So, maybe you read the last post, and despite the fact that Lorcana boosters are currently going for a street value of $5 an ounce, (a ratio that really feels like it should be reserved for a different type of substance), you still want in?
All right. It’s a pretty fun game. But instead of buying those starter decks at prices people are selling them, we’re instead going to use the power of the free market in our favorite for once.
Here’s how it works. First, click on one of the above links. This will bring you to TCG Players bulk entry page. It will look something like this.
If this all looks good, click the add to cart button! And presto, we have a cart with all the cards in the starter deck!
It’s also going to currently be costing you a lot more then the starter deck. No worries. We can fix that by clicking on the Optimize button in the lower left corner, right under the Paypal option.
After this, TCG player will try to optimize for shipping and buying from the fewest number of sellers. If everything looks good, you can send your purchase though, and end up with your very own Lorcana starter deck for less than a retail video game.
Ed Note: This writeup contains links to TCG Player, the management of which is a bunch of union busting corporate weasels. These aren’t affiliate links, (we don’t ever do that) and we don’t endorse their anti-competitive bullshit. That said, they’re owned by eBay, so it’s not like there’s a better place to go buy cheap singles that isn’t tainted by a desire to screw the employee.
Ed Note 2: This was written when Lorcana was being CRAZY scalped. It’s possible that the prices have gone down to a sane range by the time you look at this writeup. Such is the internet, and writing about collectibles.The general approach to using TCG Player, and the optimize functionality for buying singles likely remains the same though.
So far this week we’ve looked at Lorcana’s strengths (game design) and weaknesses (product allocation, rarity distribution). So now it’s time to get into the armchair, and pundit like no one has pundited before. What does the future of Lorcana actually look like? Will this game be around in 2 years? What factors will determine its future?
The House of Mouse and the Burg of Ravens
Lorcana’s wide ranging appeal is likely going to be seen as the result of the use of Disney property. Ignoring whether or not this is completely true, this puts Disney in the driver’s seat here for the continued production of Lorcana as it exists, with the use of the Disney intellectual property.
And there are sooooo many things that have the potential to go wrong.
It’s worth noting that for the other large card games with sticking power, they almost always completely own the art and IP they’re working with. Pokémon is owned by the Pokémon Company, Yu-Gi-Oh is owned by Konami, and Magic is owned by Wizards of the Coast.
Sure, other card games that have IP from other franchises exist. There’s things like Weis Schwarz and MTG’s Universes Beyond. But these are side products, augmenting an existing game.
Here’s just a short list of problems I could see happening:
Disney refuses to license any additional characters to Ravensburger for use, limiting space for growth.
Disney ups the price of the license to the point that production of the game isn’t worth it.
Disney approval and checks of licensed designs require a large amount of sign off, extending the production schedule of sets, and causing Lorcana to product sets at a much slower pace than its competitors.
And I’m sure more exist. The short version is that any breakdown of corporate goodwill or licensing agreements could kill Lorcana real quick.
Community Building
Disney can’t kill Lorcana faster than the fanbase could, though. Trading card games need an active community of players to survive and thrive. Do you know what doesn’t contribute to an active and healthy community? Booster packs costing the same amount as another game’s starter deck.
Some dude once said something about people being unable to survive off just bread. You can quote me on this one: card games can’t survive off whales alone. Right now, I suspect a majority of would-be players are priced out of the market for playing this game. Lorcana needs a casual player base.
Right now, Lorcana is not in the position to have that player base. That’s not to say you can’t buy singles and play the game cheaply. But the players Lorcana needs are the players who haven’t heard of something like TCG Player, and maybe don’t even known what TCG stands for.
If Lorcana isn’t able to actually meet demand and start selling to players who aren’t hyper invested, and who aren’t whales, they’re very unlikely to actually build the casual player base that is the fundamental foundation of a community. Without a community large enough to sustain prolonged interest, attract new players, and weather down time and bad sets/designs (because it will happen!), I predict Lorcana will shrivel and die.
This clause in particular seems incredibly… hmm. Look, friendly local game stores are not a big money business, and requiring a store to purchase new product every 90 days for an unproven game just to be in your program feels like it could go badly.
Author Note: Just based off theming and demographics, I suspect the group that needs to worry about Lorcana coming for its lunch money isn’t MTG, but Pokémon. Lorcana has the potential for cross generational appeal in a non-threatening manner, which is much more Pokémon vibe than Magic’s. Y’know, given that the upcoming Magic set features people being eaten by a murderous village of candy, in a world suffering from the aftereffects of invasion by a group of sentient flesh robot hivemind. Other sets this year include the giant living horror murder hotel.
Expansive Design
But not every prediction for Lorcana’s future is a bummer.
The last thing Lorcana needs is design space to continue to release expansions and sets. And I actually think it has that in spades. First Chapter is a very restrained product, and if playing a game makes me think of 5-6 new mechanics, I guarantee the actual designer has a list including all of those, and an additional fifty in a text document somewhere.
There’s a lot of obvious space. Cards that care about color. Cards that are multicolor. More typal support, modal typal punish. Just going and borrowing twenty years worth of what Magic already did.
Now, because the people who make this game are likely smart, they also need to do this in a way that isn’t overwhelming, but I have confidence they can pull that off.
Conclusion
Lorcana has the potential to turn the big 3 of cards games into the big 4. However, it needs to surpass a significant number of challenges and risk to do so. Even ignoring their fans, Disney and Ravensburger need to maintain a good working relationship. But the biggest challenge is going to be Ravensburger’s ability to supply product to LGS’s and other stores where people can buy it at sane prices.
Funnily enough, the one area I don’t have any worries about is the game’s design and playability. It’s fun. It’s interesting. It’s relatively unique.
But it needs to be easier to get ahold of than, for example, illegal street drugs. And also have a lower price point.
If Lorcana can do all of the above, and survive the next two years, then Ravensburger might actually have made a popular, mainstream TCG.
Enchanted is Lorcana’s sixth rarity, and its rarest rarity. Enchanted cards alternate art cards with a special finish and design, but the same mechanics as a lower-rarity card.
Left: Belle, Strange but Special. Right: The exact same card, but 10x more expensive.
In Lorcana, First Chapter boosters, enchanted cards can only show up in the foil slot of the booster. This means you have at most one chance to pull an enchanted card per pack.
So what are the approximate odds? There’s no official source for these odds. Instead we’re going to look at two separate sources of experimental data.
The first is from Digital TQ, who posted their breakdown here. I don’t trust this breakdown very much for several reasons, but I’m still going to use it, and I’ll talk about why in a bit.
This data set has 216 booster packs opened (9 boxes worth) and 5 enchanted cards pulled. This puts them at an experimental probability of 2.3148% odds of a booster pack containing an enchanted card.
The second data set is from a game store in Halifax, Nova Scotia called The Deck Box. They posted their own data from opening 18 booster boxes online, and had an experimental probability of 0.9259%.
Wonderful graph made by The Deck Box, with the experimental probabilities of various cards. Like, seriously. This is a really nice infographic.
So, we have two different sets of numbers. You might have noticed that what I didn’t do is just average these two numbers together, because that would violate principal one of the Fundamental Constraints of Math.
This might be better worded as “The Two Fundamental Constraints of Mathematical Analysis”. Also, in this diagram, the stupid person is me. I’m the stupid.
As such, experimental data indicates that the experimental probability of opening an Enchanted card is likely around 1%.
Math Time
Disclaimer: Any of the below writing and statement of the problem is the result of my requesting that some friends help me out. As a result, any mistakes for dumb shit, misinterptation of math, or misuse of statistics should fall to me, chief idiot of Gametrodon. Any praise for analysis or clever thought should go to them.
However, just because I’m stupid doesn’t mean my friends are. In fact, some of them are quite smart, and actually do statistics based things.
So I reached out to one of these friends, and asked him to help me calculate a range of probabilities for what the true rarity of enchanted cards is likely to be, and here’s what he came up with.
Vanilla
Wald High
Wilson
Wilson Low
Wilson High
Estimated Probability of Rare
0.009
0.018
0.0136
0.0036
0.0236
So based off these numbers, here’s what we can say.
Based on the assumption that the 432 packs were opened were a representative sample of Lorcana booster packs, we believe that the true probability of opening an Enchanted rarity Lorcana card in any given random pack is between 0.3%, and 2.3%.
So, assuming that’s the case, how many boosters would you need to open to probably get an enchanted card, for each of these probabilities?
Packs Opened
Odds of Getting At least 1 Enchanted Card at 0.3%
5
1.49%
10
2.96%
24
6.96%
96
25.06%
Packs Opened
Odds of Getting At least 1 Enchanted Card at 1%
5
4.90%
10
9.56%
24
21.43%
96
61.90%
Packs Opened
Odds of Getting At least 1 Enchanted Card at 2.3%
5
10.98%
10
20.76%
24
42.79%
96
89.29%
There are a lot of assumptions here, and I’m sure real statisticians are looking at this and wincing, but the point I mostly want to make with these charts is the following:
If something has a 1/100 chance of occurring, and you do it 100 times, there’s no guarantee of getting that 1/100 chance odds. Actual odds are around 60%.
Author’s Note: I don’t care about enchanted cards, because when all is said and done, they’re alt-arts, and that’s it. That said, leaving them out entirely seemed rude to people who might care. So I’ve compromised by giving them their own post.
So, you’ve decided you’d like to buy some Lorcana cards. Good luck finding any.
It feels wrong to describe Lorcana’s launch as “Ugly” since we’re still technically in the middle of the launch… But I think it’s pretty clear at this point that Ravensburger massively underestimated initial demand for the product.
In short, nobody can actually buy what they want, every item for sale in big box stores already got bought out by bots, and the general tone is “People like the game, but are pretty upset they can’t get cards to play it.”
And booster packs are $19 a pop. Edit: In the time between me writing this, and the post going live, they’ve gone down to $15. Which is still too high.
So, ugly launch. But I’d be lying if I said that this was particularly surprising. A lot of TCG’s have these super hype launches, that then fizzle out several months later. MetaZoo might be the best example of this.
Right now though, we’re firmly in the middle of the hype train, and it shows no sign of stopping. As such, as much as I like the game, there’s no way I would ever buy it at current prices.
A Tale As Old As Time
Part of that is because I’ve been here before. I’ve bought into plenty of TCG’s that ended up dying early on (Looking at you, Force of Will). Prices for a base set are a pretty bad way of estimating how much staying power a game will have. For example, a few years ago the new hotness was MetaZoo. Then it became Flesh & Blood.
There will always be a brand new card game, and there will always be content creators hyping it up as the next member/killer of the Big Three: Magic, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh.
Here’s the thing: in over 15 years in this hobby, I haven’t seen any new TCG’s that have really stuck around. Some end up niche, like Buddyfight Vanguard, or Flesh and Blood.
But most just fade and die.
Why does this matter for Lorcana?
I’ll write more on this in the conclusion to this series, but as I’ve already noted, Lorcana is currently at a state of very low complexity, and perhaps more importantly, it can’t actually get less complex over time.
Unless Lorcana wants to be yet another failed attempt to bottle lightning, right now could be the largest period of hype that it experiences. And it probably wants to convert that hype into an actual community of long term players.
From a gameplay perspective, this is currently the easiest period for onboarding players who have never played a card game before. From a physical product acquisition perspective, it’s the worst time for onboarding new players. If there’s not enough product for people who are actively aware and hyped about the game to get their hands on it, there sure isn’t enough for casual players to try it, or buy it.
That’s not to say Lorcana is dead in the water. But frankly, I would consider this to be a badly managed launch for what feels like a family oriented introductory card game.
So that said, let’s say you do get ahold of those booster packs, and don’t have to sell a kidney for them. Then what? How do the odds for various rarities stack up? How much of the set are you likely to see?
Ignoring everything else about Lorcana, there’s one critical question that needs to be asked. Is the game any good?
Yes. It’s a perfectly solid game.
Is it the most innovative thing in the world? Not particularly.
For anyone whose played a fair amount of TCG’s over the last 10 years, there’s nothing here that’s immediately shocking. Lorcana’s gameplay is a mash-up of a variety of different systems that most experienced players will have seen before.
Lorcana has players make a 60 card deck, with up to four copies of the same card. Deck construction is limited by the fact that decks can only contain cards from 2 of the game’s six colors.
The first small twist on the standard TCG is that instead of being a rush to bleed your opponent out, it’s a race to the top. There are no life points. Instead players are competing to be the first to collect 20 lore, in something more akin to KeyForge, than Magic or YuGiOh.
For the rest of this to make sense, we’re going to go over the general structure of the game. If you don’t care too much about that, you can skip ahead for our actual opinions on the gameplay.
Types of Cards, and General Structure
Lorcana currently has three types of cards. These are characters, actions, and items. Items and actions are somewhat self-explanatory, so we’ll cover them later.
Example Card: Gramma Tala
Characters are more complicated, and explaining them gives a good opportunity to go over the core of the game, so we’ll start with them. First, characters (and all other cards) have a cost. For Gramma Tala, this cost is two. But it’s not the only thing communicated by the top left corner. Gramma Tala also has swirly border around her cost.
This means she can be placed into your inkwell, Lorcana’s version of a mana/resource ramp system. Each turn, you can play one card facedown into your inkwell. Once in the inkwell, cards have no other types or information, can’t be looked at, and are just considered Ink for the rest of the game. Cards in the inkwell start facedown, and pointed up. To get resources, you rotate them 90 degrees, “exerting” them. (Yes, this is just tapping from Magic. But since they patented tapping, each time someone wants to make a new game, they have to invent a new word for it.)
There are three other numbers on Gramma Tala besides her cost. The first is the 1 in the spiky circle. This is Gramma Tala’s attack/power/what have you. It’s how much damage Gramma Tala does when attacked, or when she attacks. The second is the number in the shield. This is her health/toughness. Each time characters take damage, they receive damage counters.
Finally, there’s a small diamond shaped symbol under her health. This is Gramma Tala’s lore value. And it’s a great segue into the next part of this writeup: character actions.
Characters in Lorcana can be used to do three things. First, they can quest. Questing means turning a character sideways, and getting lore equal that character’s lore value. Collecting 20 lore is how you win the game.
Next, characters can challenge opposing exerted characters. Note the emphasis on exerted. If a character isn’t exerted (turned sideways), they’re safe from being attacked by the enemy. When characters challenge, the challenger is exerted down, and then both the challenging character, and the challenged character take damage equal to the other character’s power.
If either of them have more damage than they have health afterward, they’re put into the discard. Lorcana damage, like Hearthstone or Pokémon, doesn’t heal between turns.
Finally, characters can sing. Which brings us to our second card type: Actions!
Actions take the role of Hearthstones spells, or Magic: The Gatherings sorceries. They’re single use cards with a one-time effect. After paying the cost, the player performs the effect, and the card is discarded.
Some actions though, are songs. For songs, you can pay their cost with Ink, or by exerting (tapping) a character with a cost equal or greater then the cost of the song.
Finally, this brings up the last card type: Items.
Items, like all other card types, have a cost. Once put into play, they can be used immediately, unlike characters which have to wait a turn. They have a variety of effects, ranging from purely passive, to activated abilities that can be used on a player’s turn.
Back to Opinions
So, now we’ve at least covered the general structure of Lorcana, which means I can talk about how I feel about the game, and the cards in it.
The first thing that stood out to me after playing my first few games and looking through the card list is that Lorcana’s base set is incredibly restrained. There’s a very large amount of unexplored design space here.
I use the word restrained because “Basic” or “Simple” feels unfair. Lorcana only has 3 or 4 named mechanics, what other card game players might think of as keywords. But I don’t think it’s because Lorcana couldn’t have more. I suspect the designers made a deliberate choice to limit the number of mechanics and complexity present in the base set.
For example, while many Lorcana cards have tags for type, many of those types aren’t used by any cards. Only princesses, villains, and brooms have cards that interact with their type.
In addition, there are zero cards that care about other cards’ colors, or are multicolor. There aren’t any cards that allow you to recover cards from your Inkwell. There are very few pieces of hard removal, and they cost a large amount of ink, and there’s only one board wipe card.
All of which strikes me as a deliberate choice to prevent the game from becoming overcomplicated, or overwhelming. Because I suspect a large part of the game’s intended target audience are Disney fans who are first time TCG players.
So does that make it boring? No, but given that there are currently only 204 cards, the deckbuilding pool is very small. And even with small pool, the game feels pretty good!
So perhaps you’ve read all of this, and decided to buy in.
Well, it’s not gonna be that easy. Read on to find out why.
