Zan Syed built a deck that costs $42.62 for all 60 cards and does one thing at 8 ink. The list is published on TCGplayer and we verified every card against the catalogue and priced each from our daily feed.
- The plan is simple. Deal damage slowly, then wipe the board with Raging Storm when your opponent is overcommitted.
- Items carry the early game. Potion of Malice and Battering Ram do the damage. Songs refill your hand.
- The expensive part is the finisher. Four copies of Raging Storm run $22.76 on their own. Everything else is cheap.
- Only two characters in the whole deck. This is an action and item engine, not a board state.
The deck runs two characters across 60 cards. That is not a typo. Syed built a list with 35 actions and 23 items. The whole structure is designed around surviving without a board until Raging Storm clears everyone else's.
What the deck is actually doing
The loop is damage accumulation followed by a reset. Potion of Malice at 3 ink puts a damage counter on a chosen character. Its second ability forces every damaged opposing character to gain Reckless until your next turn. Reckless means they can't quest and must challenge if able. So you slow your opponent down, damage their characters, and wait.
Malicious, Mean, and Scary puts 1 damage counter on every opposing character at once. That's 3 ink for a board-wide tag. To Wither a Flower then deals 2 damage to each opposing character that is already damaged. So the two cards chain: tag the table, then finish what the tag started.
Once characters are damaged and locked into challenging, Raging Storm banishes all of them. Every character at the table. It costs 8 ink, which means you need a functioning curve to get there. That curve is what the rest of the list is built to provide.
The draw engine
Syed's answer to running almost no characters is songs. Strike a Good Match draws two and discards one at 2 ink. Strange Things locks up to two opposing characters from questing and draws a card, at 4 ink. Education or Elimination, also 4 ink, either pushes through damage or gives a character Evasive for a turn.
My Adventure Book helps find non-character cards specifically. Activate it, pay 1 ink, and reveal the top card. If it's not a character, or if it's Kevin, it goes to hand. Everything else goes to the bottom. The deck runs only two characters, so the odds heavily favour hitting.
Syed built a list with 35 actions and 23 items, and the whole structure is designed around surviving without a board until Raging Storm clears everyone else's.
Ursula's Shell Necklace rewards the song package directly. Whenever you play a song, you may pay 1 ink to draw a card. One copy in the list. It is the kind of piece that quietly does a lot of work when it lands in the right turn.
Buzz's Arm and the cost reduction engine
Buzz's Arm costs 2 ink and reduces the next action or item you play that turn by 1 ink. Syed runs four copies. The list carries no Buzz Lightyear character, so whether MISSING PIECE ever comes online depends entirely on what happens in the game.
SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED is the ability players treat as the reason to run it. Activate it and chain a song or an item at a discount.
Inscrutable Map backs this up. It costs 3 ink and reduces an opposing character's strength by 1 until your next turn. Three copies. It's not dramatic, but when your plan involves waiting until turn 8, shaving a point of strength here and there keeps your opponent's board from running you over before you're ready.
What the reset costs you
Four copies of Raging Storm at $5.69 each is the entire financial weight of this list. The Horseman Strikes! runs $2.52 per copy and $10.08 for the set of four.
After those two entries, nothing else in the list crosses a dollar a copy. Malicious, Mean, and Scary is $0.61 each. Potion of Malice is $0.32. The rest is nearly free.
The Horseman Strikes! draws a card and may banish a chosen character with Evasive. At 3 ink that is strong utility on its own. In a deck that cannot challenge profitably without characters of its own, removing an Evasive blocker matters.
The full list
Where this plan falls apart
The deck is slow by design. It needs time to accumulate damage and reach 8 ink. A fast aggressive deck that goes wide early and quests without overcommitting gives Raging Storm a much smaller target. If your opponent is disciplined about keeping two or three characters instead of flooding, the wipe doesn't generate the swing it needs to.
Sabotage is the answer to opposing item and location strategies. Two copies, each banishing a chosen item or location and all others with the same name. That is targeted but narrow. Against a deck running diverse items, two Sabotage copies may not be enough.
Stegmutt - Clumsy Dinosaur is the single character flex. His cost reduction scales with item cards in your discard, which by the late game is a real number.
He also puts three of those item cards back on the bottom of your deck and deals 3 damage to a chosen character. One copy, and he is more of a late-game reset than a plan.
Who should build this
If you already own The Horseman Strikes! in another deck, you're $10 closer before you start. The rest of the list is accessible. Start with four copies of Raging Storm at $5.69 each.
That's your engine. Everything else you can pick up for a few dollars total, and you can test the damage-accumulation shell with budget substitutes while you wait for prices to move.
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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