As you are already aware with a great new Disney Lorcana set, come great new single player decks filled with amazing new cards. These single player decks have become progressively more and more interesting as a way to explore new mechanics released within a new set or to test new combinations and mechanics. I am a huge fan of these type of Decks and I am always wondering which new combination will be released with each new set.
As usual, Reign of Jafar includes two different Decks. The first one, “Brave and Brazen” is a well rounded deck based on an engine that rewards challenging your opponents to put pressure on their board and also trigger the abilities of other cards to gain various advantages. The Deck features the new “Stitch, Alien Troublemaker” that allows the player to gain lore and cards when you use it to banish a character in a challenge and “Mulan, Charging ahead” that helps in banishing ready characters that your opponent may try to protect. “The Matchmaker, Unforgiving Expert” can also be used to slow down your opponent by making them lose lore whenever she challenges. Last but not least, this Deck also have some interesting new cards like “Cri-Kee, Part of the Team” and “Light the fuse” which take advantage of having exerted Characters in play.
As you are already aware with a great new Disney Lorcana set, come great new single player decks filled with amazing new cards. These single player decks have become progressively more and more interesting as a way to explore new mechanics released within a new set or to test new combinations and mechanics. I am a huge fan of these type of Decks and I am always wondering which new combination will be released with each new set.
As usual, Reign of Jafar includes two different Decks. The first one, “Brave and Brazen” is a well rounded deck based on an engine that rewards challenging your opponents to put pressure on their board and also trigger the abilities of other cards to gain various advantages. The Deck features the new “Stitch, Alien Troublemaker” that allows the player to gain lore and cards when you use it to banish a character in a challenge and “Mulan, Charging ahead” that helps in banishing ready characters that your opponent may try to protect. “The Matchmaker, Unforgiving Expert” can also be used to slow down your opponent by making them lose lore whenever she challenges. Last but not least, this Deck also have some interesting new cards like “Cri-Kee, Part of the Team” and “Light the fuse” which take advantage of having exerted Characters in play.
The second Single Player Deck is an Amber-Amethyst Deck called “A Harmonious team”. This deck is designed to use songs to trigger multiple powerful combos the same way single tunes come together to create a very effective harmony. The two Lead vocalists of these decks are “Tiana, Natural Talent” and “Bruno Madrigal, Singing Seer”. Tiana is not only a powerful Singer 6 but she can also reduce the Strength of each opposing Characters by 1 for each song played during a turn. Bruno, on the other hand will provide a card for each Characters in play every time a song is sung during a turn while “Pepa Madrigal, Sensitive Sister” will instead generate 1 lore. Will your characters be at risk of being removed after singing? Not if “Alma Madrigal, Accepting Grandmother” is around as her ability will ready all characters that sang in that turn. Although this ability only works one time per turn, there is no limitation on what the Characters will be able to do once they got ready….
The card-list of both these Single Player decks look quite intriguing, and I was definitely looking forward to try them out. However, thanks to the Ravensburger team I managed to sneak a copy of them ahead of the release thus I have a lot of first impressions to share after putting them against each other for a few days. Let’s have a look in detail into the second of these two decks, “A Harmonious team”
Reign of Jafar Single player Decks: contents
As usual, a Single Player Deck comes with a ready made 60-cards deck that also includes a foil copy of the two Characters depicted on the starter deck box itself. As done for all previous Starter Decks, all of the cards included are also available in the main set, and therefore no exclusive cards are included in these Starter Decks. On the other hand, both Starter Decks actually include 45 cards from Reign of Jafar plus a few other cards from previous sets. These include 13 from set 7 and 2 from the 5th set.
Inside the box, players will also find a standard Reign of Jafar Booster Pack with 12 additional cards of different rarity that can be used to boost the starter deck, a player’s guide with all the game rules, a small cardboard playmat with a lore tracker, a few cardboard damage tokens and one Lore tracker token.
Sing Together as loud as possible – A Harmonious Team Strategic Guide
A Harmonious team is a great example of how songs can be used efficiently to lead a Deck to victory without necessarily use the Steel songs all players know very well. In fact this Single Player Deck is stocked with 12 Songs cards (20% of the deck size) and none of them deal damages to the opponent Characters. In this case, all these songs are instead used as a way to trigger Characters abilities to generate Lore and to draw cards in addition to the effects of each single song.
In order to obtain the maximum effect from these songs, players will need to prepare a board properly starting from turn one when your best play would be “Mirabel Madrigal, Curious Child”. This version of Mirabel does not have very good stats but allows the Player to get a Lore right on play just by revealing a Song card. Unfortunately you would need to likely wait till turn three to actually sing any song using hopefully a cost 2 Character. Most of the Characters you can play on turn 2 are pretty good with “Bambi, Prince of the Forest” and “Huey, Reliable Leader” being your best options. Huey in particular is a good Character to have in play as he can either be exerted to sing a song on turn 3 or he can quest to play a Character at a lower cost.
The main reason you want to wait till turn three to sing any song is because you want to have “Pepa Madrigal, Sensitive Sister” in play before doing it to gain an additional Lore. For example, playing Pepa and then use Bambi or Huey to sing “This is my Family” will get the Player 2 lore and one card. “Trials and Tribulations” or “So Much to Give” can also be good options to protect your characters a bit longer. The aim of the game should be have Alma Madrigal or/and the Floodborn Bruno Madrigal in play to ready any Character that sings a song and to draw additional cards. Pepa will essentially provide you Lore while Alma and Bruno will help in keeping your engine going.
The greatest play you can achieve is to use your board to sing the new 9-cost Sing together song “Fantastical and Magical” that draws an additional card and provides one additional Lore for each Character singing it. This, obviously, is in addition to any bonus triggered by Alma, Pepa or Bruno and it can lead to a massive Lore swipe.
In order to keep your board protected to reach your end-game conditions, the 4-cost “Bruno Madrigal, Single Minded” can be of good help. Not only he provides a target for its Floodborn version later on but he also prevents an exerted Character from ready in their next turn. The action “They never Come back” can also be quite good to help protecting your Characters longer as it has the same effect but can affect up to two Characters. The new “Druun, Ravenues Plaque” can show that singers also have teeth while the adorable “Clawhauser, Front Desk Officer” can take one for the team as a Bodyguard or just join the Chorus with its Singer 4.
Final thoughts – Could this deck be competitive?
After playing Lorcana for quite a while, you know very well that Amber-Steel is by far the most renown and effective Song-based deck. In a Steel-Song deck, however, the songs are mostly used to damage the opponent and to remove pesky Evasive Characters. The idea of singing Songs as a mean to obtain lore and card advantage instead of keeping pressure on your opponent is actually quite nice and refreshing and I would love to see the Amber Ink colour evolving in this direction after set rotation. With this in mind, I think this Single Player deck can definitely be an opportunity to test something different and to find new ways to play songs. With this in mind, I think this deck can be improved in a few different directions depending on your preferred play style. The good starting point is that Amethyst is likely the more versatile Ink colour and it offer plenty of options for customization.
When looking to update A Harmonious Team” Single Player Deck, I think a good starting point can be to identify which cards are not really helpful to select the ones you really want to keep. Personally, I would list among cards to take out from the deck “Louie, One Cool Duck”, “Flower,
Shy Shunk”, “Ryder, Fleet-Footed Infiltrator”, “Poe de Spell, Magica’s Brother”, Dewey, Lovable Showoff”, “Mariano Guzman, Handsome Suitor”, “Dolores Madrigal, Within Earshot”, “Charlotte la Bouff, Mardi Gras Pricess”, “Antonio’s Jaguar, Faithful Companion” and “Madame Mim, Up to no Good”. All of these cards are decently good but they do not strengthen the Deck strategy or they can be swapped for better options. For example, Ryder and “Genie, Wish Fulfilled” are both 4-cost Evasive Characters but Genie quests for 2 instead of one and grants one card on play making him a better alternative to Ryder eventually.
In order to optimize your deck strategy, you should then consider adding more cards that take advantage from Singing songs and also to review the Song cards you have in the deck. In the first case, a few obvious choices are “Alan-a-Dale, Rockin’ Rooster” to gain a Lore for every Song played during a turn or Sleepy’s Flute as they both proved to be quite effective in Steel-Song decks in the past. In terms of songs, “This is my Family” is definitely the best one in your Deck and I would not take it out. The other songs that comes in the Single Player Deck are not bad but you may swap them to align more to your strategy. Among the options “Friends on the Other side”, “The Bare necessities”, “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and “Zero to Hero” can be quite good options to be used very early in the game to provide Card or Board advantage or to start messing up with your opponent strategy. As you have a lot of Characters from the Madrigal family I would also consider the 7-Cost Sing together “Look at this family” to get some good Characters to your Hand.
In terms of Characters, there are a lot of good singer cards to chose. “Cinderella, Ballroom sensation” and “Ariel, Spectacular Singer” would definitely be good options at least until the rotation hits but there are definitely be plenty of others to choose from. The Madrigal Family also includes cards from previous sets that can be added to boost this deck in various ways. For example, “Mirabel Madrigal, Musically Talented” can retrieve a 3-cost Song upon questing while “Isabela Madrigal, In the Moment” can quest for 4 Lore and not be challenged if any of the other player characters sings a Song in the same turn. Last but not least, we should consider “Kristoff, Reindeer Keeper” which cost is reduced by one for any song in the discard pile allowing this deck to bring out not only a powerful bodyguard quite quickly but also to use him to sing the 7 and 9-cost songs. So many good options to make this deck really POP!
Zatu Review Summary
Zatu Score
95%
