Want to know what the latest and greatest Lorcana Ruby/Sapphire deck is?

Ruby/Sapphire has been a powerful force in the Lorcana meta since the Rise of the Floodborn days. Today, it utterly dominates the playing field. To make this deck even more compelling, it has a ton of new support in Azurite Sea, with everything you could possibly need ranging from powerful new ramping cards like “Sail the Azurite Sea” and Maui – Half-Shark.

Below, let’s take a deep dive into how the latest version of this deck works and what makes it so strong.

2 Be Prepared
4 Brawl
1 Gold Coin
3 Gramma Tala - Keeper of Ancient Stories
2 Great Stone Dragon
1 Hide Away
4 Hiram Flaversham - Toymaker
2 How Far I'll Go
3 Ice Block
1 Lucky Dime
2 Madame Medusa - The Boss
3 Maleficent - Monstrous Dragon
3 Maui - Half-Shark
2 Maui - Hero to All
4 Pawpsicle
4 Sail The Azurite Sea
3 Sisu - Daring Visitor
3 Sisu - Empowered Sibling
4 Tamatoa - So Shiny!
4 Tipo - Growing Son
4 Vision of the Future
2 Vitalisphere

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Ruby/Sapphire – Basic Strategy

Ruby/Sapphire is a pretty hard control deck. That can be a really good strength and also a really big weakness. Take, for example, the fact that Ruby/Sapphire doesn’t run any one-cost characters. That’s not going to be an issue against decks like Amber/Steel that are pretty good at decimating one-cost characters anyways. But against hyper aggro decks, this could be a problem, making it a little tricker it keep them from getting too far ahead before you start clearing their board.

What this deck does have turn one, however, is the item that largely makes up the early-to-middle backbone of this deck: Pawpsicle. Pawpsicle makes up one leg of your draw engine, while the mighty Hiram Flaversham makes up the other.

A quick note on how Pawpsicle works

Pawpsicle can be a little bit tricky to use, especially when playing it with Flaversham. First of all, Pawpsicle’s card draw effect only happens when it is played. Second, in order to use “That’s Redwood,” you have to activate that ability and then banish the item. You don’t need another card to banish Pawpsicle in order to use this effect, and the healing capability won’t work if you happen to banish Pawpsicle via another effect like Flaversham’s Artificer ability.

Flaversham makes up the bulk of your draw engine

Flaversham is a strong character simply because of his pretty broken draw ability. It also doesn’t hurt that he’s got a pretty high will power stat, making him rather annoying to banish via a challenge or with damage alone. Use his ability whenever possible to keep your hand full and search out those key cards you are going to need in order to win the game.

Flaversham is probably this deck’s single most effective card.

Ruby/Sapphire has more ramp options than ever

One of the reasons I’ve made an early call on Ruby/Sapphire being the best deck of the Azurite Sea format is because of the insane ramping options now available to this deck. Indeed, there are so many solid ways to get added Ink into your Inkwell that Ruby/Sapphire players are at the unique advantage of picking and choosing.

In this deck, the options you are going to be leveraging the most frequently are Sail the Azurite Sea, Tipo, and the underrated Great Stone Dragon. Below, let’s dig a little into each of these powerful ramp effects and how they help you achieve your goals.

Sail the Azurite Sea

It’s sort of crazy to imagine Ruby/Sapphire no longer needing what once was a key staple in its lineup: Fishbone Quill. However, Azurite Sea has really changed the way you play this deck, giving you much, much faster ramp capabilities at an earlier point of the game. Play this card a few times and you’ll know what I mean. The ability to draw a card and then Ink an extra one is a total game changer and makes any Sapphire deck stronger than ever.

Tipo – Growing Son

In many ways, Tipo may not be as strong as Sail the Azurite Sea, but he’s still a very effective ramp option, giving you additional Ink in your Inkwell as early as turn two. He’s also an extra body on the board which gives you the option to quest or (in limited cases) challenge.

How Far I’ll Go

How Far I’ll Go is a handy song card that lets you achieve the double aim of card search and ramp. While this isn’t a main ramp pillar of this deck, it’s a handy card that you’ll likely want to play at least once in a game.

Great Stone Dragon

Finally, we have Great Stone Dragon. I absolutely love seeing this card gaming notoriety on the competitive level. It’s such a powerful card and helps you ramp like nothing else. I can see why (with the addition of Sail the Azurite Sea to the game) ramp decks are going more in the direction of this card. Unlike Fishbone Quill which forces you to add resources from your hand into the Inkwell, Dragon lets you recycle characters from the discard.

While this may present a challenge in decks that may or may not have too many characters in the discard, thanks to card like Be Prepared you are basically guaranteed to have characters in your discard at a certain point of the game.

Ice Block and the offensive end of Ruby/Sapphire

Now that we’ve taken a deep dive into the backbone of what your ramp strategy is going to be for this deck, let’s look into the more offensive side of things. At the heart of this offensive strategy is going to be Ice Block – letting you enhance the range of powerful card removal abilities.

Ice Block majorly buffs already powerful cards

You can also play the new and useful Sisu – Daring Visitor to help get rid of characters your opponent has in play, or the handy Brawl card.

Both of these cards can be used to instantly banished low strength characters. However, their abilities get much, much stronger when they are combined with the powerful Ice Block card

Ice Block at first seems like a pretty unassuming item. However, it’s quite deadly when you combine it with the powerful card removal characters in Ruby. In fact, many of the weaknesses Ruby/Sapphire once had seem to be largely erased by this new buff, and its strengths have only gotten stronger.

Essentially the strategy with Ice Block is to strategically lower the Strength stat of opposing characters to make them more susceptible to effects from cards like Madam Medusa. Because Ice Block stacks, really no character is safe anymore from these deadly cards.

Sisu – Empowering Sibling, for example, has the potential to totally decimate your opponent’s board if you are able to lower all of their character’s strength. It’s a pretty crazy combo that is continues to push Ruby/Sapphire to the top of the Lorcana tier list.

Maleficent Dragon remains core to this deck’s strategy

Before moving on from card removal characters, you still can’t have a Ruby/Sapphire deck without Maleficent – Monstrous Dragon. Maleficent is a one-and-done character banishing machine, and if you are able to get her off she can seriously hamper your opponent’s chances of every building up enough resources to fight back.

Lucky Dime raises your chances of winning

Apart from powerful card removal, this deck also boasts a powerful lore gaining mechanic in the form of Tomatoa and Lucky Dime. Tomatoa has a very lore ceiling as he gains additional lore for each item you have in play while also enabling you to bring handy items back from the discard. Meanwhile, Lucky Dime lets you gain lore equivalent to a character in play, which is insane if you have Tamatoa out there.You can combine these two cards to quickly race to 20 lore, sometimes crossing the majority of the distance in a single turn.

The Maui Shark Play and Be Prepared

Finally, one important new strategy that Ruby in general has at its disposal is the crazy Maui – Half-Shark play. To be honest, the fact that this character was even made has me scratching my head a bit because he’s just so good. I mean, we already had a powerful Maui character and this one feels perhaps 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. This lets you get away with running less copies of Be Prepared without hurting your strategy.

Playing Be Prepared

Be Prepared remains today one of the most broken cards in the game, letting you reset the game to your advantage. 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.

How to counter Ruby/Sapphire

Not everyone will be looking to play this deck and many will be looking to win against it. I’ve played against Ruby/Sapphire with a variety of decks and here are my general observations. I’m not going to sugarcoat it – there aren’t a lot of great options when dealing with this particular deck. But with a little hard work, you can manage to overcome this powerful strategy.

Hyper Aggro – The Nuclear Option

Although this deck is a little bit better now than it used to be at dealing with aggro decks, the reality is your best bet at beating it remains to go all the way with hyper aggro. The only problem with that strategy, however, is the fact that Hyper Aggro dies pretty easily to steel decks, and there’s plenty of steel going around.

That being said, I almost always beat this deck when I play hyper aggro, and my favorite is the Amber/Amethyst combo.

Play a deck that relies on strong characters

Apart from straight-up countering the deck with aggro, I’ve faired much better against Ruby/Sapphire when playing decks with strong characters. While it’s not impossible for this deck to lower your strength via Ice Block and take you out, you certainly can increase your odds of sticking around if you run plenty of strong characters in your deck with strength stats – four or more.

Many Inks also have interesting techs to help naturally increase your characters strength stat. One that’s really popular right now is the Hidden Cove location card that is popular in Emerald/Steel decks.

Lean hard into discard

Ruby/Sapphire is a hard deck to beat through discard alone, however it can be done. If you run Emerald/Steel and manage to get your discard engine running quickly, you could sap your opponent of any means to get ahead in the early game.

Deck Ruby/Sapphire out

In order for Ruby/Sapphire to perform well, it needs access to a lot of cards. That means it typically discards a lot of cards as it seeks to gain dominance over the field. To help eliminate some of its advantage, cards like A Whole New World can be helpful. If you play your cards right, you could even manage to deck your opponent out before the race to twenty lore is done.

Destroy all items

Last but certainly not least, Ruby/Sapphire is heavily item reliant. Indeed, it’s this reliance on items that has caused most decks to run at least one or two cards capable of banishing items that are in play. The strongest right now in the game are arguably Floodborn Simba from Set Five as well as Kuzco – also from set five.

Ruby/Sapphire absolutely has what it needs to be a dominant deck in the Lorcana metagame. While there’s a lot of hype early in the Azurite Sea season for other decks like Emerald/Amthyst, I think we will likely see Ruby/Sapphire end up on top as the weeks go by in this season as well.

Lorcana Ruby/Sapphire Deck – Sisu on Ice (Set Six)

Ink Colors

Inkable

Card Types

Ruby/Sapphire – Basic Strategy