Emerald Format Coconut Leaders: Donald, Robin Hood and Ursula

Emerald has the most high-lore characters in the game: 38 characters with 3 or more lore, ahead of Sapphire at 31. It also holds the only table-wide damage effect outside Steel, To Wither a Flower, which makes it the default partner for anything that wants to sweep a board.

Emerald wins by racing rather than by fighting. It carries just 2 of the 29 banish-chosen-character effects, so if your plan needs a specific threat answered, you are looking outside this ink.

Counted across every card currently legal in Infinity. “One-sided sweepers” means cards that damage every opposing character without touching your own; symmetric board damage such as Lyle Tiberius Rourke - Crystallized Mercenary is excluded. “Cards that draw” is a broad match and is best read as a ranking between inks rather than an exact total. Use this to pick the two inks you are adding, not the one your leader already picked for you.

If you have landed here directly, these are the two rules that make evaluating a Coconut different from normal deckbuilding.

• The Coconut card is not in your deck. It costs no slot, it cannot be removed, and its ability is on from turn one.
• Singleton counts full names, not characters. “A character named Stitch” is a deep well, because every version of Stitch is a different card you may run one of. “Two or more other Hunny characters in play” is a trap, because each one is a one-of that has to be drawn and then survive. When an ability cares about a name, that is good news. When it counts a classification on the board, be suspicious.

A third category is easy to confuse with the second and is actually fine: abilities that trigger when you play a card of a type need only one card at a time in hand, never density on the board.

Both are covered in full in how to build a Coconut deck.

We are deliberately not ranking these by power. The format is weeks old, not one deck in the public corpus carries a win rate, and anyone claiming to know the best deck is guessing. Read these as build briefs.

You pay 1 ⬡ less to use Boost abilities.

Unlocks 4x Donald Duck - Fred Honeywell, a 4-cost 4/4/1 inkable Storyborn Ally with SPIRIT OF GIVING (whenever you use the Boost ability of a character, you may put the top card of your deck under them facedown) and WELL WISHES (during opponents’ turns, whenever one of your other characters is banished, you may draw a card for each card that was under them).

The deck: stack cards under your characters, then get paid when they die.

Boost reads, on the cards themselves, as “once during your turn, you may pay N ⬡ to put the top card of your deck facedown under this character.” So the Coconut makes every Boost one cheaper, and it makes Boost 1 free. There are 42 cards referencing Boost in the legal pool, spread across every ink.

Archetype, Paid in Full. Run the cheap Boost characters, stack cards under them with Donald out doubling every stack, and let the table kill them. Every banished character on someone else’s turn refunds you its whole pile.

Strengths. In a four-player pod there are three opponents’ turns between yours, so WELL WISHES has three times the windows it would have in a duel. It rewards you for the thing you cannot prevent anyway, which is your board getting attacked. Free Boost is real value every single turn.

Weaknesses. WELL WISHES says during opponents’ turns, so your own trades and your own removal pay you nothing. The engine also wants two things at once, Donald in play and Boost characters in hand, and Boost is a recent and narrow mechanic, so the deck is more constrained on what it can play than any other Emerald option.

Two off-ink cards worth building toward. Every Boost card in the game gets a discount, and Boost is spread across all six inks rather than concentrated in Emerald. Gaston - Frightful Bully (Amber, 2 cost) and Hercules - Spectral Demigod (Ruby, 1 cost) both carry Boost 2, which the Coconut turns into Boost 1. Hercules is the sharper one, since the card you tuck under him gives him +3 strength on a one-drop body.

Once per game during your turn, you may deal 1 damage to each opposing character.

Unlocks 4x Robin Hood - Sneaky Sleuth, a 5-cost 3/5/1 inkable Floodborn Hero with Shift 3 and CLEVER PLAN: this character gets +1 ◊ for each opposing damaged character in play.

The deck: one enormous turn.

Archetype, One Good Ambush. The two halves are built to fire in sequence. Use the Coconut to put a point of damage on every character across all three opponents, then quest with Robin Hood, who now counts every one of those damaged characters, on every board, for lore.

This is worth calling out because it looks like the two-card combo we tell you never to build. It is not, and the difference matters. One half is the Coconut, which is always available and needs no draw. The other half is your four-of. That is a completely different reliability profile from two singletons.

Strengths. The lore swing is the biggest one-turn number in the format, and it scales with the number of players rather than shrinking. It also softens three boards at once for whatever damage you have queued up behind it.

Weaknesses. Once per game, not once per turn, and one damage kills only the smallest characters. You get one shot at the timing, and firing it early for a modest gain wastes the whole card. Robin Hood’s Shift 3 also wants another Robin Hood in play first, and without the Coconut fired he is a 3/5 that quests for one.

Two off-ink cards worth building toward. CLEVER PLAN counts damaged characters across every opponent, so you want more ways to chip three boards at once, and that effect lives almost entirely in Steel. Avalanche (Steel, 4 cost) deals 1 damage to each opposing character and can banish a location. Windstorm (Steel, 4 cost) does the same and then adds 2 more to anything with Evasive. Either one turns Robin Hood into a four or five lore quester on the turn it resolves.

Your characters count as having +1 cost for singing songs. Your characters named Ursula count as having +2 cost instead.

Unlocks 4x Ursula - Deceiver of All, a 3-cost 2/3/1 inkable Dreamborn Villain Sorcerer with WHAT A DEAL: whenever this character sings a song, you may play that song again from your discard for free, then put that card on the bottom of your deck instead of into your discard.

The deck: songs, cast twice.

First, clear up the wording, because it reads like a downside and is the opposite. Singing requires a character whose cost is at least the song’s cost. So counting as more expensive means every body in your deck sings a tier above its weight, and Ursula herself, a 3-drop, sings your five-cost songs.

Archetype, Encore. Build around the biggest songs you can find and get Ursula singing them. Every song she sings resolves, then resolves again for free out of your discard. In a pod, doubling a card that hits every opponent is the best rate in the format, and there are 119 songs in the legal pool to choose from.

Strengths. Free double-casts of your best effects, and a name check on characters named Ursula that singleton cannot shrink, so every Ursula version you run is another premium singer. Songs are also cheap to acquire, which makes this one of the friendlier builds to assemble.

Weaknesses. Everything runs through a 2/3 body that the table can kill on sight, and she has to survive a full turn before she can sing at all. You need songs and a singer in hand together. And the recursion puts the song on the bottom of your deck rather than the discard, so you cannot loop the same one twice.

Two off-ink cards worth building toward. The Coconut makes every character count as more expensive for singing, which matters most for Sing Together songs, where what you need to clear is the combined cost of the characters you exert. A Pirate’s Life (Ruby, 6 cost) drains 2 lore from each opponent and gives you 2, a swing of eight at a four-player table. With a Few Good Friends (Amethyst, 6 cost) draws a card for each different ink among your characters, which a three-ink deck is unusually good at.

From every public community deck in the format, pulled 25 August 2026, 88 of them legal. Decks is how many people built one. Copies taken is how many times someone else copied that deck to play it themselves. Those measure different things and they disagree loudly.

Emerald is the most-played ink in the format by a wide margin: 23 decks and 123 copies across its three leaders. Donald has the most decks of any Coconut and Ursula has the most copies of any Coconut, and they sit in the same ink for opposite reasons. Donald is what the tinkerers build. Ursula is what people want to play.

None of this is a power ranking. Not one deck in the corpus carries a win rate, so nobody has performance data for this format, us included. Read the right-hand column as how much other people wanted to play it, which is useful and is a completely different thing from whether it is good.

The full eighteen-leader comparison is in the August format report.

Amber · Amethyst · Ruby · Sapphire · Steel

Or start from the overview of all eighteen leaders.

We are building ready-to-play Format Coconut decks now, and every list gets played out before it ships to anybody. The first wave is not on sale yet. Join the list on our Format Coconut decks page and we will email you the moment it is ready.