Daniele Stella finished 3rd-4th at the European Championship in September 2026 with this Emerald-Sapphire list, and you can pull the full 60 cards from the TCGplayer page right now. The whole thing prices out at $112.80 from our daily feed, cheapest printing of each card.
- Stella's deck finished 3rd-4th at Euros. Verified 60 cards, $112.80 total.
- The engine is ink acceleration. Mickey Mouse - Detective and early characters fill your inkwell so you can land sevens on turn five or six.
- Twenty of the sixty cards have Ward. Targeted removal can't touch them. Challenging still can.
- The three most expensive cards average about $8 each. That's where most of the $112.80 lives.
Here's the thing about this deck. It does not look like aggro from the outside. Eight ones, twelve twos, a top end full of sevens. But every card below four ink is doing a specific job, and that job is getting you to the sevens before your opponent expects them.
So let's talk about how that actually works.
The Ward package is what it's trying to do
The top half of the curve is built around Ward. Hades - Meticulous Schemer at 6 ink, Winifred - Exasperated Elephant at 6, Scuttle - Birdbrained at 5, and Dr. Bushroot - Evil Botanist at 5 all have Ward. That's sixteen copies before you even get to the sevens.
Ward means opponents can't choose the character except to challenge. Targeted removal, return-to-hand effects, exert effects, anything that requires choosing the character: none of it touches them. Your opponent has to walk something into a challenge to get rid of them, and that costs them resources.
Dr. Bushroot - Evil Botanist adds a layer on top. Whenever he's challenged, the opponent chooses and discards a card. Same principle as a toll booth: yes, you can get through, but it costs you something.
The bottom of the curve makes the top possible
Eight one-drops, all Minnie Mouse. Minnie Mouse - Curious Adventurer at 1 ink and Minnie Mouse - Practical Traveler at 1 ink each come in as four-ofs. Practical Traveler's DISCERNING EYE lets her quest for an extra lore whenever you played another character the same turn. The deck runs enough two-drops that this triggers reliably.
Mickey Mouse - Detective at 3 ink is the real accelerant. His GET A CLUE ability puts the top card of your deck into your inkwell when you play him. That's not optional income. That's why you can threaten a 7-ink card before the game feels like it should be there.
Mickey Mouse - Detective at 3 ink is the real accelerant. His GET A CLUE ability puts the top card of your deck into your inkwell when you play him. That's not optional income. That's why you can threaten a 7-ink card before the game feels like it should be there.
Strike a Good Match at 2 ink is the deck's only action. It draws two cards and discards one. That's card selection, not card advantage, but it smooths the curve and feeds the discard synergies elsewhere in the list.
Where the sevens actually come from
Mickey Mouse - Bob Cratchit at 2 ink runs HARD WORK: whenever he quests, you put the top card of your deck facedown under him. When he's banished in a challenge, you move all those cards under another character or location. That's lore acceleration turned into something that survives the turn he's banished.
Milo Thatch - Getting His Hands Dirty at 7 ink has Ward and two abilities. SCHOLAR'S GAMBIT lets you discard a card to return a chosen character to their player's hand when you play him.
PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE draws you a card at end of turn if two or more cards went to discard that turn. Between Strike a Good Match, Tod - Clever Fox's PROBLEM SOLVING draw-two-discard-one, and Milo himself, hitting that threshold is not hard.
Mickey Mouse & Minnie Mouse - Adventuring Duo at 7 ink is the safety net. Their THINKING OF YOU ability means if they'd be banished, they go to your inkwell instead. At Duo Shift 0, you can play them on top of a Mickey or Minnie for free. They're not a threat you're protecting. They're a resource you keep recovering.
Donald Duck - Perfect Gentleman at 4 ink bridges the mid-game. His ALLOW ME ability lets each player draw a card at the start of your turn. That symmetry looks like a downside. In a deck this hungry for cards, the extra draw is worth it.
What actually stops this deck
Twenty of the sixty cards have Ward. That's the headline. But Ward is not invincibility. Anything that challenges gets through. Decks running characters with high strength can walk straight past Ward and banish these characters in a challenge.
The Ward characters are also mostly expensive. If your opponent applies pressure before you reach five or six ink, the Ward package is still sitting in your hand. Early aggression, the kind that forces you to trade characters or fall behind on lore, is the real threat.
From what we can see in the card text alone, a deck that keeps you off ink development applies the most pressure here. The case for calling early challengers the hardest matchup is strong, though without broader matchup data that stays a judgement rather than a finding.
The full 60 cards
What it costs to build this
The deck is $112.80 total. Most of that lives in three cards.
Hades - Infernal Schemer is $8.38 each, four copies is $33.52. Milo Thatch - Getting His Hands Dirty is $8.09 each, four copies is $32.36. Mickey Mouse & Minnie Mouse - Adventuring Duo is $7.15 each, four copies is $28.60. Together that's $94.48, more than eighty cents of every dollar you spend.
The rest of the list is remarkably cheap. Mickey Mouse - Bob Cratchit at $1.77 and Dr. Bushroot - Evil Botanist at $1.59 are the next most expensive cards. Everything else is under a quarter per copy.
If you're deciding whether to build this, start with Milo Thatch - Getting His Hands Dirty at $8.09 a copy. He's the hardest card to replace, he does multiple jobs at once, and his Ward means he actually survives long enough to do them.
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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