Dillon Leduc took this Amber Amethyst list to the North American Championship on August 30th and finished first. You can find the full 60-card list on TCGplayer, and we've verified every card against the catalogue and priced it from our daily feed. Total cost as of today: $339.10.
- Dillon Leduc finished first at the North American Championship with this Amber Amethyst list.
- The deck costs $339.10. Demona - Scourge of the Wyvern Clan accounts for roughly half of that at $41.88 a copy.
- The engine is cost reduction into tempo sweeps. Grandmother Willow and Hamm cheapen your curve, then exert effects lock the board down.
- Nine copies rely on Evasive. Any deck running a board-wide Alert effect dismantles that protection entirely.
Here's what the deck is actually trying to do. It wants to play characters early for less ink than they cost, build a board faster than the opponent can answer, and then stall their whole side with exert effects while questing ahead. It's not complicated. It just does that better than you'd expect for $339.
The engine that makes it cheap
Grandmother Willow - Ancient Advisor costs 2 ink and lets you pay 1 less for the next character you play each turn. Hamm - Piggy Bank does the same thing by exerting. Together they shave real ink off your curve, every single turn you have one in play.
That matters because this deck's power sits at 4, 5 and 6 ink. Getting to those cards a turn early is the whole plan.
At 1 ink, Rafiki - Mystical Fighter and Luisa Madrigal - Pushing Through are cheap Challengers who eat small threats. Besties, Assemble! digs for the character you need. None of them are the point. They're just keeping you alive until the discount engine fires.
Where the tempo comes from
At 4 ink, Isis Vanderchill - Ice Queen of St. Canard exerts a chosen opposing character the moment she hits the board. Tigger - Bouncing All the Way returns any character, item or location costing 2 or less to its player's hand. Both answers are immediate.
Gaston - Superior Archer at 5 ink banishes any character with 5 strength or more on entry. That's the big-threat answer.
Then there's the six-drop that the whole late game is built around. Demona - Scourge of the Wyvern Clan exerts every opposing character when she's played. Every one of them. She also triggers a draw refill: each player with fewer than 3 cards draws back up to 3.
The catch is printed right on her. If you have 3 or more cards in your hand, she can't ready. So she sits there, board locked, not questing herself.
Nine copies of Evasive bodies is a meaningful part of the deck's defence. Against a board-wide Alert effect, that defence disappears.
The plan is to spend your hand down before your turn so she readies, or use her purely as a wrecking ball on entry while your other characters quest past the frozen board.
Stitch - Carefree Surfer at 7 ink draws 2 cards if you have 2 or more other characters in play when he arrives. That refills you for the next Demona entry and keeps the engine cycling.
The Evasive angle
Nine cards in this deck use Evasive or grant it. Dumbo - The Flying Elephant has Evasive himself and gives it to a chosen character on entry. Sven - Leaping Reindeer has Rush and Evasive together, which means he challenges the turn he's played and can only be challenged back by other Evasive characters.
The Horseman Strikes! is a 3-ink action that draws a card and can banish any character with Evasive. It keeps opposing Evasive threats off the board while your own stay protected.
That's a real plan. But it has a real answer.
What actually stops it
Alert lets a character challenge as if it had Evasive. A deck that grants Alert to its whole board removes the protection from every Evasive character you control in one move. Cards like Judy Hopps - Lead Detective, Angus - Mighty Horse, and But I'm Much Faster all grant Alert and strip that layer away entirely.
Nine copies of Evasive bodies is a meaningful part of the deck's defence. Against a board-wide Alert effect, that defence disappears.
The other line of challenge is hand management against Demona herself. Her cost reduction package means she often arrives with plenty of ink left over. But if your hand is at 3 or more when your turn starts, she doesn't ready. Keeping her locked is a real defensive option for the opponent.
What it costs to build
The deck sits at $339.10 for all 60 cards, cheapest printing of each. Most of that cost sits in five cards.
The next steepest entries are Stitch - Carefree Surfer at $18.51 each for 4 copies ($74.04 total), then Ohana Means Family at $23.26 for the single copy, then Cheshire Cat - Inexplicable at $7.78 each for 4 copies ($31.12).
The rest of the list is cheap. Grandmother Willow - Ancient Advisor at $3.56 each is the last card over a dollar.
If you're pricing this out before buying: the Demona playset is the buy-in question. Everything else is replaceable or inexpensive.
The single copy of Ohana Means Family at $23.26 looks steep for a one-of, but it removes all damage from a character and draws a card for each point removed. In a deck that wants to protect key pieces, that one slot earns its cost.
This is a tournament-proven list from a player who read the room correctly on August 30th. The field that day was whatever it was.
Your local or regional event will not look identical, and Leduc's list is built for specific matchup assumptions that may not match yours. That honesty is the most useful thing we can offer alongside the verified cards and the prices.
Start with Grandmother Willow - Ancient Advisor if you're building piece by piece. She's the cheapest enabler and the one card the whole cost-reduction plan runs through. Then pick up Demona - Scourge of the Wyvern Clan only when you're ready to commit the full $41.88 per copy. The deck functions without her. It just doesn't win the same way.
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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Source: Dillon Leduc’s Amber Amethyst Midrange, North American Championship
