Encoder-based language models remain essential for natural language understanding tasks such as classification, semantic similarity, and retrieval-augmented generation. However, the lack of high-quality monolingual encoders for Brazilian Portuguese poses a significant challenge to performance. In this work, we systematically explore the training of Portuguese-specific encoder models from scratch using two modern architectures: DeBERTa, trained with Replaced Token Detection (RTD), and ModernBERT, trained with Masked Language Modeling (MLM). All models are pre-trained on the large-scale Jabuticaba corpus. Our DeBERTa-Large model achieves results comparable to the state-of-the-art, with F1 scores of 0.920 on ASSIN2 RTE and 0.915 on LeNER. Crucially, it matches the performance of the 900M-parameter Albertina model while utilizing significantly fewer parameters. We also release custom tokenizers that reduce token fertility rates compared to multilingual baselines. These findings provide evidence that careful architectural choices and monolingual tokenization can yield competitive performance without massive model scaling.