Tier 3 · Build the Table · Lesson 7 of 8
Build your first deck
Cutting cards, What Lorcana actually is, What Lorcana actually is
By the end of this page there should be 60 cards in a pile in front of you. Not a good deck. A finished one. Everything in this tier so far has been analysis, and analysis does not shuffle.
You are filling 60 slots, not picking 60 favourites
A deck is 60 jobs, and a card earns a slot by doing one of them better than the next candidate. That was the idea in What a deck actually is. This lesson turns it into a page you can fill in tonight.
Four of the numbers below are rules. Break one and the deck is not legal. Every other number here is a target, and you are allowed to miss it.
You will be told which is which, every time.
The four numbers that are actually rules
Constructed is the format you are building for: a deck you put together in advance and bring with you. It has exactly 4 hard requirements, and they all live in one sentence.
In the Constructed format, each player's deck must contain at least 60 cards, can't contain more than two ink types, can't contain more than 4 cards with the same full name, and can't contain any banned cards.
Comprehensive Rules 1.10.1.1
In plain terms:
- 60 cards, minimum. Not 58 because you ran out of ideas.
- Two ink types, maximum. One is also legal. Three is not, ever, for any reason.
- 4 copies of any one full name. Full name means the name and the version together (5.3.6.1), so 4 of one Elsa and 4 of a different Elsa is 8 cards and is legal.
- No banned cards.
That last one needs an honest note. The Comprehensive Rules name the restriction and then hand the list itself to a separate document, the Tournament Rules (1.1.3). No ban list appears anywhere in the 507 rules this course is written from, so this page will not print one. Check the current Tournament Rules before an event, not a website.
The build sheet
Take a sheet of paper, or open the deck builder on this site. Write your two ink types at the top, the pair you settled on in Choosing your two inks. Every card you write down from here has to be one of those two.
Now fill the 60 in three passes, in this order. Do not start at the top of the list and work down. Fill the middle of the deck first, because that is the part you use in every single game.
- Pass 1: 42 characters. Only characters can quest (4.5.1), and questing is how lore gets to 20 (1.8.1.1). Most of your deck is characters or your deck cannot win. Put 4 copies of your 6 strongest 3-cost and 4-cost characters down first, then spread the rest across the other cost rows.
- Pass 2: 12 answers. Actions, songs, items and locations. At least 6 of these should banish or damage an opposing character, because a character you cannot answer quests every turn for the rest of the game. This is the pass beginners skip.
- Pass 3: 6 free slots. Leave them empty until the checks below, then spend them on whichever check failed.
Use 4 copies of anything you want to see. A single copy sitting in 60 cards turns up in roughly 1 game in 3, which is not often enough to learn what it does. In a first deck, nothing goes in at 1 copy.
Three checks before you shuffle
Run these in order. Each one has a fix, and the fix is always the same: swap a card, do not add one.
- Legal? Count to 60. Count your ink types, and there must be 2 or fewer. Find every card you have 5 of. This check is pass or fail and it is not negotiable.
- Curve? Sort the 60 into cost piles and compare them to the budget above. One fat row is fine. Two empty rows at the bottom is not, because those are the turns you would otherwise spend doing nothing.
- Inkable? Count the cards with the swirl around the cost. Aim for 40 or more of your 60. Roughly 1 card in 5 in the game cannot be inked, so a deck under 40 is a deck you built on purpose and cannot pay for.
When all 3 checks pass, the deck is done. It is not good yet. It is done, which is the only thing this lesson promised.
A small number of cards carry 2 ink types at once, and they count as both. Counted from our own card database today, 16 of them are legal in Core.
An Amethyst and Sapphire card is legal only in a deck whose 2 inks are exactly Amethyst and Sapphire (1.10.1.3). Drop one into an Amber and Steel deck and you have quietly built a 4-ink deck that no judge will let you play.
Check the ink bar behind the name on every card you write down. Two colours means 2 ink types.
Your sheet is full at 58 cards and you cannot think of 2 more you like. What do you do?
- Play it at 58. It is close enough, and a smaller deck draws better. A smaller deck really does find its best cards faster, which is why the floor exists at all. But 60 is a minimum, not a guideline, so a 58-card deck is not a legal deck (1.10.1.1).
- Add 2 cards from a third ink, since 2 cards will barely come up. The rule caps ink types, not the number of cards from each. Two cards from a third ink is 3 ink types and the deck is illegal, exactly as illegal as 20 would be.
- Take 2 cards already in the deck that are below 4 copies, and add another copy of each. Right, and it is the better deck as well as the legal one. More copies of a card you already chose means you see it more often, which is the whole reason the 4-copy limit is the number people build up to.
Where this recipe is wrong
The curve budget is convention, not rules. Nothing in the Comprehensive Rules says a deck should have 12 cards costing 2. Real decks bend that shape hard, and a deck built to win on turn 6 looks nothing like the diagram above.
The 60 is worth arguing with too. More cards means a longer deck to draw through, and you lose if your turn ends with an empty deck (1.8.1.2). That is a genuine reason to go above 60. It is almost never the reason people do it, which is that they could not choose.
And the deck you build from what you own will lose to a deck copied off a results page. That is true and it does not matter yet. A deck you assembled is a deck you can diagnose, because you know what every slot was supposed to do. A borrowed one teaches you nothing when it loses.
- 60 cards, 2 ink types, 4 copies of a full name.
- Build in 3 passes: characters, answers, then free slots.
- Aim for 40 or more inkable cards in the 60.
- Fix a failed check by swapping, never by adding.
- A dual-ink card counts as both of its inks.
Fill all 60 slots in one sitting, tonight, from cards you already own. Then leave it alone. Do not change a single card until you have played the deck 3 times.
The first version is allowed to be bad. It is not allowed to be unfinished.
Rules quoted from the Disney Lorcana Comprehensive Rules, version 2.2.0, effective 9 July 2026. Card counts were recounted from our own card database on 9 August 2026 and will move as new sets arrive, so treat the 16 as of that date.
Next: Upgrading a starter deck. You now know what a slot is for, which is the only thing that makes spending money on cards sensible.
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