Is Disney's TCG Lorcana any good?

[@sethlynchart]

I could listen to you guys talk about game mechanics forever! I'm curious on your opinions on the state of legends of runeterra and that games development

[@ForrestImel]

Oh man, I'd love to talk about Legends of Runeterra :)

[@keltonschleyer6367]

9:51 The amount of blunt understanding communicated in that “Okay” says so much about Magic’s history 😂

[@hatertime]

I noticed from my multiple games of Lorcana, it has a huge quantity knobs to turn to make card variance matter. They'll never ever run out of things to make cards interact with. Inkability, Lore, Power, Toughness, Types, Jobs, Names, Locations, Orientation, Sing ability, caring about items, caring about actions, evasion ect. ect. Despite all of that I feel like every single game is just a race. Ink every turn, Play as many creatures as you can, Quest every single available creature. As time goes on perhaps there will be more diverse ways to remove Lore Counters, but currently it just favors racing to the finish and ignore your opponents entirely. Since you can't really consistently punish greediness. At the very highest levels of play Control has reigned supreme is more a function of limited card pool and mostly linear strategies at launch being utterly destroyed by resource denial At the current time, as of the release of Into the Inklands, many people think Combo decks will begin to take over. They added new items that help card filtering, synergize with creatures that care about Items and new ways to increase the static Lore amount given by a creature to allow more explosive turns and give incentives to opponents to disrupt your board state instead of putting their head down and racing to 20. They also changed the rules to allow moving damage counters and introduced Locations which is more design space. I think the function of all of this is to actually reduce the punishment for interacting with the opponents board state independent of the type of deck they are. Just to wrap this up, I think Lorcana can have deep and very engaging gameplay. Inking Strategy alone could fill an entire book, it isn't "solved"and it would be very difficult to ever fully optimize, but as of launch interaction and being punished for disrupting Lore production weren't available, leading to any deck that could boardwipe having an advantage in any race. I think with damage shifting and lore producing Locations increases the number of targets for control and could allow Combo and Linear Midrange decks to have an advantage in deploying more things than Control could account for.

[@distractionmakers]

Being able to win the game without interacting with my opponent was my biggest criticism of Lorcana. They definitely have a lot of knobs to turn and design space to explore, but like you alluded to: it doesn’t really matter if you don’t need to interact.

[@hatertime]

@@distractionmakers yeah that is definitely true of the time you reviewed it, and may be true going forward. I've played Magic for 23 years, but my wife was excited to play Lorcana because she's a Disney fanatic and for the first time we'd be on a level playing field. After a ton of games over the months, every game was really just a race. Doing a 1 for 1 with your Lore producing creatures was just always bad - so I played Ruby to break Parity. After that she backed off playing and shifted to collecting. The newest set Into the Inklands and adding Locations did spice it up. Instead of just playing creatures until you have 20 lore and tapping them all in 1 turn, you're sort of have to leverage your board to prevent your opponent from just racing ahead. It's not perfect though, I think your initial impression is really dead on though.

[@danielcrosby1254]

wish this was a podcast

[@yourMoonstone]

deeply agree with yall talking about the space card games have to innovate. i dont think its a surprise that games that stick around are doing things other than what mtg does. pokemon is different. yugioh is different. vanguard is different. flesh and blood is different. but so many designers adhere to mtg rules because(???). its tiring!

[@bigbellyobie6204]

good review, fast forward lorcana is doing great, they added hand interaction for decks to deal with control, new card type locations that add a lot of depth and also new ways to get lore. very happy with the game having a blast.

[@brianmattei7134]

Have you guys kept up with Lorcana at all and the newest two sets?

[@distractionmakers]

Not as much as we were. Might be time to revisit and see if our predictions were correct.

[@pierredupont1096]

It's better for one reason to me and that it is using its own IP and building off the strength of its own IP. Magic's brand isn't strong enough to do that anymore.

[@dillonkaseysmith]

Low variance favors control, not aggro. Aggro is built to be consistent in an inconsistent world and relies on opponents stumbling for free wins. In mtg, if you took a control aggro matchup and asked the players ‘you can automatically get a land every turn, but so can your opponent’, the control player would instantly say yes and the aggro player would say no way because they only need a couple lands ever.

[@distractionmakers]

The land consistency lets aggro play up the mana curve and look more like midrange. This allows them to consistently apply life total pressure against control. Control might be able to board wipe turn 4 consistently, but aggro follow up with a large threat and wins anyway.

[@manuelfernandeztato2185]

@@distractionmakers aggro decks dont run "large threats". This of course depends on your definition of control, aggro, midrange etc. but i dont see a goblin player ever turning around a supreme verdict in magic. if an aggro deck has cards that cost 4 or 5 mana, thats not an aggro deck, at least regarding magic metagame.

[@QUAKEMS]

I'm late to this video check out Grand Archive really interesting how it tackles the Queen problem and progressing the game state. If a card costs 3 to Play you put down 3 cards from your hand then those cards you put down are inaccessible until your next turn when you pick them back up. There are a lot of interesting mechanics around that but that's baseline

[@distractionmakers]

Iiinteresting… we’ll have to check it out.

[@andrewhodge6447]

I laughed so hard when you said this video is getting nerdy. I have only played Magic, Pokemon, and Lorcana. I have not played alot of Lorcana because when the cards came out they were so hard to get for at least in my area the first 3 sets and by that point I was already on the fence if I wanted to try to get into this game but not being able to get "game pieces" caused me to completely lose interest. But does Lorcana even have "Board Wipes"?

[@Evaders99]

SW:CCG had cards as resources "Force" that you spent. Pretty intuitive

[@christopherwhibley1509]

When you mentioned running out of terms for tapping a card, I realised I had done the same thing in my game. I just call it "sideways" and "upright"

[@distractionmakers]

Haha it’s pretty comical at this point.

[@leinad3955]

I'm confused about the "counting up to 20 instead of down" part, why does that matter?

[@distractionmakers]

In lorcana you start at 0 lore and gain it through your creatures questing. The first to 20 is the winner. This impacts how players interact in a few ways: players don’t need to interact with each other at all to win the game and in a multiplayer setting only one player has to get to 20 instead of each player being brought to 0.

[@leinad3955]

@@distractionmakers Ohhhh okay, thanks! You did say all that, but the big picture didn't click for me, so that's my fault

[@fafapapa1271]

MtG first tournaments were also dominated by painfully slow control decks :) It's likely because most creatures were underpowered in the first sets. But still, it seems that control decks adapt quickly to aggro strategies in other CCG as well.

[@PaulSzkibik]

I just realized that the new card type in MtG, battle, has consideral overlap with Lorcana's songs. Sure you have to pay mana to get some initial effect, but there's also the backside, often times the real meat of the card. How do you get to flip it? Not by spending extra mana but by tapping (well, attacking with) your creatures (Of course there's extrasteps because your opponent can still block.) and basically forgoing damaging your opponent (getting lore) and instead getting that battle-card flipped for something, that will hopefully have an even greater effect down the line.

[@distractionmakers]

That is interesting! We should do an episode on battles.

[@moocowp4970]

Interesting discussion. I wouldnt be too worried about ruby/amethyst being too strong if i was Lorcana's designers. Obviously they should continue to tweak the game to make a varied meta game, but as a Magic player we are obviously used to metas being pretty stale. In bo1 MTG its pretty good variety currently, but for large periods over the last year in bo3 the meta was pretty stale with Esper midrange just being the best with essentially no losing matchups (or not many). Fortunately thats not the case currently, but there are definitely plenty of times where the meta has been stale af, and its not because of Magic's/Lorcana's game design, its just the card pool at that specific time. I disagree with your Aggro bears Control beats Midrange beats Aggro analogy for mtg tbh. Yeah in general i guess it works like that, but definitely there are plenty of midrange decks that outvalue Control, and Control decks that are good against aggro. Generally it depends on the card pool available. In large card pools Control should do better because they sideboard better and have better answers, whereas the difference between one aggro creature and the next is rarely as big. So maybe that should be something Lorcana can worry about.

[@txtualyt]

Before watching the video, answering the thumbnail: No.

[@999Lucas]

you made a slurry of a non-sequitor in the intro lol

[@frankyg821]

the baseline used to be agro beats combo, combo beats control, control beats agro. Now agro is supposed to beat control but lose to "midrange".... Interesting.

[@hyperonmonster]

It is: combo beats aggro (wins faster), aggro beats control (fast and every threat needs answered), control beats combo (ignore most of their cards and counter the key card). Similarly with midrange instead of combo: midrange beats aggro (goes bigger), aggro beats control (fast and every threat needs answered), control beats midrange (answer the high-cost cards for mana advantage).

[@Tolls4You]

Hearthstone starting hands have 3 cards if you're on the play and 4 cards if you're on the draw. The non-starting player has the coin, and both players draw on their first turn.

[@Jakerunio]

Funny you talk about the idea of going to Disneyland and getting excited to see kids playing Lorcana... the allocation and distribution is so bad that Disneyland doesn't even have the product. Tokyo Disneyland didn't even have the product, and Tokyo is like TCG heaven.

[@jitjit2x]

Can you take a look at codex card game by sirlin games ?

[@mageslime]

The old rock paper scissors variance in magic: the best deck, anti the best deck, rogue decks that beat the anti decks.

[@distractionmakers]

Yeah pretty much. From my understanding Magic tries to aim for a minimum of 5 viable decks in a format and wants around 8.

[@DourPrize]

Y'all should talk about Final Fantasy TCG. It's japans answer to MtG.

[@CatManThree]

Id say pokemon was more the answer to MTG.

[@skurai]

What a segway

[@nikolibarastov4487]

Seems like Lorcana will not last very long. The Interaction on your opponent's turn is a crucial aspect of even mimicking MtG, it makes the game more interesting. Richard Garfield caught Lightning in a Bottle with Magic The Gathering, and a lot of his other projects have not been as influential or well known.

[@sayntfuu]

Disney is gross.

[@derenathor]

MTG < Lorecana < One Piece

[@montycontrite9178]

No Edit: Why would I trust the opinion of someone who owns a Funko Pop

[@simplegarak]

somedays the cards will just be known as portrait'd or landscape'd

[@danielbaird1295]

The underlying IP for lorcana is just too bad for it to have any real reach

[@russellpizel3750]

There is no way I'm buying Disney product, even if it's "good"

[@spammyv]

I have not tried to play Lorcana at a higher level or do more than glance at tournament decklists, but from my usual tourist-y "I'll buy two starter decks of any card game" perspective I've just felt neutral on it. Disney as an IP doesn't make me excited, and the gameplay seems... fine. Funny that y'all mentioned Marvel Snap, despite hating that game's card acquisition I could launch into how I think the gameplay is innovative and what I love about it... And mostly I have any Lorcana because my friends do.

[@distractionmakers]

We’ll do an episode on marvel snap soon. =)

[@ConFusi0n]

​@@distractionmakersI would love to see a Snap episode!

[@NathanielSnow]

I miss Pixelborn. How has Disney not made lorcana digital yet... they are like 4 sets in

[@distractionmakers]

Kinda crazy how long it stuck around honestly haha.

[@DragonmasterSK]

I don't like that there's no interaction. That's why I quit playing Lorcana.

[@Macwylee]

In response to that I scoop l.

[@yurisei6732]

So many recent card games have tried to have a win condition other than depleting life, and I don't understand why. Are they just not designed by card game players? Are they low interactivity on purpose to appeal to children?

[@distractionmakers]

Seems the second one is likely. I think it’s also trying to fix the multiplayer problem of player elimination. If you’re all racing to 20, one person wins when they reach it.

[@yurisei6732]

@@distractionmakers That's probably a motivating factor for Lorcana, but then you have strictly two-player games doing the same thing.

[@thygrrr]

To be honest, I like many of the ways Lorcana encourages opening yourself up for interaction which then opens your opponent up for interaction. And their Ink system has me designing a "Landless" Magic Format in earnest. It requires some rules mixing and lands still exist, but the gist is, whenever you could play a land, you may exile a spell from your hand and play it as a basic land that can make mana of one of the types of mana symbols in the card's casting cost. (plus some caveats, which I'm tuning - e.g. WUBRG casting costs are mildly IMBA a because of how they stack with other WUBRG cards).

[@5Grave5Robber5]

Legend of the Five Rings uses 'bow', if i remember correcyl, for turning it sideways/tapping. Which was very falvourful considering the setting.

[@CyrisAeon]

HARTH-stone. Great video though, got me a sub!

[@chrisharrison2900]

Lorcana feels more a variant of Keyforge

[@42pips29]

On brand or on point

[@meiliyinhua7486]

I know this was a short comment at the end, and not the main thrust, but... tbh I feel like politics in games gets a bad rap, Like, sure, it can feel bad when you lose for reasons that aren't your fault, but, it also gives many of these competitive games more of a chance for players to play it for *relatedness*, that being one of the basic psychological needs according to the Self Determination Theory of Motivation. Like, the alternative to playing for relatedness is to make teams like in Two-Headed Giant, which is a genuine option, but a lot of games don't support that sort of structure as strongly and a lot of what makes commander popular as a 4-player casual format is because you essentially *force* this interpersonal interaction. You *have* to politic at the table to be competent, and that can be rewarding even when it doesn't come out in your favour, because now you have extra reasons to talk to each other. Like, people into games for the social aspect are into many-player games, and a lot of those happen to be free-for-alls. There are a few cooperative games on the market (like Pandemic), or team games (like Codenames), but they all come with their own design problems to work around (particularly quarterbacking) Plus for many people who play a lot of these games, it's a bit easier when some of the negative interaction comes from an opponent and not a teammate (many people avoid team games like LoL or DotA because of teammate flame) So it represents an ounce of relatedness put into the game itself, without needing that added level of trust to be kind and understanding, as well as trust you to make your own decisions, as a teammate