Tonnes of news about Lorcana is dropping today, including a new article with three cards we’ve seen for the first time. We’ve also got some clearer official art for already shown cards, plus information on the game’s design.
Further to the earlier drop of the Lorcana League and organized play information we now know the program will be called Lorcana Play. Now, Polygon has released an article with some great images of six cards – three of which are brand new.
We finally get a song card for Let It Go, possibly the most popular Disney song ever released. The ability is a really interesting one as it’s the first card to give us ramping – aka another way to gain ink in the inkwell. It can also be used to banish powerful opponent characters.
Being a song, it can be used completely free, though you’ll need a fairly powerful card of 5 ink or more to use it without paying.
Kristoff Official Ice Master is a fairly straightforward vanilla card for Steel. Frying Pan is a simple but effective item for Steel that can stop powerful attackers from making the best use of their stats.
We also have some nicer images for Dinglehopper and One Jump Ahead. We’ve updated those card listings, take a look at our list of Lorcana cards with tonnes more information on each one.
Designing Lorcana
In the article, Ryan Miller talks about the design process he went through with Steve Warner and early playtest groups. It seems like they got a variety of people to play, including many people that had never played card games before.
They talked about designing and putting a resource system into place – settling upon Inks. The game doesn’t have dedicated resource cards – like Lands in Magic: The Gathering. In Lorcana, once a turn you can flip a card over and put it into your “inkwell”, to be used as a resource to play other cards.
That means the cards in your hand have multiple uses, you’ll almost never be unable to add one more ink a turn, and you’ll need to play your cards tactically – deciding whether you want to play or use as ink.
Apparently, “Miller and his co-designer Steve Warner spent six months trying to find a different solution” to what previous games had gone with. They found that they could limit the power of some cards by not giving them the ability to turn into ink – aka the cards that don’t have an inkwell symbol over their play cost in the top left.
“It allows a really interesting balancing tweak that we can do,” Miller said, “because by taking the ink off of a card and saying this card doesn’t provide you ink, it really changes your valuation when you’re building your deck“
Read more in the full article.
