There is a deck in Attack of the Vine that plays no characters. Not a light character count. Not a couple of cheap bodies to hold the fort. Zero. It never quests, never challenges, never puts a single glimmer on the table, and it wins.
- Locations gain lore on their own. That is the whole trick. Two locations do all the questing this deck ever needs.
- My Adventure Book hits 100% of the time when your deck has no characters to whiff on. It also explains the deck's nickname.
- Reckless is a total lockout against an empty board, not a drawback.
- Raging Storm says "banish all characters." You have none. Read that again.
- Your opponent will be far ahead on lore for most of the game. That is the plan, not a problem.
The Uninkable Dads covered this list on their podcast this week, and credited it to Dad Lore. The zero-character segment starts at 38:50. Watching two people try to explain a deck that breaks the game's most basic assumption is worth your time, and it raises the obvious question.
Characters are how you score. So how does a deck with none of them get to 20 lore first?
Locations do the questing
A location with a lore value gains that lore at the start of your turn. No character has to be standing on it. No one has to quest. It simply ticks.
Game Preserve is the engine at two lore a turn, the most of any Core-legal Amber or Emerald location. Tundratown costs one ink and pays a lore forever. Neither needs a character.
Enigmatic Inkcaster is the third source, and a deck of cheap items clears its two-card condition by accident.
The card that named the deck
You will hear this called the Kevin deck. Most versions do not play Kevin. The name comes from a single line of rules text.
My Adventure Book reveals the top card of your deck. If it is a non-character card, or a character card named Kevin, it goes to your hand. Otherwise it goes to the bottom.
The card that makes it perfect is the one it politely offers to find for you.
Turning their board off
None of that matters if the opponent just quests past you. So the deck spends its early game making their characters useless rather than removing them.
Malicious, Mean, and Scary puts a damage counter on every opposing character. Potion of Malice adds more, then banishes itself to give every damaged character Reckless.
Here is where the deck stops being cute and starts being genuinely mean. Reckless reads: they cannot quest, and they must challenge if able.
There is nothing to challenge. So their whole board just stands there.
Why that is worse than removal
Reckless is normally a small drawback on an aggressive character. Pointed at a player with no characters to challenge into, it is a total shutdown. Their team sits there doing nothing, and it cost you one item.
Inscrutable Map takes a lore off a chosen character. A Gaston that finds no targets is just a body questing for less.
The wipe that only hurts one player
Raging Storm banishes all characters. That is the entire card. In any other deck it is a reset button you press when you are losing and you accept the cost. Here there is no cost. You have nothing on the board to lose, and you never did.
The honest part
You will be a long way behind for most of the game. The Uninkable Dads described opponents reaching the high teens in lore before this deck does anything, which matches how it reads: nothing in it stops a determined quester early, it only makes them regret it later.
What beats it
That is a real risk and not a small one. Any deck fast enough to close the game before Raging Storm arrives beats you, and a board that goes wide faster than you can ping it beats you too. This is not a safe choice for an event you care about.
You are playing a spreadsheet against someone playing Disney characters.
There is no board to look at, no combat maths, no trades. You have to be comfortable being visibly, embarrassingly behind for fifteen minutes.
If you sit down across from it
You will know within three turns. No characters by turn three is not a slow draw, it is the deck.
Once you know, the instinct to flood the board is exactly wrong. Every character you add is another target for a single Raging Storm, and you are handing them a bigger blowout for the same eight ink.
Play the minimum you need to close, hold the rest, and keep questing. The deck wins by surviving to eight ink, so the question is whether you can finish first.
Their locations are undefended. Challenge them.
Game Preserve only gains Evasive while a character with Evasive stands on it. This deck has none, so it sits there unprotected, quietly paying them two lore a turn.
Why it is worth knowing about anyway
Even if you never sleeve this up, it exposes three things about Lorcana that are easy to forget.
- Locations score without help.
- Symmetric effects are only symmetric if both players have something to lose.
- A keyword written as a downside can be a lockout when one board is empty.
Those are not tricks specific to one brew. They are true in every game you play, and most people only notice them when someone shows up with no characters and beats them.
The decklist, all sixty
They never read the list out loud, but it was on screen for the whole segment. Eighteen unique cards, and not one of them is a character.
Fourteen Amber, forty-six Emerald. Credited to Dad Lore (@dadlorcana), read off the screen in the segment from 38:50, and every card checked against our own database.
Loads all sixty cards, prices them live, and you can save or change anything from there. No account needed to look.
Two choices worth staring at
Freeze the Vine banishes all locations. This deck runs seven.
They play two copies anyway.
Against another location deck it is a haymaker. Here it is simply a button you never press.
Enigmatic Inkcaster is only a two-of despite being one of your three ways to score, while nearly everything else is a four-of. The deck would rather draw removal than draw its clock.
Making it look expensive
Three cards in this deck have a premium printing, and it is a rare case where the flashiest versions are also the ones you actually cast.
The Kevin is the joke pick, and it is the one people will ask about. A deck named after a card it refuses to run, with that card sleeved in the binder beside it.
None of this makes the deck better. It makes it yours, which is a different and perfectly good reason.
My Adventure Book hits 100% of the time when your deck has no characters for it to whiff on.
Building it the cheap way
Almost everything here is Common, Uncommon or Rare. Potion of Malice is the only Super Rare, and the deck plays no Legendaries at all, which is unusual for something that beats real decks.
Local store first, always. If that is not an option, these links keep the site free at no extra cost to you.
Deck credit to Dad Lore (@dadlorcana), and to The Uninkable Dads for the breakdown that sent us digging.
Related: Five Players Brought the Same Deck. All Five Made Top Cut..
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Every interaction here was checked against our own card database. Spot something wrong? Tell us and we will correct it in public.
