with Maui to keep bringing the card back.

The Sisu Play

Let’s take a look at a strategy Ruby/Amethyst has taken out of Ruby/Sapphire’s playbook – Sisu – Empowered Sibling.

In fact, this deck runs two different Sisu characters and both are strong for different reasons. Earlier on, three-cost Sisu works to keep your opponent at bay with its powerful strength stat, while also making for a good combo with Flynn, making it difficult for your opponent to play something with enough strength to stop you from gaining three passive lore each turn.

Later when you can either play Sisu or Shift her, Sisu – Empowered Sibling acts as a strong deterrent to aggro decks, wiping low strength characters from the board and asserting your dominance in the mid-to-late game.

Genie is an interesting new tech in the Ruby/Amethyst strategy

Finally, one new card that’s been seeing itself get worked into many Ruby/Amethyst decks is the new Genie character from Azurite Sea. An Evasive character that lets you draw a card when played may not seem huge, but it ends up being a powerful force in this deck that needs a lot of draw power in order to overcome the meta.

Other than letting you draw a card, Genie is just a solid card with decent stats, two lore value, and of course that handy Evasive keyword.

Ruby/Amethyst’s Weaknesses

Ruby/Amethyst Bounce Control is arguably the most well rounded deck in the current meta. It has the early game capacity to keep aggro decks at bay, and the late game power to control and close out a game.

With some of this versatility, however, the current version of Ruby/Amethyst does lose out on some advantages. For example, early game, it is not as strong as other powerful early game decks like Steelsong. It’s not got a ton to threaten opponent’s with for several turns, and doesn’t turn deadly until after turn six.

At the same time, by focusing more on the middle ground, Ruby/Amethyst doesn’t fair quite as well in the late game as, for example, Ruby/Sapphire that has access to tons of powerful card removal characters and insane lore gaining capabilities.

No item removal

Another key problem Ruby/Amethyst faces is the fact that it doesn’t have any item removal yet. Despite item removal becoming more and more popular across all Ink types, Ruby/Amethyst is the unfortunate Ink combo to not have access to any Item removal at all.

This makes it relatively weak against Sapphire decks that love to load up on items to draw cards and gain crazy amounts of lore.

How to counter Ruby/Amethyst Bounce Deck

If you are trying to beat the Ruby/Amethyst deck, discarding cards can really slow this deck down, so playing a discard deck is definitely a favorable matchup if you are trying to beat it.

Additionally, if you can get a lot of characters out fast, and a lot more once Be Prepared is played, you could very likely beat Ruby/Amethyst to the punch. Hyper Aggro decks are good at this. However, given the prevalence of Steelsong and other midrange decks, Hyper Aggro still isn’t seen much at the competitive level.

How to counter Be Prepared

While this deck boasts many powerful character cards, its strongest card is still Be Prepared. It’s a really tough card to deal with because it can quickly clear all the hard work you put in to building up your board of characters.

Here are a few strategies you can use to deal with this distractingly powerful song card.

Manage your resources

The first thing you can do to help against Be Prepared is to really pay attention to your own resources. How many cards do you have in your hand? How many cards are on the board?

This is probably the hardest thing to do because everything in you wants to load up your board with every character you can and race to the win. However, once Be Prepared is played, if you have all your characters in play and no cards in hand, they are just going to get banished. This means you also won’t have anything in reserves, forcing you to rely on the top of your deck which is almost certainly fatal against this deck.

The Sorcerer’s Spellbook can’t be cleared with Be Prepared

Having a Sorcerer's Spellbook in play can help you continue gaining lore while you’re working to recover your board after a Be Prepared. If you did a good enough job gaining lore, you could even pull off a win this way.

The Sorcerer’s Spellbook

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In many ways, the Spellbook is a better recovery option than Locations because Ruby/Amethyst has not answer for it, while it can pretty reliably take out locations via Maui.

Double down on locations

Be Prepared doesn’t eliminate locations, so you can bet running a deck that focuses on location cards will have a better chance than one totally reliant on characters. That being said, locations alone aren’t a foolproof answer, as you’ll still have to contend with Maui.

Try discarding Be Prepared

In general, you need to be careful if you are going up a Ruby/Amethyst deck with A Whole New World. Often the best thing that can happen to you is that your opponent just fails to draw Be Prepared, and Whole New World can help them draw it. However, you could also get lucky and discard their Be Prepared or even two (or three).

However, if you are running a discard deck, you can get away with discarding it without opening up the option for them to draw it. This is partly why discard decks are so strong against Ruby/Amethyst right now.

Beyond running a distinctly discard focused deck, many decks are able to tech discard card in. Cards like The Bare Necessities, for example, or Ursula Deceiver can be effective if played at the right time to dispatch a Be Prepared.

Before moving on, however, I have to point out that this strategy is not nearly as effective as it once was due to Maui – Half-Shark. If you’ve managed to get them to discard their Be Prepared, save up some removal to get rid of the Half-Shark before it can start challenging and bringing vital actions back from the discard.

Mufasa is a strong counter to Be Prepared

Mufasa – Betrayed Leader

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Mufasa – Betrayed Leader is a pretty good defensive card to use against Be Prepared. This card replaces itself with cards from the top of your deck. If you have three Mufasas in play when Be Prepared is played, you could end up with three more characters ready to use next turn.

Don’t overthink it

One of the worst things you can do when going up against the Ruby/Amethyst bounce deck combo is to overplay against Be Prepared. While it’s good to be smart and not empty your hand when your opponent is likely to slam you with it, it’s better to just play your game with your end goal in mind than to fiddle around endlessly in fear of the card being played.

Play your game, and let your opponent play theirs.

Is Ruby/Amethyst bounce control still a good deck after Azurite Sea?

Ruby/Amethyst refuses to die as a top tier Lorcana meta deck. Azurite Sea helps make this deck more competitively viable than ever thanks mostly to the Half-Shark. Already it’s dominating major tournaments and will undoubtedly be a force to be reckoned with throughout the Azurite Sea season.

Lorcana Ruby/Amethyst Bounce Control Deck List and Guide (Set Six)

Ink Types

Card Types

Inkable