Garrett Martin took Ruby Amethyst to the CCS Invitational and won it. The list looks like every other Ruby Amethyst list for about four seconds, which is how long it takes to notice that the deck's most famous card is not in it.
- He cut Hades. Not because it is weak, but because it is only good on the play, and this format punishes the draw harder than any before it.
- The two drops are the deck. Garrett's claim is that this list simply has the best ones in the game right now.
- Dumbo is an engine, not a finisher. It hands every other Evasive character a draw and a lore.
- Red Alert is the whole reason Ruby is here. It was aimed at a specific room, and the room showed up.
- Full sixty card list below, one click into the deck builder.
The cut that made the list
Ask most players what a Ruby Amethyst deck wants at five ink and they will say Hades. Garrett cut it entirely. His reasoning is not that the card is bad. It is that the card is conditional, and the condition fails half the time.
Seventeen to eighteen percent. Garrett's estimate of the gap between going first and going second in this format. Every card in every deck gets re-judged against that number.
The failure case is specific. On the draw you spend turn five on a 3/4 and let your opponent draw two cards. They untap, clear your board, and you never got the value. On the play you were already favoured and did not need it.
A card that is only good on the play is not a five drop. It is a coin flip you paid five ink for.
Mr. Incredible went for a related reason. Six strength reads well until you notice the four willpower, which means any four power character on the other side trades with your five drop. Garrett is blunt that he does not consider it a Core playable card.
Nobody else has these two drops
This is the point Garrett keeps returning to. Most decks in the format play two drops because the curve demands one, not because the card is good. His are genuinely good, and that gap compounds every game.
Scrooge is the flexible one. He costs two, but Boost lets you pay an ink to tuck the top card of your deck under him, and he gets bigger for every card sitting there. A turn two Scrooge and a turn five Scrooge are different cards.
A two, a three, a four and a five. Scrooge is whichever one the turn in front of you needs, which is why the deck is never taxed on curve.
Jebidiah is the aggressive half. A 3/3 with Evasive for two ink is already ahead of rate. Reckless means it cannot quest and must challenge, so it is not lore, it is pressure that most two drops cannot answer.
Dumbo does not finish games. It runs them.
Here is the piece that explains the other fifty one characters.
Dumbo has Evasive and can exert plus one ink to draw a card and gain a lore. The second ability is the real one: every other Evasive character you control gains that same line. A board of small flyers becomes a draw engine and a lore engine at once.
Fifty two characters. Three actions. Five items. Not one song and not one location. Every Evasive body on the table is another Dumbo activation, so this deck wants bodies far more than it wants spells.
Garrett makes a sharp comparison here. In a mirror where both players trade off and the game becomes a topdeck war, his Dumbos draw more cards, because he actually has the Evasive characters to switch the ability on. Other decks play Dumbo and hope.
Red Alert is why this deck is Ruby at all
The Amethyst half is the engine. The Ruby half is a prediction about the room.
Garrett and his team named the three decks they expected to dominate the invitational before they got there. All three turned up. By his count around twenty of the hundred and twenty players were on green yellow aggro alone.
Roughly one player in six was on the deck Red Alert is best against. That is not a lucky read. That is the reason the card is in the sixty.
Red Alert banishes any character with three strength or less for four ink, which covers most of what an aggressive deck puts on the table. That is not a generically strong card. It is a card chosen because of who was going to be sitting across from him.
The one ofs are not filler
Four singleton cards sit in this list, and each answers a different question.
Dash is the strongest one drop available but becomes a liability against the green decks they expected, so it stays at exactly one. Liquidator is there for opening hands against aggression, and Garrett is candid that he does not rate it highly otherwise.
One copy each. Four different questions, four different answers, and none of them are there to fill a slot.
The three ink Dumbo is the clever one. It grants Evasive, which turns an ordinary character into a surprise attacker, or lets a grown Scrooge reach something it should not be able to touch. Medallion Weights arrived last, to win the five drop trades.
The full sixty
Grouped the way the deck builder groups it. Hover any name to see the card.
Loads all sixty cards and prices them live, so you see what it costs today rather than what it cost when this went up. Change anything you like from there.
If you are building it, build it once
This is not a budget list. Four Dumbo and four Demona are the expensive part, and they are also the two you cannot sensibly replace, because one is the engine and the other is the reset button.
The engine. If you buy one playset from this list properly, make it this one.
Check price at TCGplayer
The six drop that ends contested boards, and the Enchanted printing looks it.
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Watch the whole thing
Garrett walks through mulligans matchup by matchup in the full episode, which is worth the time if you intend to actually play the deck. The card choices are one thing. Knowing which two drop to keep against which opponent is the rest of it.
Deck by Garrett Martin. Discussed on Magical Maneuvers Ep. 3 from Manifest TCG, hosted by Jordan. Decklist published by the author on Dreamborn.
If you want the opposite end of the design space, we recently covered a deck that plays no characters at all. Same format, same set, and a completely different theory of how to win. For a cheaper way into these two inks, there is our budget Amethyst Ruby build.
