Neopets TCG 102: Deck Building on a Budget

If you’re just getting started, you probably already own the Neopets Trading Card Game Starter Set. This is a great place to start, although with only six Basic Neopets, you won’t be able to build a legal tournament deck. This does, however, give you a great card base from which to start building! So where do we go from here? Theme decks!

Neopets released two theme decks with the Battle for Meridell expansion; the Meridell deck and the Kass deck. Neither of these is an amazing deck, but these two theme decks combined with the cards from the starter set will give you a lot more options for building your own decks.

You may be wondering why you’d want to buy the theme decks as opposed to booster packs. The answer is that these theme decks come ready to play with two or three copies of many cards. For the price of both theme decks you could buy around six booster packs, and the odds of getting as many cards that work well together or doubles of cards as the theme decks are slim. You would need to buy several more booster packs to begin to build a deck with the starter set. Simply put, it’s cheaper for beginners to build a deck this way until they build up a stronger card base.

Let’s get started! There are only three rules in deck building. First, you must have a minimum of 10 Basic Neopets. Second, you need a minimum of 40 cards in your deck. Finally, you may not have more than three copies of any card in your deck or Neopet stack.

Those are the only rules, but there are several things I’d strongly advise for beginners. For instance, over half your deck should be made up of bankable cards (Items and Equipment). You should also stick to two or three faerie types and two to three species of Neopets.

Keeping these rules and guidelines in mind, it’s time to take a look at all the cards and sort them. Sorting the cards into their own card types will help you get an idea of what you have to work with.

Basic and Experienced Neopets are going to cover three of the arenas, so these cards will be our first priority. This will also help us decide which faerie types to use. Looking at our Neopets, it becomes apparent that since there is only one Earth Basic Neopet and one Fire Basic Neopet, these two faerie types would not be good choices for our deck. That leaves us with Light, Air, Water, and Dark. Since there is only one Basic Neopet for Aishas, Korbats, and Acaras, these will also be excluded. That leaves us with Zafaras (Light), Blumaroos (Air), Eyries (Air), Quiggles (Water), and Skeiths (Dark).

At this point it can be helpful to see what Villains are available. Since we can only have three Neopets in play at any given time, the fourth arena is going to need to be blocked off by a Villain. Our options are Morguss and Draik Skeleton. Morguss is an Air and Dark Villain with an 18 in magic and intelligence. The Draik Skeleton is Dark and Fire and has 15/13/17/17 for its stats. Both allow your opponent to untap when they defeat the Villain. Since we’re not using Fire in our deck, to use one of the Villains we need either Air or Water.

Since both Villains may be played with Dark, I’ve chosen Skeiths for our deck. Skeiths also offer the benefit of an Experienced Neopet. Now that Skeiths are going to cover the strength arena, we need Neopets for agility and either magic or intelligence.

With two Experienced Neopets, five Basic Neopets, and the highest stat available for agility, Quiggles are a great choice for this deck. This leaves us with magic or intelligence to fill. Let’s look at our cards again.

We’ve already narrowed our options down to Zafaras, Eyries, and Blumaroos. Since Eyries are best in strength, and we already have Skeiths covering that arena, we’ll leave them out of this deck. Blumaroos have the best intelligence stat as well as an Experienced Neopet with a great ability, but Blumaroos are a little tricky. Basic Blumaroos have a higher stat in intelligence, but the Experienced Blumaroo actually has a lower intelligence than the Basic Blumaroo!

Looking at what Something Has Happened and Equipment cards are available also helps. Some of the Equipment and SHH cards that can most help our deck are Light, so I think Zafaras would be a better choice than Blumaroos.

So now we have our Basic Neopets, Experienced Neopets, and Villains picked out, giving us our faerie types. Now we can look at all our other cards to help out. At this point, you might want to remove any Air, Earth, or Fire faerie type specific cards because they won’t be used in this deck. Then we can move on to Heroes.

The Meridell theme deck offers several Heroes with excellent abilities. The Water faerie type has a couple of the best. We’ll include Kayla and Morris in our deck. Kayla allows you to draw a card if you lose a contest, and Morris stays in play at the end of the turn if he loses a contest, making for a longer lasting Hero that can help out on your opponent’s turn and your next turn!

There are only four Something Has Happened cards available for our faerie types and they are all worth putting in this deck. Light offers Library Visit, allowing you to tap a Light Neopet to draw two cards! Since our Zafaras don’t have an Experienced Neopet and magic isn’t our strongest arena, the Zafara may fall a bit behind, but the Library Visit will let you draw two cards anyway! Another great SHH card is the Gigantic Snowball. You get to pick one of your opponent’s Neopets, and it doesn’t untap on your opponent’s next turn! This is always useful in keeping your opponents from getting auto wins, or from winning easily in arenas where you’re overpowered. The Dark SHH card is Chomp, while turns one of your opponent’s Neopets stats to 1. You’re almost assured a win when you pay this card! All four of these cards have a place in our deck.

It’s time to talk about Equipment. Since we only have one copy of each of our Experienced Neopets, the odds of getting one in play aren’t great, so we’re going to need to improve our stats somehow. This is where Equipment comes in. Since we have Light in our deck, we’re going to add Jeran’s Armour and Jeran’s Sword. The armour keeps your opponent from playing Items and gives a +2 to agility! The Sword gives a +3 to strength, and if you have a Jeran’s Armour and a Jeran’s Sword attached to the same Neopet, it gets a +4 to all stats! What a boost!

We also need some heavy hitters that just boost our stats. This is why I’ve included Wooden Blocking Shield (a +4 in agility) and Ice Scimitar (a +4 in strength). These are very arena specific and we don’t have anything to boost magic yet, so we’ll add a couple of Puppyblews, which give a +3 in magic and a +2 everywhere else. Finally rounding out our Equipment, we’ll add a Sceptre of Banishing, which will help us with Villains; it gets a +7 against them!

At this point, all we have left to do is add some Items! Because this deck is going to depend on banking fast and large numbers, I’ve chosen 13 Items with a bank value of 4. I’ve also tried to avoid Food as much as possible, because Food are a target of Crop Failure, a very popular card that removes a Food from your bank. That being said, I also included the Peachpa. This works as a combo with Jeran’s Armour because the Item has excellent stats, but is discarded if your opponent plays an Item too. If you have the Jeran’s Armour, your opponent can’t play an Item!

There are a couple of other cards that had to be included. Healing Potions are an excellent Water faerie type Item. They not only give a +4 in strength and agility; they untap one of your Neopets when you bank them! This is always helpful, especially if you get the Quiggle Runner in play! Otherwise, you can use this to untap to put on more Equipment or use Something Has Happened cards.

I’ve also included the Potion of Speed and Potion of Strength. They both give a +3 stat bonus, and each goes back into your hand if you win the contest! Finally, I’ve added Kass’s Charm, which is another help against Villains. It lets you choose a Villain and move it to a different arena! So if you think of a Villain with a 23 in magic, but a measly 8 in strength, you can move her to where you’ll have no trouble beating her!

That should finish off our deck. Let’s take a look at it:

Basic Neopets: Equipment:

1 Red Zafara 2 Jeran’s Armour

2 Yellow Zafara 1 Jeran’s Sword

3 Green Quiggle 2 Wooden Blocking Shield

1 Blue Skeith 2 Puppyblew

3 Green Skeith 2 Ice Scimitar

1 Sceptre of Banishing

Experienced Neopets:

1 Quiggle Runner Items:

1 Quiggle Scout 2 Light Faerie Token

1 Darigan Skeith 2 Healing Potion

1 Dark Faerie Token

Heroes: 1 Kass’s Charm

2 Kayla 2 Illusen’s Charm

2 Morris 2 Moon Charm

2 Chokato

Villains: 2 Peachpa

1 Morguss 2 Pinanna

1 Draik Skeleton 2 Potion of Speed

2 Potion of Strength

Something Has Happened: 2 Shadow Breeze

2 Library Visit

1 Gigantic Snowball Total: 45 cards

1 Chomp

This is a tournament legal deck that has a lot going for it. Even better, you can build this deck for around $30! With the Neopets Trading Card Game Starter Set and the Meridell and Kass theme decks, you’ve opened up a lot of options for deck building! This is only one deck idea. So get these products and start building your own creations today!