Steel Format Coconut Leaders: John Silver, Scar and Tinker Bell

Steel owns table-wide damage. We checked the full legal pool: there are 11 cards in the game that deal damage to each opposing character, and 10 of them are Steel. The eleventh is Emerald. Steel also holds zero of the 29 banish-chosen-character effects, which is the cleanest statement of what this ink is. It kills boards, not individuals.

Against three opponents, a card that hits every opposing character is doing triple duty, and this is the only ink that has them in quantity.

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.

Each of your locations gains Resist +1 for each character there.

Unlocks 4x John Silver - Greedy Treasure Seeker, a 3-cost 3/3/1 inkable Dreamborn Villain Alien Pirate Captain with CHART YOUR OWN COURSE: for each location you have in play, this character gains Resist +1 and gets +1 ◊.

The deck: locations as an engine, which almost nobody is doing.

Archetype, Treasure Planet. The unlocked card is where the value is. Each location you control makes John Silver bigger, harder to damage, and worth another point of lore. Three locations out and he is a 4-lore quester with Resist +3, which is a serious clock on a 3-cost body. There are 47 locations legal in a Steel, Emerald and Ruby build, so the pool is there.

Strengths. Locations are the format’s most durable permanent. They survive board wipes, which in a pod full of sweepers is real insurance, and they generate value without ever exposing a character to a challenge. Locations are also about 2% of what community decks play, so almost nobody has answers for them.

Weaknesses. We will be straight with you: the Coconut itself is the weakest of the eighteen. Resist on your locations only matters if someone is attacking your locations, and mostly nobody is. The unlocked card carries this deck almost single-handed. Locations are also slow, they cost ink that could be a body, and moving characters onto them costs more ink again.

Two off-ink cards worth building toward. Every location makes John Silver bigger, harder to damage and worth another point of lore, so the cheapest locations are the most efficient. Jolly Roger - Hook’s Ship (Ruby, 1 cost) gives characters Rush while they are there, and Belle’s House - Maurice’s Workshop (Sapphire, 1 cost) makes your items a cost cheaper. Both are one-cost, which is the number that matters when you want three of them out.

During your turn, you pay 1 ⬡ less for the first Ally character you play.

Unlocks 4x Scar - Finally King, a 5-cost 5/4/2 uninkable Legendary Storyborn Villain King with BE GRATEFUL (your Ally characters get +1 ¤) and STICK WITH ME (at the end of your turn, if this character is exerted, you may draw cards equal to the ¤ of a chosen Ally character of yours; if you do, choose and discard 2 cards and banish that character).

The deck: the least-explored one, by a distance. Scar had zero community decks in our August 11 sample and just two as of August 25, out of 91. Both appeared on the same day, which is what a lane looks like right before it opens.

Archetype, Long Live the King. Ally is the biggest tribe you can actually build around, with 660 legal Ally cards. Only the three birth origins (Storyborn, Dreamborn and Floodborn) are printed on more cards, and those are on almost every character rather than being a tribe. Quest with Scar, which exerts him, then at end of turn cash in an Ally for cards equal to its strength. BE GRATEFUL adds +1 strength to every Ally, which is a card on top of whatever you were drawing.

Strengths. A draw engine that scales with how big your board is, on a deck that gets a discount on the thing it plays every turn. There are 27 Allies with 6 or more strength in the pool, and each one is a potential six-card refill. Being unexplored is also a legitimate advantage in a format this young, since nobody at your table knows what your deck does.

Weaknesses. STICK WITH ME is expensive in a way the card does not advertise. You banish your own Ally, then discard 2 cards, so drawing five cards is really netting two cards and costing a body. Cash in something small and you have simply lost material. Scar is also uninkable at 5 cost, so he is a dead card in an opening hand, and he has to survive a full turn while exerted for the ability to ever trigger.

Two off-ink cards worth building toward. STICK WITH ME draws cards equal to a chosen Ally’s strength, and BE GRATEFUL adds one to that, so the whole deck wants big cheap Allies and Ruby and Emerald have them. Willie the Giant - Ghost of Christmas Present (Ruby, 4 cost, 7/7/2) is a seven-power Ally for four, which cashes in for eight cards. Hook Hand - Unexpectedly Friendly (Emerald, 5 cost, 6/5/2) is a clean vanilla six-power Ally with no conditions attached.

Whenever one of your other abilities or actions deals damage to an opposing character, deal 1 damage to that character.

Unlocks 4x Tinker Bell - Giant Fairy, a 6-cost 4/5/2 inkable Floodborn Ally Fairy with Shift 4, ROCK THE BOAT (when you play this character, deal 1 damage to each opposing character) and PUNY PIRATE! (during your turn, whenever this character banishes another character in a challenge, you may deal 2 damage to chosen opposing character).

The deck: a damage multiplier bolted onto the format’s most-played effect class.

Archetype, Second Star. A card that damages every opposing character is the best rate in the format, because it hits three boards at once. There are only 11 such cards in the whole legal pool, but 10 of them are Steel, so a Steel Coconut has natural access to nearly all of them. This Coconut turns every single one into a 2-damage sweep across the whole table. One damage kills almost nothing. Two damage kills a great deal.

The unlocked card does it to itself. ROCK THE BOAT deals 1 to each opposing character, the Coconut adds another, and with a playset that happens up to four times a game.

Strengths. It upgrades cards you were already going to play, so there is no deckbuilding tax and no combo to assemble. It scales with the pod rather than against it. And it stacks with the format’s own preferences instead of fighting them.

Weaknesses. Two limits are written into the text and both matter. It says “one of your other abilities or actions,” and it says abilities or actions, which means challenge damage does not trigger it. This is a card-based damage deck, not a combat deck, and building it like a combat deck will disappoint you. Tinker Bell’s Shift 4 also needs another Tinker Bell in play, and at 6 cost without Shift she is slow.

Two off-ink cards worth building toward, and one hard constraint. We checked the whole legal pool. Of the 11 cards that damage every opposing character without touching your own, 10 are Steel and the eleventh is Emerald. Outside those two inks there is exactly one option, Lyle Tiberius Rourke - Crystallized Mercenary (Ruby, 8 cost), and it deals its 2 damage to each character in play, so it hits your own board just as hard. That effectively makes Emerald your second ink. To Wither a Flower (Emerald, 4 cost) deals 2 to each opposing damaged character, which the Coconut turns into 3. Chomp! (Emerald, 1 cost) deals 2 to a chosen damaged character, which becomes 3 for a single ink. Note that both care about characters that are already damaged, so they want something to chip the board first.

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.

Tinker Bell has the highest copies-per-deck of any Coconut in the format. Four people built her and 59 people took the list, the strongest want-to-play signal in the data. Scar sits in the same ink with two decks and a single copy, despite having the deepest card pool of any leader to work with.

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 · Emerald · Ruby · Sapphire

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.