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. It’s good against a wide range of decks out there, with the only most glaring weakness being against aggro.

Even in that matchup, however, this deck fares decently, complete with cards like Brawl and Sisu that look to banish low strength characters before they can run away with the game.

3 Be Prepared
4 Vision of the Future
3 Lucky Dime
4 Tamatoa - So Shiny!
1 Hide Away
4 Chicha - Dedicated Mother
4 One Jump Ahead
4 Donald Duck - Focused Flatfoot
4 Develop Your Brain
4 Fishbone Quill
4 Maleficent - Monstrous Dragon
2 Madame Medusa - The Boss
4 Brawl
4 Pawpsicle
4 Hiram Flaversham - Toymaker
2 Sisu - Daring Visitor
3 Sisu - Empowered Sibling
2 Ice Block

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 backbone of this deck: Pawpsicle. Pawpsicle makes up one leg of your draw engine, while the overpowered 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.

Turn two – Chicha, Jump, and Visions

Although Ruby/Sapphire hasn’t changed massively since Shimmering Skies came out, it did gain a powerful new ally in the form of Chicha – Dedicated Mother. Chica only adds to this deck’s insane draw power. You add Ink so often into your Inkwell via cards like Fishbone Quill that you are almost guaranteed to get this effect off.

While having Chicha in play is really helpful, you have other cards that will help you get the pieces you need to get things going. Vision of the Future is a powerful card search action released in set five, letting you look for the exact card you need from the top five of your deck. Meanwhile, this deck also runs four copies of One Jump Ahead, giving you the ability to accelerate your ramping even more.

Fishbone Quill is your most vital item

Notice this deck doesn’t give you many three-cost characters, and that’s because ideally you are going to be playing the Fishbone Quill on your third turn so you can start seriously accelerating Ink into your Inkwell. Your shot at victory will largely depend on your ability to ramp.

That being said, Fishbone Quill isn’t your only three-cost card to use. 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 majorly buffs already powerful cards

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 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.

How to counter Ruby/Sapphire

However, 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 do it.

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, and there’s plenty of steal 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 is one of the strongest Lorcana decks right now

Ruby/Sapphire absolutely has what it needs to be a dominant deck in the Lorcana metagame, and right now it is vying with Amber/Steel for best deck overall.

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

Ink Colors

Inkable

Card Types

Ruby/Sapphire – Basic Strategy