Disney Lorcana is releasing soon! It’s the first time that Disney has taken a serious foray into the Trading Card Game world, and with it comes a lot of expectations. People are wondering about the value of cards, the best decks that you can play, and how to actually play the game. Luckily, we’ve got the full description of what each kind of card does, what you need to know, and what you should understand before you go off and buy a ton of cards to play the Disney Lorcana TCG game.
We’ll be running through how to read a Disney Lorcana card, how you build your Disney Lorcana deck, how to take action during your turn, and how you actually win a Disney Lorcana game.
How To Read A Disney Lorcana Card
There are a few things that you need to know about a Disney Lorcana card before you get into the weeds with the game.
What Is Ink In Disney Lorcana?
Ink is the equivalent of a mana cost in Disney Lorcanam, and there’s a number in the top left corner of each playable Lorcana card that will tell you what the card costs.
If the number has a circle around it, this means that you can place the card into your ‘Inkwell’ to be used as ink. This is known as the Inkwell icon, and is a way to replenish your mana.
The Card Name
Just above the description of what the card is and what it does is the name of the card itself. You can have up to four copies of the same card in your deck.
Damage Score
Directly next to the name of the card, you’ll see two different numbers. The first number is how much damage the character would deal during a challenge.
Willpower
To the right of the Damage Score is the Willpower, which is how much damage any one character can take before it is banished.
Classifications
Classifications specify exactly what type of card you have. Basically, it describes classes and types of actions.
This has no real impact on the game as a whole, and just exists to help a player understand the card better.
Where to find Disney Lorcana Ink Type?
This is located in the middle left of the card, it’s the small icon near the border.
Essentially the ‘type’ of the card. You can only have two different inks in any one deck.
Abilities
The things that the card actually does. These are either triggered by other actions or effects that occur on your turn. Some words are ‘keyworded’ meaning that they do specific things repeatedly.
Lore
How much lore the card generates when it quests.
Set Information
What card the set is from, the artist, card number, and language.
These have absolutely no impact on the game at all, literally only existing for people who are chasing a certain card, or for working out the value of a card. If you’re just casually playing the game, then you don’t need to understand this.
What are the Disney Lorcana Rarities?
There are five different card rarities:
- Grey Common
- White Uncommon
- Bronze Rare
- Silver Super Rare
- Golden Legendary
Read our article Disney Lorcana TCG Rarity Explained to keep up to date!
Your Deck Itself
Your deck needs to be at least sixty cards, with four copies of a card name in your deck. This also means that you can have two different types of a card in your deck since this includes both the subtitle and the card name itself.
There are three different types of cards: Characters, Items, and Magic. Characters are the way you actually challenge your opponent and get Lore.
Actions are items that have a one-time effect that could change the game but immediately go to your discard pile afterward (a variant of these would be Songs, cards that you can skip the requirements on if you have one of the characters listed on the card). Finally, there are item cards, cards that don’t challenge but have effects and abilities.
Remember, you can only have two different inks in your deck. There are six inks to choose from, all of which do separate things:
- Amber (Yellow): The defender ink
- Amethyst (Purple): Cards that use abilities and actions to enforce a control strategy
- Emerald (Green): An adaptive ink that can take cards back from certain zones
- Ruby (Red): The aggressive ink. The ink that deals direct damage to your opponent much more efficiently.
- Sapphire (Blue): An ink type that uses item cards a lot
- Steel (Grey): Cards with high defence and the ability to brute force.
How To Win The Game
There are two different ways to win a game of Disney Lorcana. The first way is to collect 20 Lore before your opponents, usually by questing your characters. The second way is to deck-ou your opponent, meaning that you need your opponent to have no cards left in the deck when they go to draw a card, causing an immediate loss.
Starting The Game
To start a game, shuffle your deck and draw seven cards. During the first game, you have to keep that opening selection of seven cards. However, if this isn’t the first game, then you can alter your hand by putting as many cards as you want onto the bottom of the deck and then drawing that amount. You can only do this once, however. Next, play rock-paper-scissors to decide who goes first.
Turn Phases
There are two phases to a turn in Disney Lorcana. There’s the ‘Beginning Phase’ and the ‘Main Phase’.
The beginning phase has three parts:
- Ready: Turn any exerted cards 90 degrees into their usual position
- Set: Any abilities that trigger at the start of your turn are resolved.
- Draw: Draw the top card of your deck. If it’s the first turn, you don’t draw for your turn.
The Main Phase
The main phase is where you do all of your actions. In your main phase, you can do any of the following things before ending your turn.
- Reveal a card and put it in your inkwell (face-down)
- Play any character, item, or action card as long as you can pay their ink cost
- Use your character or item abilities. Important to note that if an ability needs a certain character, then you have to have had the character in play since the start of the turn.
- Have one of your characters go on a quest for Lore
- Challenge your opponent’s characters
How To Play Cards & Make Ink
As previously mentioned, you have to pay a certain amount of ink specified on a card to actually use it. To turn cards into Ink, you reveal a card with the circular inkwell symbol and place it face-down into your inkwell.
Your inkwell cards can be used to make one ink, which then can pay for any other card that requires ink. For example, you must exert three ink cards to play any card that costs three ink to actually play. All of your ink is reset at the start of your turn, but those cards cannot be challenged by your opponent when they are exerted.
Questing With A Card
Questing is how you generate Lore. It’s an action that you have to take during your main phase, and requires you to exert a character card. Basically, the previously mentioned Lore value on the right side of your card is how much lore it generates when you choose to quest.
It’s important to remember though that you can only exert a card once a turn. A card can either quest, challenge, or use an ability that needs exertion, but only one of the three. If a card exerts, then that makes that card open to being challenged.
What is Challenging?
Challenging is the Disney Lorcana version of combat. You can only challenge during your own main phase, and characters can only challenge based on two conditions. These two conditions are as follows:
- The character you want to challenge is currently exerting
- Your character has been out since the start of the current turn
By challenging a character that has been exerted you need to exert your own character. At that point, both characters in the challenge deal damage to each other equal to whatever their strength is. If a character takes more damage than their willpower, then they are banished and go straight to the discard pile.
Damage doesn’t go away from cards, meaning you might want to use tokens to keep track of who has taken damage. You can also only challenge with a card once per turn, but you can challenge with multiple different characters in the same turn if you want to go all-out against your opponent.
That’s all you need to know to play Disney Lorcana before the new Trading Card Game set releases later this year. There is a chance that Disney decides to add more rules to the game as time moves on, similar to how Yu-Gi-Oh has different ‘Master Rules’ which dictate what you can actually do, but for now, the game remains pretty simple, easy to understand, and able to be played by anybody of all ages.
