It’s totally possible to do it with a very minimal deck :)
I think the trick was to get the extra two scorium cards and the aquifer pretty early and just upgrade, upgrade, upgrade while trashing my worst ore/two worst scorium cards. I nabbed the creature around round 6-7 which was key to triggering big score hits with the katzite, even when it didn’t collide with the amber on the initial turn. By rounds 9-10 I never played my ore cards except to add value to the katzite.