92 Players Brought Boost to a Qualifier. None of Them Made Top 8.
What you will actually sit across from at an Attack of the Vine Set Championship, based on 800 decklists from 11 qualifiers. Two decks take two thirds of all Top 8 slots, one popular deck has stopped converting entirely, and the cheapest winning list cost $120.
Ninety-two players registered Amber/Ruby Boost across the Set 13 qualifier season. Between them they produced zero Top 8 finishes. Boost was 17% of the field in late July and it is 1% now. If you are deciding what to register in September, that is the single clearest thing the results say.
Set Championships run every weekend this month, nine rounds of best-of-three, no sideboards. This is what the field looks like going in, taken from 800 decklists across 11 qualifiers between July 18 and August 23.
We are publishing it before the first weekend so it can be graded afterward rather than quietly revised. In July we ranked the five cards that shaped Wilds Unknown and said which would survive rotation; all four calls held, including Merryweather - Feisty Fairy, who was the most-played card in the set when we said she would fade and now shows up in under one percent of the field. One article is not a track record, but we would rather post the scorecard than only the predictions.
What you will play against
| Deck | Inks | Share of field | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Midrange | Amber/Amethyst | 21.0% | rising |
| Elinor decks | Amber/Emerald | 17.7% | rising hard |
| Songs | Amber/Emerald | 11.5% | falling |
| Evasive | Amethyst/Ruby | 9.6% | rising |
| Steelsong | Amber/Steel | 9.2% | falling |
| Emerald/Steel shells | Emerald/Steel | 8.1% | rising |
| Bots | Amethyst/Steel | 6.3% | falling |
| Control | Amethyst/Emerald | 4.1% | rising |
| Boost | Amber/Ruby | 1.0% | collapsed |
Both the online ladder and the paper results move every one of these the same direction, which is the reason to trust the table at all.
The two decks you have to beat
Amber/Emerald and Amber/Amethyst were 38% of the field and took two thirds of every Top 8 seat. Whatever you bring needs a real plan for Elinor and for Midrange. Nothing else is close.
Elinor decks are the strongest riser in the data. They went from 43% to 65% of their color pair over the season, they won the two largest events of the set (Thailand at 224 players, Singapore at 172), and they are now roughly one in six decks in the room.
Worth knowing what she actually does, because she is not only a Princess-deck card: at the end of your turn, if you have three or more exerted characters, she deals 1 damage, gains you 1 lore and draws you a card. Any deck that quests with a wide board turns her on every single turn. That is why she also shows up in the Amber/Emerald Toy builds, which is the version we build as You’ve Got a Friend in Me.
Midrange is the other one. One in seven players brought it and it took one in four Top 8 seats, the best conversion of any deck in the format. It won three qualifiers.
It is also the most expensive way to play Lorcana. The deck that won Pastimes D23 cost $576, the priciest winning list in the whole dataset, with four copies each of Dumbo - Ninth Wonder of the Universe, Demona - Scourge of the Wyvern Clan and Hades - Looking for a Deal.
One practical note if you sit across from it: Amber/Amethyst has the highest first-player win rate in the format at 57.6%. Nine rounds of best-of-three with no sideboards makes the die roll matter more than usual, and this deck leans on it harder than any other.
Why Boost collapsed
Boost is not a bad deck on paper. The ladder rates it at 53.49%, which is a perfectly good number, and that is exactly why people kept bringing it.
The problem is one matchup. Boost loses to Amber/Emerald 33% of the time across 2,119 recorded games, and Amber/Emerald is the biggest pair in the format. A deck with a fine average and a catastrophic matchup against a quarter of the room is precisely the deck that feels fine in practice and then goes 4-5 in Swiss.
Ninety-two registrations, zero Top 8s. If you were planning on Boost in September, that is the argument against it.
The deck nobody is prepared for
Amethyst/Emerald Control is the smallest thing in this report and the most interesting. Fifteen qualifier decks, but it produced two Top 8 finishes and won the Woodzshack Multi Case CCQ at 128 players on an 8-0-2 record. The winning list cost $242.
It is rising in both sources from a very low base. Fifteen decks is a small sample and you should treat it that way, but if you want the deck your opponents have not practiced against, this is the candidate.
You do not need the expensive version
Winning qualifier decks ranged from $120 to $576, with a median of $293. The cheapest winner was an Elinor list that took a 116 player event, and its most expensive card was four Elinor - Renowned Diplomat at $11.65.
The part that should change how you shop: across the 11 winning decklists, the format’s famous expensive cards mostly are not there. Demona and Hades - Looking for a Deal each appeared in six. Dumbo appeared in four. But Circle of Life appeared in one, Angel - Experiment 624 in one, and Ohana Means Family in one. The simulator rates all three near the top of the format. The people actually winning tournaments are largely not playing them.
What to do with this
Bring something that beats Elinor and Midrange. They are two thirds of the Top 8 seats. Everything else is a rounding error next to that.
Do not bring Boost. Ninety-two people tried it this season.
Do not assume you need to spend $500. The median winning deck was $293 and the cheapest was $120.
Paper figures come from inkDecks tournament results for the 11 Set 13 Championship Qualifiers held between July 18 and August 23, 2026. Share and Top 8 figures use only the 725 decks from six full-field events; 75 decks from top-cut-only events were used to identify what wins, never as a denominator. Ladder figures come from public best-of-three play on duels.ink since the July 16 rotation. Decks were matched between the two sources by comparing card lists rather than archetype names. Six of the eleven qualifiers were Asian events and a North American September field may differ. The most recent paper week is a single 96-deck event, so anything under about 2% there is one or two physical lists. Prices are near-mint market as of August 25, 2026. This report will be restamped after each Set Championship weekend.