Brandon Bolen took Amethyst Steel to a CCQ win in Ridgeland on July 19th, and the list he registered runs 60 cards priced at $461.93. Most of that money sits in three cards. The rest of the 60 is remarkably cheap, which tells you something about how the deck is built.
- The deck costs $461.93 complete. Four copies of Demona - Scourge of the Wyvern Clan account for $167.52 of that alone.
- The core loop is damage movement and board lock. Cheshire Cat - Inexplicable moves damage counters around; Demona - Scourge of the Wyvern Clan exerts everything when she enters play.
- Eleven copies lean on Resist. Straight banish effects ignore it entirely, and that is the deck's main structural weakness.
- The rest of the 60 costs under $30 combined. The expensive playset is the buy-in; the shell is affordable.
What Bolen was trying to do
The plan here is control through exhaustion. Exert the opposing board, move damage where it hurts, and ride Maleficent & Diablo - Evil Incarnate as a late engine that refills itself from the discard. That's the skeleton. Everything else on the list exists to buy time until it works.
The exert effect is the whole point. Demona - Scourge of the Wyvern Clan reads: "When you play this character, exert all opposing characters." Everything across the table sits down at once. That's the opening the deck wants.
There is a catch built into her own text. STONE BY DAY says she can't ready if you have three or more cards in your hand.
So the card that locks the board also locks herself. Bolen's answer is to build the deck around being in a low-hand state, where the threat of STONE BY DAY is managed rather than avoided.
How the engine actually runs
The Boost cards are doing the real work in the middle turns. Cheshire Cat - Inexplicable costs 3 ink and lets you move damage counters from one of your characters to an opposing one. Genie - Magical Researcher does a lighter version of the same job and grows as a lore threat while he does it.
Luisa Madrigal - Confident Climber at 5 ink does something different. She absorbs damage from your characters, and if she's taken enough, she redirects it all to an opposing character. That's not a removal tool exactly, but it functions like one in a damage-heavy game.
Strength of a Raging Fire costs 3 ink and deals damage equal to the number of your characters in play. In a wide board state, that number gets large fast. He Hurled His Thunderbolt at 4 ink deals a flat 4 damage and gives your Deity characters Challenger +2 for the turn.
The Resist layer
Eleven of the 60 cards carry Resist in some form. Violet Parr - Force Field Practice at 2 ink has Resist +1 baked in.
Bolen's bet is that the exert lock and the damage routing buy enough time before that kind of answer shows up.
Violet Parr - Super Resilient at 5 ink shifts on top of her and keeps the reduction. Angel - Experiment 624 at 4 ink gains Resist +2 whenever your hand is empty, which the deck is actively trying to make happen.
That's a meaningful damage floor against challenge-based decks. Against anything using straight banish effects, it means nothing at all. Resist reduces damage. A card that banishes outright skips the damage step entirely. That's the structural weakness, and it bites hardest against decks built around unconditional removal.
Bolen's bet is that the exert lock and the damage routing buy enough time before that kind of answer shows up.
The Shift package and the curve
The curve runs 1 through 7, with the heaviest concentration at 2 and 3 ink. That's where the deck does its early board work. Morph - Little Imitator at 2 ink is a Shift enabler for any character, which is genuinely unusual. ADVANCED MIMICRY lets you shift any character on top of him, including all Shift variants.
Violet Parr - Force Field Practice into Violet Parr - Super Resilient is a clean two-step that leaves a Resist body in play and draws a card. Luisa Madrigal - Confident Climber has Shift 3, so she can land early off the right opener.
Maleficent & Diablo - Evil Incarnate has Shift 5, but her FOOLS! ability lets you put five character cards from your discard on the bottom of your deck to shift her for free. By the late game, that trigger is usually available.
Lexington - Small in Stature at 3 ink has Alert, meaning he can challenge as if he had Evasive. STONE BY DAY applies to him too, so he also locks down with a full hand. He's not the star. He's the piece that pressures exerted characters while the big spells set up.
Where the money actually goes
Hades - Looking for a Deal costs $31.15 each, and Bolen runs three copies. When you play him, you may choose an opposing character. That player draws 2 cards, or puts that character on the bottom of their deck. It's a soft removal threat that also creates information pressure.
Cheshire Cat - Inexplicable at $7.78 each is the next tier down. He's the card that makes the damage-routing plan coherent rather than theoretical. Four copies is the full bet on that plan working.
Strength of a Raging Fire at $5.01 each rounds out the expensive slots. Below that, most of the list is cents. Maleficent & Diablo - Evil Incarnate, the late-game finisher, costs $0.49 each. The shell is cheap. The expensive cards are specific.
The full list
Who should build this
This is not a starter purchase. The three expensive placements, Demona - Scourge of the Wyvern Clan at $41.88 each, Angel - Experiment 624 at $39.12 each, and Hades - Looking for a Deal at $31.15 each, are the buy-in and they don't have a budget substitute on this list.
The deck suits players who want a control-style game where the board lock is the win condition, not just the setup. If your preference is an aggro race, this is not it. The turns are slower and the hand-management puzzle is constant.
Start with Cheshire Cat - Inexplicable at $7.78 each. He's the piece the damage-routing plan can't function without, and he's the cheapest entry point into understanding how the deck actually feels to play. Pick up the four copies, proxy the rest, and decide from the table whether the Demona - Scourge of the Wyvern Clan price tag is worth chasing.
Prices update daily. Price any list as you build it in the deck builder, which reads the same feed as this page, and every card above links to its own page in the card library.
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