Non-Clickbait Title: Ravensburger has shot itself in the foot repeatedly, and it killed my local Lorcana scene.
Okay, so that’s a little bit of a lie. My local game store (LGS) did cancel their weekly Lorcana events, but as far as I’m aware, the game isn’t dead. Yet. But the local population of players has cratered.
I like looking at weird things that happen in TCG’s, and Lorcana has recently given me an interesting little case study in players at my LGS, and how/when the drop-off happened.
I also think that for the specific population of players I played with, I can trace back the decline to two or three fairly specific events, and that interests me! So let’s talk about it.
But first…
Why does it matter that weeklies are cancelled?
The store I went to for Lorcana ran casual weekly events. These were non-prized, non-competitive freeplay events. You bought in for $7, got a booster pack of your choice, and were entered in a raffle to win some other organized play prizes.
These events were the lowest possible entry point to get into Lorcana and connect with the local community. If you are brand new to the game, if you’ve never played a card game before, if you didn’t go out to card game events… this was the easiest way to try out the game in the lowest stakes, most chill energy environment available.
Without these events, the first rung on a ladder of getting into the game has been removed. It won’t stop weirdos like me who show up to sealed events for games they can’t play, but I do think it makes it much more daunting (and expensive!) for almost everyone else.
I think this is bad, but I think its especially bad for Lorcana. A lot of Lorcana players in our local were Disney fans first, and Lorcana players second. The traditional label for this would probably be “casual” players, but I don’t think that fits here. These were folks who came to every pre-release and bought cards by the booster box. They might have played the game casually, but they didn’t engage with it casually. They were more interested in making decks around their favorite characters than trying to break the meta.
Anyway, that’s a lot text to say:
- Loss of weeklies was bad because it removed the first step in on-boarding for new players or players who wanted to get more involved.
- It’s especially bad for Lorcana because it removed the environment where a lot of players could play the sorts of decks they liked to make.
Cause #1 – Weekly Challenges
Prior to Lorcana’s set 9 (Fabled) release, Lorcana weeklies had a point a system. Each week, you could show up, earn points for doing a variety of different things, and at the end of the season, the folks with the most points got some special prizes.
I don’t want to focus on the prizes here, but I do want to look at the challenges. Some of them notably rewarded playing weird decks. So instead of everyone just showing up with their best deck each week, there was an incentive to build out a deck to try to meet that weeks challenges, or to play a multiplayer game.
In short: there was a reason to keep things fresh.
(And as a side effect, probably lower the power level of the decks of the players who really wanted to earn points.)
When Ravensburger got rid of this, it removed both the incentive to show up every week, since prizes were now just raffles at the end, and it also meant that there was no reason to even try to make a new deck every week. Meaning that on a week to week basis, every week started to feel the same.
Cause #1.5 – Prize Adjustments
I debated giving this a full sub-section, but I think its comparatively minor. A bit after the weekly scoresheet changes, Ravensburger swapped out their prizes. Previously, I think there had been things like playmats, pins, and cards. Right now, there are only cards and these really underwhelming card boxes.
How underwhelming? Underwhelming enough that I, the king of taking free stuff, the supreme sovereign of snatching up game-adjacent garbage, paused before accepting one of these things. I mean, I still took it. But I was unenthused.
I don’t think that this on its own really did too much damage to Lorcana, but I do know that for specific players, this was highly demotivating. It wasn’t a bomb, but it was a surgical removal of another incentive for that set of player to show up and play.
Cause #2 – Set Rotation
Different games have different terms for the idea of set rotation, but all of them loosely follow the same idea: at some point in the lifespan of a TCG, older sets of cards removed from the standard play pool in order to make room for new sets of cards. It can be viewed as a necessity in order to prevent the game from becoming stale, or a way to get people to buy new cards.
Regardless, virtually every card game does it, and Lorcana was no exception; they called it Core Constructed. And after their rotation, Lorcana required that decks at these weekly casual events be in the Core Constructed format.
I think this was a terrible idea.
I do think that Lorcana needed rotation from a mechanical standpoint. Set 1, while not committing any of the flaws of say, Alpha Magic, or base set Pokemon, has some flawed designs.
So yeah. Rotation made sense from a competitive standpoint, and a design standpoint.
But I don’t think it made sense for the large subset of the player base who were Disney fans first, and Lorcana fans second. There were a fair number of adults and kids who could no longer play their favorite deck because those cards weren’t reprinted in Fabled, and so… they stopped showing up for weekly casuals.
Synthesis
So when my LGS held their final casual Lorcana event, I was the only person who showed up. I sat around for a bit, did some drawing, then went food shopping while the rest of the store was full of folks playing Riftbound.
The removal of weekly challenges and prizes disincentivized entrenched players from showing up to play, while also making the ones who did show up bring the same deck week after week. Set rotation killed off a lot of casual decks that didn’t need to be killed off, while making folks who’d never played a card game before feel a bit cheated, and question their investment of time, money, and energy in the game.
So here’s my guess as to what happens next:
The lack of casual play will remove a critical part of the playerbase pipeline. The events that are still supported will have lower and lower turnout, as it becomes less and less interesting to play with smaller numbers of people.
End result? No more Lorcana at the local game store.
Conclusion
Okay, so I know I called that part above this synthesis, but I think there’s a much more interesting takeaway here: Ravensburger doesn’t understand their playerbase, and treated them like they would Magic: The Gathering players.
To be fair, I would have made the exact same mistake if I was in their position. No one has to put me in charge of a possible multi-million dollar TCG yet, based off a brand worth billions of dollars, but still.
There’s an assumption that the final form of the “hardcore” player of a CCG/TCG is out grinding tournaments, tracking their full collection, building copies of and iterating on meta decks, and just generally fully engaging with the game portion of the collectible card experience. I think in the case of Lorcana, some of the meat and potato grinders weren’t doing that. They were collecting, they were buying tons of cards, and they were making fun weekly decks for character they liked.
These were the ‘hardcore’ players. They attended every prerelease, they had built decks for store championships, they tracked every set. But the game was only a portion of the experience, not the end state. Lorcana had core players, but they looked and behaved differently than they might in another game.
Or at least, that’s my crackpot theory.
