Disney Lorcana: The First Chapter Review

TheGamer’s resident card boys and Lorcana superfans Eric Switzer and Joe Parlock have been absolutely consumed by the new Disney trading card for the last week. If you followed our Lorcana Week coverage, you know the game stole our hearts right from the start, and that we’re committed to covering Lorcana as it grows and changes over the coming months and years.

But, we’re nothing if not professional. So we’ve put our Disney fandom aside in order to assess Lorcana’s strengths and weaknesses in depth, and as objectively as possible. We’ll be looking at the game from four perspectives: Design, Product Quality, Gameplay, and Longevity.

Design

Eric: Ravensburger has made a lot of wise decisions with Lorcana so far, but none have been better than the decision to produce all original art for the game. I fell in love with this game when I saw those first seven cards at D23 Expo last year, and the love has only grown fonder since. In some ways I miss Lorcana’s spoiler season, before the game was released, when cards were being revealed one at a time. Discovering each card and having time to ruminate on their individual details and designs gave me a lot of appreciation for the artwork, and I’m excited to have that experience again and again with each new expansion.

There’s so much I could say about how much I love Lorcana’s art direction and style. The way each ink is incorporated into the color palette of each card is brilliant, and it does a lot to tie all the cards in a specific ink together and give them a unified look. I also love the way the ink symbols have been incorporated into some of the cards, like Hercules’ shield and Ariel’s music box. The layout is clean and clear, which makes the game easy to teach and understand.

I’m a huge sucker for well-themed cards. I love when a character’s abilities or stats match who the character is or what they do. It’s my favorite thing about Marvel Snap, and Lorcana does it extraordinarily well too. I love Maui, Hero to All, which has Rush and Reckless – two perfect keywords for Maui. When he hits the board, he does exactly what you’d think Maui would do. Those kinds of details add a layer of emergent narrative to the game that helps you to visualize what’s happening in the battle, and I can’t get enough of it.

It’s one of those things that shows how much care and attention went into every single card, even the pack fillers. I’ll never play Moana, Chosen by the Ocean or Ariel, on Human Legs, because they’re terrible cards – but I’m delighted that they exist. I hope the game will continue to have fun with themes and characters, because it adds a lot of depth and flavor to the game.

The thing that really pushes the design of Lorcana from good to great are the Dreamborn and Floodborn characters. Cards like Tinker Bell, Giant Fairy and Hades, King of Olympus spark my imagination and make me excited for the future of the game. There’s pure Disney magic in those designs. There’s a cynical impression of Lorcana that it’s just a Magic clone with Disney characters, but the creativity of its reimagined characters easily beats those allegations. They make Lorcana an authentic Disney experience, rather than just another licensed product.

There’s a je ne sais quoi to Lorcana, an X factor that makes it so irresistible. It’s the way each character’s personality and essence are so perfectly captured in their expressions and body language. It’s the way dozens of artists with different styles can make hundreds of cards that all feel like they’re part of the same world. It’s the sense of wonder, excitement, and joy that springs force from every card. It’s the decision to include characters like Archimedes and John Silver alongside Elsa and Stitch. It’s impossible for me to separate my love for Disney from my love for Lorcana, but as a huge fan of the Mouse, I can say that Lorcana is giving me everything I could ever want from a Disney card game.

Joe: The thing that gets me about Lorcana is how, right from the get-go, Ravensburger has made it clear practically every part of Disney canon is on the table. It would’ve been so easy for Lorcana to be a promotional tool for whatever the latest Disney movies around each set are, like the upcoming Wish.

Instead, Lorcana has a great balance of fan-favourites and deep cuts. We’ve got the bigguns like Elsa, Rapunzel, and Stitch, but we’ve also got John Silver from Treasure Planet, the Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, and The Emperor’s New Groove.

I do think some of the art plays it slightly too safely – Mickey Mouse, True Friend is almost eye-rollingly on model, for example. But elsewhere, there’s such creativity that feels far divorced from Disney’s usual infamous overprotectiveness of its properties. I can’t imagine a game this side of Kingdom Hearts that would be willing to show Mickey in so many different ways, or Scar as a fire demon from Hell.

Product Quality

Eric: As enthusiastic as I am about the look and design of the game itself, I’m far less impressed with the quality of the products. I have major concerns over just about every accessory in the launch lineup, and I’ve also encountered a number of quality concerns with the cards themselves.

I don’t care for the deck boxes at all. The artwork is nice, but all of the lines and creases look worn out, even when they’re brand new. They’re a bit too stiff, and after taking them outside they now give off a horrific smell. I didn’t even expose them to direct sunlight, but now they smell like rotting pumpkins, and they make my cards smell too. Not impressed with those at all.

The boxes aren’t nearly as bad as the sleeves though. It’s as if they’ve been designed to produce the maximum amount of friction so that your cards can’t slide past each other at all. They stick to each other and the playmats – the one accessory I don’t have anything bad to say about – and they’re almost impossible to shuffle. They didn’t even print the art directly onto the sleeve. It’s another layer that’s glued on top of it, and I only had to mash-shuffle my deck a few times before the art started to separate from the sleeve. I don’t understand how they can sell these, the Disney Sorcerer Arena card sleeves are way better.

I’m not all that impressed with the binder either. I don’t have major quality concerns, but I just don’t understand who a 60-card binder serves. I’ve heard people say it’s good for kids as they start to build their collection, but I still can’t imagine a scenario where having such a small binder would be useful to anyone, even kids. I thought about just putting my tradable cards in there to carry around with me, but it’s not enough space for all my extra holographics, rares, super rares, and legendaries, and I’ve only opened a little more than three booster boxes so far. The slots for novelty-sized promo cards are nice, but I’d rather have a little binder just for those than one that can hold a single deck’s-worth of cards.

As far as the actual product goes, I’ve got major gripes with the booster boxes and the Treasure Trove. Ravensburger has elected to go with a pull-tab design for the booster box, and while I appreciate not having more plastic to throw away, there’s a major security flaw here. When I got my first booster box at Gen Con last month, I immediately reached into the box and pulled out a pack without even ripping the pull-tab off. There’s a gap on top where you can reach your full hand in and pull packs out. Hell, I bet if you shook the box hard enough packs would fall out of it.

This worries me because it enables bad actors to tamper with the boxes. Packs could go missing, or someone with a lot of boxes could open them until they find an Enchanted card, then put the rest of the packs from that box in a pile, and use them to fill up an empty, sealed box. All of the cards in a box have the same serial number, which can help you identify if you’ve been ripped off, but it won’t stop someone from doing it in the first place. I hope this problem can be fixed quickly. I don’t care about people who want to keep sealed product in their closets, but I also don’t think fresh booster boxes should be this easy to manipulate.

As for the Treasure Trove, I just think it’s another low-quality product. The box itself isn’t nearly as thick and durable as a Pokemon Elite Trainer Box, and it doesn’t come with anything other than paper damage counters and a couple of paper deck boxes, which you should never use if you care at all about protecting your cards. Lorcana products sell for a premium over other card games, even at MSRP, and I expected higher-quality stuff for the price. Pokemon ETBs come with plastic status indicators, a bag of dice, dividers, a coin, and an additional booster pack, and they’re typically $10 cheaper than Treasure Troves.

The cards themselves have some major quality issues as well. I’ve had the most issues with foils, which often have sections covered in black speckling, as if the ink wasn’t applied in a solid layer. I have multiple cards with roller marks down the center of them, and I’ve seen cards with crimping. Every TCG has printing issues, and maybe I’m unlucky, but I’ve seen a lot more than usual with Lorcana. In one of the starter decks I opened, all of the cards were glued together in a solid block. As I peeled them all apart, some of them left ink behind on the cards they were stuck to.

None of these concerns bear a single ounce of weight on my or any else’s enjoyment of the game itself. I don’t think about defects in the foiling when I’m playing the game, and I already have different sleeves and storage solutions that are far better. But like I said before, Lorcana is a premium-priced game, and I expect premium-quality products. It doesn’t bother me too much as a player, but as a collector, I’m disappointed.

Joe: I haven’t had the pleasure of opening a booster box of Lorcana yet, but have looked at all three starter decks, the Gift Set, and the Treasure Trove.

I’m perhaps a little more positive on the Treasure Trove than Eric, seeing as I’m more used to Magic: The Gathering’s take on Booster Bundles than Pokemon’s ETBs. The box just looks nice, and is a different shape to the usual ETB/Bundle design. It would’ve been nice to see it come with sleeves, dividers, or something to make storing cards a bit easier, but as a piece of Lorcana memorabilia, I don’t hate it.

The Gift Set is a much harder sell. My biggest concern here is the lore tracking counters. The box makes a big deal of them, so I was expecting at least plastic, akin to Pokemon’s flip-coins, but instead, they’re just yet more cardboard punch-outs that make the box feel slightly cheap. You’re paying a premium for four packs, two extra playable cards, and a big box you have to tear apart to open, when this could’ve been a lot more.

As for the cards themselves, one thing worth mentioning is the cold foiling process used so far seems to make Lorcana foils much less prone to ‘pringling’ than Magic or Pokemon. This has a real gameplay benefit, as you can probably play foils in competitive games without accusations of tampering or marking your cards, a problem that plagues using foils in other games.

Gameplay

Joe: It’s easy to look at Lorcana and write it off as ‘baby’s first Magic: The Gathering’. After all, the two share a lot of similarities, from how they split cards up into a colour pie (or ink pie, which sounds gross) to how characters have similar attack and defense stats. Writing off Lorcana as a clone would be missing a huge part of its appeal, though.

Lorcana is approachable, but not necessarily simple. You’re not going to be bogged down in a billion phases of a turn like in Magic, need a law degree to parse the cards like in Yu-Gi-Oh!, or fall prey to an overreliance on random chance like in Pokemon. You can look at a Lorcana card and know straight away what it does, how it works, and whether it’s any good. It’s approachable.

But if you want to work out how to put these cards to use, you’ve got a deep well of interactions and strategy to explore. Lorcana pulls you in and has you theorycrafting advanced gameplay systems right from your first game, and its welcoming visuals and simple templating help make it feel like less of a dive into the unknown.

There’s also much less room to screw up your turn than in other games, as there aren’t many strict ‘phases’ where you can do specific things. If you want to quest with one character, do some other stuff, then go back in and quest with some more, you’re free to do so instead of being railroaded into a discrete combat step that shuts off all your other options. Its open-ended nature helps make it feel like you’re not stumbling through a turn and having to backtrack because you forgot something. Again, approachable, but not simple.

The most complex aspect of Lorcana is its resource system. Instead of just passively collecting mana each turn, or needing to play a resource card, almost anything in your hand can be put into your ‘inkwell’ to help pay the cost of other cards. It’s a genius system that allows you to focus on putting together a deck of cards you’re excited to play, instead of having to commit a third or more of it to a random resource card. It also adds more decision points to the game – do you keep this card for later, or ink it to play something now? Knowing when to hold them and when to ink them raises the skill ceiling without overcomplicating things.

Lorcana also does away with instant-speed interaction. You can’t interrupt your opponent on their turn to play a card of your own, meaning when it passes back over to you, you’re free to carry out your turn unimpeded. On the one hand, this helps the approachability, as you rarely need to resolve stacks of effects from multiple players. It gives the game a nice back-and-forth and provides you with the breathing room to advance your gameplan without having to worry about anyone else butting in.

On the other, it also pushes Lorcana into a win-more design, where the player that’s ahead likely will be for the entire game. A lack of interaction means the chances of those epic reversals so key to other TCGs don’t happen as often here, and when they do are seen coming from a mile away. There’s a satisfaction to duking it out on the stack with your opponent that Lorcana completely forgoes, and it’s a shame to see.

My other biggest problem with Lorcana is its ink colors. Every card is split between one of six inks: Amber, Amethyst, Emerald, Ruby, Sapphire, or Steel. Ostensibly, they have different design spaces, such as Sapphire liking items and Amber relying on go-wide strategies. In practice, the difference between the inks feels somewhat slim.

Lots of the inks step on each others’ toes, which waters down their identities and makes it harder to understand exactly what your opponent is up to. Emerald and Amethyst both like control, for example, with the difference between the two frequently feeling arbitrarily decided on a per-card basis. Ruby’s identity is also underdeveloped in its focus on direct damage… something Steel does better.

None of these are inherent problems that can’t be fixed, though. The magic of TCGs is that they can adapt and change with each new set, and as Lorcana releases more cards, we might see more ways to swing the game back in our favour when we’re on the back foot, and we might see the colours find their own niches more naturally. At its heart, Lorcana is a highly strategic game offering tons of depth, without getting bogged down in the terminology and waffle that puts non-TCG players off.

Eric: You’ve explained Lorcana’s ‘easy to learn, hard to master’ quality perfectly, and it’s the thing that, as a relatively inexperienced TCG player, I’m really enjoying about the game. It feels even easier to teach than Pokemon, yet I’m constantly finding new interactions and deck strategies to try, and learning more about the game every day.

While it’s simple in some ways, I’m impressed with how wide the decision tree spans. The inkwell is one component of that, as you alluded to, but there’s also songs, which can be played for an ink cost or sung by a character. Support characters can challenge themselves or quest to give their strength to another character. Bodyguard characters can be played out of your hand exerted to protect your board. There are so many choices to make every turn and so many different ways to play the same deck. Most importantly, no one deck feels completely unbeatable.

I don’t entirely agree with your take on ink identities. Ruby and Steel have different approaches to control and removal that are unique to each class, but I do see where you’re coming from with Amethyst. It’s the card-draw color, but it also has Rush characters like Ruby, and the Frozen characters have the whole Exert thing going on… We’ll see if future sets make the ink categories more or less defined, but either way, this isn’t a sticking point for me. Only being allowed to play two colors is a big restriction, so I understand the need for a bit of strategic variety among each color.

I do agree that it’s difficult to catch up once you fall behind because of the way questing works. We have some solutions already, like Jasper, Mother Gospel, and plenty of removal tools that can help slow down an opponent that’s running away with the game. Lore removal might become more prevalent later too. I think this is definitely something the designers will want to keep an eye on, because playing four or five more turns when you already know you’re beat is pretty demoralizing.

Longevity

Joe: The big question hanging over Disney Lorcana is whether it can stand the test of time. Plenty of other games have come for the big three (Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Pokemon) and failed, so does Lorcana stand a chance? Right now, it’s hard to say.

There’s a hell of a lot of room for Lorcana to expand, even within the first year. Having Disney properties to build on really resonates with audiences, and it’ll draw in new fans with every new character it reveals. There’s also a strong mechanical base to expand, particularly with refining the ink pie to make each feel more specialised, and with ways you can directly interact with your opponent.

Multiplayer is a big part of Lorcana right from the start too, which is huge. Lorcana’s casual focus puts it in direct competition with MTG’s Commander format, and over time we’ll likely see Lorcana lean more into that space with cards designed for more than just two players, and as the community grows we’re almost certainly going to see fan-made formats pick up traction, as long as Ravensburger can keep providing us with a game worth playing and getting invested in.

The story is a slight concern. When Lorcana was announced, we were promised a year-long unfolding story, but so far it’s been incredibly in the background. There isn’t so much a story as there is cards that suggest there will be a story later on, and without any kind of narrative tying The First Chapter together, it’s still unknown exactly how Lorcana is going to cater to those who want to get invested in another soap-opera-like, years-long TCG story. The flavour of Lorcana is impeccable, but the quicker we find out more about this world, the better.

Of course, the big, looming issue of Lorcana is availability. While I, in the UK, had no issue finding product sold at reasonable prices, North America was plagued by low product allocation, high prices from stores, and a huge amount of scalping from the usual TCG finance types who ruin every other game. People are desperate for Lorcana cards, but that excitement isn’t going to last a year from now if nobody has the cards to even play with.

We need more print runs for The First Chapter, and promises from Ravensburger for more supply for future expansions. If Lorcana is going to build a community that sticks with the game, builds those fan-made formats, and offers people a way to actually play the game, it needs to stop relying on event promos and a dizzying sense of FOMO to shift product.

I think Lorcana has a bigger chance of becoming the fourth game in the Big Three than anything we’ve seen before, like Flesh and Blood or the Digimon TCG, purely because of that sweet, delicious Disney IP drawing people in. But there is a worry that, if Ravensburger can’t get supply issues sorted quickly, it could simply flounder until people move on to other things.

Eric: Heh, Flounder. The supply issues are a major concern, no doubt. The limited stock has led to high prices (at least in the US, someone explain to me how that works) which is creating an early impression that the game is too hard to find and too expensive. Maybe that’s exciting news for investor types, but it’s disappointing for players, and it’s stifling the growth of local communities for Lorcana when it matters the most.

We don’t know how long this is going to be a problem though. The September 1 big box release could help a lot, the next wave of product to LGSs in mid-September could help even more. By The Second Chapter, it might not be an issue at all. It’s the most important thing that will determine whether Lorcana lives or dies, and we have no way to know what’s going to happen.

But what we do know is that Ravensburger says it’s committed to building a community of players and supporting the game long-term. They say they have a ten year plan, that they’re six or so expansions into development, and that they’re fully invested in local game stores and the organized play scene.

They’re saying all the right things are they’re making really positive, player-driven decisions. The Organized Play program and OP kits were a great investment in the community, as was the decision to give stores a two week lead on selling products – even if that has had mixed results. This is Ravensburger’s first attempt at a TCG and it’s expected that it will encounter some challenges it didn’t anticipate. I think the way it pivoted away from first edition cards after the D23 Expo is a great sign that this team is listening and that they can adapt.

The game is fun, the cards are beautiful, and people love Disney. The stars are aligned for Lorcana to be a huge success for many years to come. All of the issues we’ve raised are fixable, and there’s nothing, other than product availability, that gives me concerns about the longevity of the game. I had high hopes for Lorcan before it launched, and now I feel confident that we’re at the beginning of something really special. I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.