The best Disney Lorcana starter decks ranked

The Sapphire and Steel deck from Whispers in the Well is very easy to recommend. It has a great balance between complexity, power, and fun factor. The game plan is reliable, but not boringly simple. There are interesting card interactions to explore, but it doesn't rely on brittle combos.

Its power comes from playing Detectives - and there are a lot of Zootopia fans here - who gradually give one another benefits. When you have your best cards in hand (or in play) you'll have a lot of options about how to proceed. But this isn't a combo deck that relies on having exactly the right cards - it uses a lot of ramp abilities to increase your ink and card draw abilities to stock your hand.

So the fundamentals are strong, and more importantly they're fun. A very easy recommendation!

This Emerald and Sapphire deck is one of the more complex starter deck options, but if you can handle its varied (and not always synergistic) tactics, you'll find it to be a satisfying entry point for the game. Plus, with a few more meta-friendly upgrades, this starter deck could go toe-to-toe with some constructed decks. As always, though, don't expect to win any tournaments with it.

The main schtick of the deck is Inventors, a classification shared by a decent chunk of its cards. Even those who don't count as Inventors can help buff those who are. The Emerald cards give you plenty of indirect ways to mess up your opponent's plans, meaning that this is a slow-burn deck where every play counts if you want to win. It's enjoyable, but it'd be even more so if there were just a few more competitive cards - or fewer cards that have nothing to do with Inventors.

The Amber and Emerald deck for Whispers in the Well has an unusual gameplan - you'll be going wide with characters, each of whom has a very distinctive ability to answer your opponent's strategies. The has a lot of 'Whisper' cards, which start out a little weaker than usual but can be given a permanent Boost by placing a card from the top of your deck under them. Ordinarily you'll need to pay ink to Boost, but there are other ways to trigger it.

So where other decks might be building up to bigger and more powerful cards, this one wants to go wide with little creatures, each of which has the capacity to become a bigger threat. It's not as much of a jump as you get by Shifting a card, but it also doesn't rely on having specific cards in play and in your hand.

Not to say there's nothing here if you love flashy effects. Every time you boost Simba, King in the Making, you can reveal the top card of your deck and put it into play exerted if it's a character. Now that's a finisher!

Standout Headliners, the Emerald and Ruby starter deck for Fabled, is packed with characters and songs from A Goofy Movie - a niche taste among Disney fans, but if you love it, you really love it. The deck has a much wider appeal, though, with a strategy that leverages powerful songs and flexible characters.

Most of your characters have good stats for banishing their rivals in challenges, and if they don't there are easy ways to pump them up, either with a song, or as the side effect of a song. The grand finale comes from the deck's most powerful card, 'Headliner, World's Greatest Rock Star' - he's such a showboater that each time he sings a song, you'll get to sing another song for free.

This deck has some interesting decision points and isn't a linear strategy, but it's also not the most complicated out there - and that's important for a beginner deck.

Ready to Let Loose uses one of Lorcana's strongest color combinations to create a strong general control deck. Lots of interaction helps keep opponents off your case while you focus on questing and racking up that game-winning lore. If you don't mind a deck that feels more directionless and asks you to adapt on the fly, you'll get on with this deck just fine.

It's not quite the infamous Ruby Amethyst Bounce deck, of course. Despite many powerful individual cards, the overall deck isn't a competitive product. Still, if you're only playing with pre-constructed starter decks, it's a pretty consistent winner.

A Harmonious Team, the Amber and Amethyst starter deck for Reign of Jafar, has two things we always want to see in a starter deck - an interesting strategy, and the right cards to pull it off. The result is a slightly more complex beginner deck than most, but one that feels great to win with.

This is a very conflict averse deck: very few of the characters here are equipped to win challenges. But they are set up to grant you more and more value from singing songs - Pepa Madrigal, Sensitive Sister grants you free lore every time you sing a song, and Bruno Madrigal, Singing Seer will draw more cards than you know what to do with each time you sing.

Rather than challenging your opponent directly, the game plan is to get more value from your board than your opponent can from theirs, faster - while also using tricks to disrupt them and Bodyguards to protect your more important characters. It's an involved game plan, but a rewarding one.

Archazia's Island's Ruby and Sapphire deck is a meta-friendly package that's ripe for upgrading. Total newcomers to trading card games might find its item-based strategy intimidating, but for more experienced gamers, this is an intriguing deck that will introduce you to some of Lorcana's latest mechanics and design ideas.

The core gimmick of the deck is its item cards, which can be banished to trigger increasingly powerful effects on other cards. Banishing items can help you deal damage or draw cards, plus it can be used to reduce the cost or increase the challenge strength of your most important cards. You'll need to manage your deck carefully to reap the full rewards of this strategy, but it's super satisfying when you do.

Brave & Brazen, the Steel and Ruby deck from Reign of Jafar, is all about challenges - but that doesn't mean it's a lunkheaded deck. The two foil cards really showcase what makes the deck special: they have really powerful effects that give you an advantage in challenges, but demand that you get those challenges right!

Mulan, Charging Ahead is Evasive during your turn and has a unique Burst of Speed ability, allowing her to challenge other Evasive characters and Readied characters - but she's Reckless, so she must challenge every turn. Meanwhile Stitch, Alien Troublemaker grants you one lore and draws a card each time he banishes a card in a challenge.

The deck is squeezed in both the early and late game. It's heavy on non-inkable cards, which can make your early turns tense. And neither Steel nor Ruby provide a deep pool of card draw effects - which means you really have to husband the resources you have. That's a delicate balancing act when the deck is also asking you to be relentlessly aggressive!

A Roaring Guest List is all about damaging your opponent's characters, and doing so can set off some fun combos. This means it's a little more complex for beginner players, who will need to do some strategizing if they want to win. However, the deck's core style is still fairly approachable - and it can run away with wins against other starter decks.

Naturally, that's not the case when it comes to the competitive scene. And your plans can start to fall apart if those combo conditions can't be met. Many of your cards only provide benefits if your opponents' characters have been damaged. This means you must play both carefully and aggressively, which is a challenging line to toe.

Princess Power, the Amber and Sapphire deck for Fabled, is aptly named - not only is this deck packed with Princesses (and Queens), it has one of the most powerful cards in the whole Fabled set - Aurora, Holding Court. The problem is that all that power is wired up not really well aimed.

You'll find lots of traces of strategies in here - there's some song synergy, some item payoffs, plenty of ways to heal your damaged units, and more draw than you'll know what to do with. But none of these cohere into a decisive winning strategy.

You'll do a lot of interesting and powerful things with this deck - but it won't turn into a win against a more focused strategy. Still, it makes an excellent basis to build from, as there are so many directions you could push it.

This Amethyst and Steel deck is filled with new keywords and mechanics from the Archazia's Island set. That makes it an appealing pick for players who want to get a feel for what playing Disney Lorcana is like now rather than a few years ago, when the first starter decks were designed. Its biggest tricks rely on making Illusion cards Vanish from the field, only to return to your hand, gain some insta-lore, or manipulate the board state.

The downside is that this isn't a super consistent portrayal of competitive Lorcana play. This deck can dominate an opposing starter deck shockingly fast if it draws into the right combo cards. However, it doesn't have many ways to guarantee that scenario - and it can feel lackluster in as many games as it feels overpowered.

Azurite Sea's Amber and Ruby deck has a delightfully simple premise. Play as many pirates as possible, send them into plenty of challenges, and have them stop off at a bunch of powerful locations to gain lore quickly. Almost every card is on board and ready to say 'aye aye' when it comes to this strategy and the swashbuckling theme. If you're totally new to trading card games, this is a seaworthy starting point.

Unfortunately, for those with a bit more experience, you may quickly notice some holes in the boat. The most powerful cards in the deck tend to be expensive to play, and it's not easy to draw the exact cards you need. This means this simple, high-speed aggro deck can sometimes feel sluggish.

The Amethyst and Steel starter deck is an excellent gateway to competitive Lorcana games - it would be at the top of this list if it wasn't about to rotate out of Core constructed! Beginners will have to grapple with a bit more complexity upfront because of this fact, but the payoff is you get to learn about one of Lorcana's latest and most exciting deck archetypes.

We're talking about 'bounce' decks, as the community calls them. These rely on Amethyst cards featuring Merlin and Madam Mim, who trigger effects when cards enter and leave the battlefield. With some careful planning, you can set up some enormously powerful combos.

The deck does sacrifice a bit of punching power to pursue this strategy, though. Amethyst and Steel may feature some fantastic cards, but its lack of beefy characters means it may struggle against other starter decks. And, without some substitutions, the starter deck can't stand alone against competitive custom decks either.

If you and your buddies are picking starter decks to play against each other, the Amber and Amethyst deck is likely to win you plenty of games. Easy to learn and well-balanced against other starters, this is a deck for Lorcana players who don't want to feel left behind because they prefer simple strategies. It would rank much higher in this list if it weren't about to rotate out of Core constructed.

Character cards take center stage, and your game plan involves playing a lot of them. You won't be setting up uber-complex combos or interacting with your opponents much, and you won't learn much about the newer mechanics featured in Lorcana. But you will have cards to play every turn, keeping the pressure on your opponents as you draw and play more and more characters.

If you couldn't tell, this is the ultimate beginner deck. Lorcana players who aspire to upgrades and competitive play will find less to be excited about here. A handful of the Amethyst cards still get played in the game's top decks, but there's not much else to work with once you're ready to build a custom deck of your own.

With a clear game plan and an excellent color combination, Stand Together is a pretty consistent starter deck. It's not got the meta's top cards in its decklist, and it doesn't exactly resemble a tournament-winning Sapphire and Steel deck. It would rate around the middle of this list, if the cards weren't about to rotate out of Core constructed.

Stand Together is stuffed with Hero cards, and a lot of its play involves making them stronger or gaining benefits when they're on the board. There's not a lot of card draw or fancy combos to play with, but it keeps things simple in a satisfying way.

In the short term, Amber and Sapphire is a solid choice of starter deck. It's full of strong, interesting cards that strike a good balance between strategic complexity and beginner-friendly simplicity. And it can certainly hold its own against the other starter decks - in some games, that is.

Too many unlucky draws in a row will slow this deck down massively. Many cards have Shift or abilities that rely on certain types and numbers of characters being in play (we're looking at you, Seven Dwarfs). There are some strong card draw options in here to balance things out, but it can't always save you from the deck's random elements.

If you're ready to build a competitive custom deck, you'll find you need an awful lot of singles that just aren't present in this starter deck. Long-term, Amber and Sapphire is fun but not all that viable.

If you're looking for consistent wins, the Sapphire and Steel starter deck might not be for you. But if it's strategy and silly fun you're after, it's not a bad choice. This Lorcana deck lives and dies on the strength of your card pulls. With the right hand, you'll absolutely dominate against other starters - without it, you're pretty much toast.

The strategy here resembles ramp decks in other trading card games like Magic: The Gathering. You want to fill your inkwell fast so you can get big, beefy characters on the board at speed. After that, your prowess with attack and defense will see you outlast your opponents.

That only applies to games against other starter decks, of course. Sapphire and Steel is a competitive ink combination, but few of the cards in this starter deck see top-level play. Besides, the lack of balance means this deck would never cut it against custom creations.

Since Into the Inklands introduces a whole new card type, location cards, it's handy to have a starter deck that can teach you how these work. Amber and Emerald offers this, as well as plenty of strong and exciting cards to play with. The only problem is that, when combined in a standalone starter deck, these cards don't function all that well.

The Dalmatian puppies introduced in this deck offer some delightful new play options, including the opportunity to add 99 copies of Tail Wagger to your deck (you'll need to buy 94 extra copies if you want to make it happen, though). Combine this with some card draw and search options, and you've got the beginnings of something beautiful - but only the beginnings.

Emerald and Ruby offers a fair amount of complexity but not much competitive value. It does give you a sneaky strategy to play with, where you'll steal opponents' lore and interfere with their board state while buffing your own questing and challenging characters. This can be oodles of fun.

In the hands of a savvy player, the deck can be quite successful against other starters. And if you want a wallet-friendly foundation for future deck-building, this is a great choice. The upside of being underestimated by competitive players is that many of your best cards don't cost much.

But there are too many downsides for us to really rate this starter deck. Beginner players might yearn for a more approachable deck, or one that teaches them more important rules and mechanics for play. Meanwhile, veterans won't get much value for money.

Madrigal Magic is a deck entirely themed around Encanto's talented family. Despite the number of impressive Encanto cards in Lorcana, few of them make an appearance here. Additionally, few of the Madrigal cards in this deck have a strong synergy with each other. 'Mirabel Madrigal - Gift of the Family' may buff other Madrigals, but you're not going to pull this card consistently, as the starter deck only has one copy.

This starter deck doesn't lean into Amethyst and Amber's strongest play styles. Rather than a fast-paced aggro deck, this is a slightly slower, support-focused deck filled with characters of the same type.

It is one of the most thematic starter decks on the list, and it's still fairly beginner-friendly. Just don't expect to win against constructed decks without some serious upgrades.

This is a pretty challenging deck for newcomers, though it can feel rewarding if you play your cards right. Rather than one clear strategy, this deck gives you a large number of options for overtaking your opponent. It's stuffed with location cards and items, as well as plenty of character abilities to help with questing and challenging.

In a vacuum, this is a versatile deck which still stands a chance against other starters. However, there's no real value in these cards if you want to build something competitive.