What has Disney Lorcana borrowed from Magic, Pokémon, and Hearthstone?

There’s a saying in trading card game communities: The card can be explained by reading the card. The same is true for Disney Lorcana, the media giant’s newest venture into the world of TCGs — especially considering that the game’s developer, Ravensburger, hasn’t released the official rules yet. The game won’t be available until 2023.

Disney displayed seven brand new cards during the D23 Expo. This is a glimpse into the character, art, and card templating of Lorcana. With a keen eye — and some experience with other TCGs, like The Gathering is Magic, HearthstoneAnd even more Gwent — you can see the telltale fingerprints of existing designs and popular mechanics. Elsewhere, lingering questions remain that will require official confirmation from the game’s designers.

Our beliefs about what we believe we know.

Based on what is visible across all cards (including the similar features) we can form educated guesses about game design principles that have been proven to work. Lorcana’s It is likely that architects were influenced by.

Ressources

A prominent number is located in the upper left corner of each character card. It feels very similar to casting cost, which other cards games refer to. On Stitch, that number is 6, and on Captain Hook it’s 1. Maleficent is 9 and so forth.

This is likely the “cost” to move characters from a player’s hand to the table during a game. And, though it remains to be seen what kind of resources players will use to pay this cost, there’s a noteworthy quality that all the numbers share across the revealed cards — the resource system appears to be universal.

In top-tier TCGs, universal resources are not common. You can find In The Gathering is Magic, players leverage a resource known as “mana” that corresponds to the cards being “tapped,” or turned on their side. Mana can be described as a particular color and is prominently displayed on the cards. This determines what cards can each player play to create a coherent strategy.

The top number of these Disney character cards could be used to determine the cost of casting. Another game that uses a singular casting cost is Blizzard’s Hearthstone. In Hearthstone, mana is a renewable resource — at the beginning of each turn you automatically gain an additional mana, which effectively prevents players from playing a card that costs four mana before the fourth turn.

If Lorcana A similar system might lead to a more efficient gameplay, which may be able to snowball over time. You could play multiple cards in a single round, but this would be best for mid-game. This allows players to buy time and money for bigger haymakers such as Maleficent, so that they can close out the game faster.

Types of cards

Although it appears that the system is quite efficient, there may be some baked-in synergies among cards. That’s because cards seem to have various types, and those types could produce strategic benefits depending on how they are used to create a given deck. We see these synergies appear on a thin line just under each card’s title.

Image: Ravensburger, Disney

For now, among the seven characters previewed, we see two recurring keywords – “storyborn” and “dreamborn,” which are evenly split among both heroes and villains.

These categories may be based on precedents from other card games. They could indicate that future cards and rules might offer synergies or benefits for characters who share some types. Perhaps we’ll see cards that make heroes on the board stronger, ones that make dreamborn cards in your hand cheaper to cast, or even rules that limit the number of each character you can have in a deck.

Some cards include additional options in their design spaces, similar to the types of creatures we see in Magic: The Gathering. Stitch is an alien and Captain Hook is a pirate, whereas Robin Hood does not have a character type — he’s just a storyborn hero.

This list of card and creature types suggests deck building possibilities that players can use to create new strategies. If you have your heart set on playing with a particular Disney icon, building a deck of cards that supports that character’s various categories could lead to a winning strategy.

Combat

These cards could be fighting one another, similar to the game in “The Last of Us.” Pokémon Trading Card Game. Several clues point to a combat feature, including a specific detail that appears on every card we’ve seen, directly to the right of the cards’ names.

Both numbers can be found side by side LorcanaCharacter cards are a bit like the defense and attack stats that we can see on. Magic And Yu-Gi-Oh creatures. We likewise see reference to a feature called “Challenge,” which reads like combat between two characters.

Cruella de Vil, for instance, has an ability which occurs when she’s challenged. Captain Hook, however, seems to receive a boost of power whenever he challenges. Meanwhile, Mickey Mouse seems difficult to challenge altogether, as his “Evasive” ability indicates “only characters with Evasive can challenge this character.”

Combat should be a core feature Lorcana, expect to see a lot of games determine once and for all who’s the most kick-ass princess in the world of Disney.

Uncertainty remains

There are many more questions than we can answer despite all of the context clues. Lorcana’s designers ahead of next year’s release. Between the game’s rules engine and other unusual card features, most of the system remains unknown.

Board States

Let’s start with what does a game state look like. Since characters will be “challenging” one another, we could see two central characters square off like the active monsters in Pokémon TCG. You could also arrange them in lanes such as in Card Wars: Adventure Time Oder Gwent. And of course there’s board states like Magic And Hearthstone, where combat is not dictated by cards’ positioning across from one another but by other, more complex rules.

As of now, board details aren’t referenced on the seven revealed cards, but this will be fundamental to fully grasping the game.

Diamonds

Are those the defense and attack statistics? Elsa and Mickey have four each, while Elsa only has one. However, they both possess at least one. Do these rare indicators indicate whether a card is likely to be opened in sealed packaging? Or are they part of the overall rules system? The possibilities are endless, but there doesn’t seem to be any other indicators on the cards that separate between common and rare characters, so that’s likely as good a guess as any.

Colors

Do the cards come with a different color scheme from those used for casting? Six different color bars are available for each of the seven characters. These show the storyborn, hero and villain as well as other qualities.

Based on the common symbol and color of Maleficent, each of these color bars appears to have a related symbol. These symbols are located adjacent to the type lines of five cards, suggesting that there may be more inter-game synergies between cards with similar symbols or rules that allow for free-for all deck construction.

According to Disney, the game isn’t scheduled to officially launch for about a year, with fall 2023 as the current release window.