Meta Staples: The Cards Every Ink Keeps Playing

Ask five Lorcana players to name the format's staples and you will get five overlapping lists backed by nothing but table talk. We wanted that question answered by counting instead. Every public deck built on this site feeds a usage table, and the cards that keep appearing across those decks surface on /decks as the meta staples strip. This guide covers what makes a card a staple, how the counting works, what the percentages are really saying, and how to put the list to work when you build.

What a staple is

A staple is a card that keeps showing up in deck after deck, including decks that otherwise have nothing to do with each other. That last clause is the test. A card that powers one specific list is a build-around: essential there, absent everywhere else. A staple earns slots more broadly. Aggressive decks want it, slower decks want it, and rival archetypes inside the same ink all end up playing it, because whatever it does is worth doing in nearly any game plan.

That is also why staples tend to look humble on paper. The flashiest cards in a set usually demand a deck built around them. Staples are more often the quiet ones, cheap card draw or removal that answers something bigger than it costs. They rarely win a game by themselves. They keep you alive and drawing until the cards that do win can take over.

How we count them

Nobody hand-picks the staples list. It falls out of a usage table that aggregates every public deck on the site. For each card, the table records how many distinct public decks run it, what share of all public decks that is, and how many copies the average deck plays.

Two details keep the count clean. The first is that printings pool together. Enchanted and promo versions collapse into the same row as the plain printing, so a deck running the Enchanted version and a deck running the base one land in the same tally. Usage measures the card itself; the version a player happens to own has no effect on the stats.

The second is a floor. A card has to appear in a minimum number of public decks before it can rank at all. One brewer's pet card in a single list is a data point, and the floor keeps data points from masquerading as trends. Above it, cards rank by how many decks run them, with average copies breaking ties.

Nothing in that pipeline gets adjusted card by card, which means the list moves when the community moves. Publish a deck and you are, in a small way, voting on what the meta staples are.

Reading the percentages

Each tile on the staples strip carries one number, the share of all public decks that play the card. Read the denominator carefully. It is all public decks, every ink combination and every archetype, casual brews included.

That denominator changes what counts as a big number. A constructed deck can include cards from at most two inks, so any single card is legal in only a minority of the decks in the pool. A card sitting in roughly a quarter of all public decks is close to an automatic include for every deck that can legally play it, and it reaches that share while most of the pool is locked out of its ink entirely. In a two-ink format, twenty-something percent is dominance.

Behind the percentage, the usage data also tracks average copies. Since a deck can have no more than 4 copies of any one card, an average near four means the decks playing it run a full playset and expect to see it every game. An average closer to one or two marks a tool that decks want access to without spending many slots on.

Staples by ink

Staples do not spread evenly across the six inks. Each ink has a personality, and its staples are the purest expression of it, the cards every deck in that color wants no matter what the rest of the list is doing. So the practical way to read the strip on /decks is by color: find the cards in the inks you play before anything else, because those are the ones competing for slots in your actual decks. A dominant staple in an ink you never touch is trivia. The same card in your main pairing is a to-do item.

Every tile on the strip also links into the deck browser filtered to the public decks running that card. That filtered view is where the by-ink picture gets concrete. You can see which pairings actually play the card and which other staples sit next to it in real lists. A few minutes of clicking through your colors will tell you more about how your inks are being built right now than any tier list.

Using staples when you build

Open /builder with your ink pair chosen and lay in the pair's staples first. They cover the jobs every game demands, drawing cards and answering threats, and they leave the rest of the list free for the cards that make the deck yours. From there, fill out the curve so the deck can act early and still has something worth playing late, and get to at least 60 cards with no more than 4 copies of any one card.

Staples also deserve priority when you are growing a collection, because they carry over. A build-around retires with its archetype. A staple moves into your next deck, and the one after that, which makes it the safest pickup a newer player can make. Our budget decks guide approaches the same pool from the other direction: it starts from inexpensive lists and walks them, swap by swap, toward the staples their archetypes eventually want.

One last consequence of the pooling is worth repeating. Because every version of a card feeds the same count, the usage numbers never nudge you toward a fancier printing. The plain version counts the same in the stats and plays the same in the game.

The staples list will keep moving as new sets land and the public deck pool shifts. That is what measuring buys you over declaring. Check the strip when a new set arrives, and check it again when your deck feels a step behind the room. The counting will tell you which cards every ink keeps playing.