Meta Staples: The Cards Every Ink Keeps Playing

Ask five Lorcana players to name the format's staples and you'll 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 in the decks browser as the meta staples strip. This guide covers what makes a card a staple, how the counting works, what the percentages actually mean, and how to use the list 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 part 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's also why staples tend to look humble on paper. The flashiest cards in a set usually need a deck built around them. Staples are usually the quiet ones, cheap card draw or removal that answers something bigger than it costs. They rarely win a game on their own. 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, we record how many distinct public decks run it, what share of the decks using that card's ink that is, and how many copies the average deck plays.

Three 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, not the version a player happens to own.

The second is an ink-specific denominator. An Amber card competes against the public decks that actually contain Amber, not every deck on the site. We derive those ink pools from the cards inside each deck instead of trusting a label on the deck. Dual-ink cards can rank in both of their colors, with a separate percentage for each pool.

The third is a floor. A card has to show up 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 looking like 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're voting, in a small way, on what the staples are.

Reading the percentages

Each tile on the staples strip carries one number: the share of public decks in the selected ink that play the card. Pay attention to the ink named on the tile. "In 63% of Amber decks" means 63% of public decks containing Amber, across every Amber pairing and archetype.

That denominator makes colors comparable. The old all-decks percentage punished a card simply because four other inks could not play it. The ink-relative number answers the useful question instead: when someone builds with this color, how often does this card make the list?

Behind the percentage we also track 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 decks want access to without spending many slots on it.

Staples by ink

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. The strip in the decks browser shows every ink at once, one labeled row per color and the same handful of cards in each, so no ink crowds out the rest. A color joins the strip once its public deck pool holds enough qualifying cards to fill its share. Start with the inks you play, since those are the cards 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 the deck 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.

Staples also deserve priority when you're 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: since 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's 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.