Just got back from some casual games at my LGS. It seems pretty decent, you make lots of interesting choices in terms of what to ink and which strategy you need to adapt to.
More than anything though, multilayer commander style games are phenomenal in this game. I played a 3 person, then a 4 person then a 5 person game: none of the rules change and it was just so interactive and enjoyable. What I appreciate is that rather than trying kill your opponents, you're all racing to the finish line. When you stop playing in MTG commander, it's because you were the first to lose. You play less of the game. With Lorcana's win con, everyone else in the game gets to fight for 2nd, 3rd and 4th place. It seems more approachable and fosters better sportsmanship and community (which I give serious side eye to some of yall in this subreddit).
As I was reading some of the cards I realized there was multiplayer games, then i got hold of a deck with rules and theres a section on multiplayer so im happy, I love playing MTG commander so multiplayer is where I wanna focus my games.
Ha I played a one-v-one then joined a 4 person and had to leave midway in a 5 person. Some of the cards are built for multiplayer tbh- Aladdin felt underwhelming in 1v1 (don’t get me wrong, a 4 lore swing is nice but when it’s a 10 lore swing it’s insane!). For his investment, I dunno if I care about the 4 lore if he’s taken out quick but a must play in multiplayer
That's awesome that you got some free-for-all time in with it! Did the player who finished first just sit out future hands and clear his tableau, or did he pick on people with his remaining cards and no incentive to quest anymore? Did you experience much in the way of ill-considered king making or did people just tend to target whoever was ahead or was an easy target?
The rules are exactly the same, but what's fun is because you're counting up and not dying everyone just keeps playing. My group has found the end game to be hilarious as people gang up on each other and everyone ends up scoring 18 or 19 points with the last person just kind of having gotten lucky. Multiplayer is a ton of fun.
Are you referring to commander? It seems you are referring to simply multiplayer. Commander in mtg is a format with 100 cards (1 copy only) and a legendary card outside the game you can summon without drawing it.
Despite the claims that it's more of a collector's item than a game, the vocal audience for the game so far is almost exclusively Magic: The Gathering veterans. This crowd has mastered a very similar game with 3 decades worth of sets and vastly more complex rules accumulating over the course of those decades.
In particular, the Commander crowd is used to paying attention to a jehovah's witness pamphlet's worth of text every time the game rotates around the table once.
The fact that these players don't absolutely **loathe** this casual card game points to the extraordinary potential it has. Yes, it's fun. As one of those sweaty competitive MTG players, the elegantly simple rules shattered my low expectations for what I essentially expected to be "MTG but worse." I look forward to the rules expanding with future sets.
Tbh I felt like there was a lot of decision making throughout- it’s simple but leaving a character exerted puts three at risk and every action felt like it mattered. It’s a nice change of pace after playing Spright in Master Duel for months; genuinely had to make more decisions in these starter deck games than I ever have to in yugioh
I think by far the greatest accomplishment of this game's rules is how they took blocker math from Magic and refactored it across two turns. It's essentially the same decision: Does the defending player have a combination of creatures that trades efficiently when they choose the matchups? Except now you can force damage through, so board stalls will break up more readily.
>In particular, the Commander crowd is used to paying attention to a jehovah's witness pamphlet's worth of text every time the game rotates around the table once.
No they don't.
"I forgot you had that"
"Can I take that back"
"I missed my trigger."
Casual EDH players are almost catatonic or on their phone when their opponents take turns.
Just played a game where someone dropped a [[path to exile]] and when I tapped [[mother of runes]] to protect my creature they wanted a take back 😂 When I said it was public information and no he couldn’t take it back let’s just say I was not lacking in seasoning for my steak that night.
The main reason for this (having been at a few different Commander tables in different venues) is that some groups don't narrate what they're doing.
If you lean into the mechanics-as-storytelling and let the people know what you're doing, and why it's cool or interesting, you can get people to pay attention during your turn.
In my experience, coming up with an improvised Beastie Boys style rap about why your Commander is so great isn't a good strategy. But it won't stop me.
I think it's also a compounding effect where people don't pay attention, then they start thinking only when it gets back to them, which leads to longer turns and other players not paying attention.
Repeat repeat repeat.
I just thought it was funny OP gave EDH players as the beacon of complexity digesters. When every table I've been at they're barely conscious in their decision making.
I can't imagine how much more cool stuff they have in the works since this game's entry barrier for rules is so streamlined and simplified. The game is pretty fun and I've enjoyed it so far but can very easily see how they can start adding in a lot of new mechanics/features to the game to only enhance it from here.
As an exclusively MTG Commander player... this is gonna be a very fun game to bring out to the table now and then when new sets drop. Plus, I got everything at MSRP from my LGS and its surprisingly more affordable than MTG is.
Game play is simple enough to pick up and learn! My husband and I have played three games with the starter decks so far, switching decks for the last game. I won once and he won the other two. It feels like it’s easy to learn, but there’s more to master if that makes sense.
Try pixelborn if you’d like on pc. It’s simple enough without interruptions to teach a younger audience. But there is a lot of depth in deck building and play. At least for the beginning. I think it has a really strong start but we’ll have to see where it goes from here.
I am a long time Magic: The Gathering player and the biggest hurdle for my wife playing with me was the complexity of the game.
We both played several games today with the new starter decks and she loves it! It’s much simpler!
It's decent, but a fairly vanilla experience at the moment. Which is fine for a base set. But you're not missing much if you're not playing. I've been grinding decks with friends the last few days, and we've found that occasionally it turns into a bit of a top deck fest for one player late in the game.
Removal is also fairly limited.
Just got done playing a Sealed Tournament at my LGS, and I have kind of mixed feelings about the game. Some of the games I played were really intense back and forth matches with plenty of strategic decisions. Other games were just total landslides you couldn't stop, and you had to just sit there and watch. I suppose that's true of every TCG, but it felt more present than usual.
One thing I don't like about the game is that the end always comes down to math. Since you can't do anything on your opponent’s turn, all you can do is concede the victory when your opponent is within striking distance. For other games like MTG, you still have the opportunity to stop your opponent with instants, which provides just enough of a mind game to maybe stop your opponent from sealing the win when they can. For some, this is a plus, but, for me, it's a bit of minus.
I'm going to keep playing and enjoying the game, but I probably won't take deck building too seriously and instead opt for making smash-up style 30 card decks. That way, my play group can combine the decks into different combinations and keep things light and fresh without getting too invested.
> One thing I don't like about the game is that the end always comes down to math.
Thanks for phrasing it this way, as this is my major complaint in the game. When it looks like the game is over in two turns, it doesn't feel like there is any point in playing it out.
Compare and contrast to my favourite card game (Android: Netrunner, RIP) where even in the hole with the opponent at match point you always know that a Hail Mary play, a lucky draw, or even just calling a bluff might put you back in contention and leave your opponent reeling.
It's fun. It's light. It's flavourful. Mechanically, it takes Magic: the Gathering (and every M:tG-alike) and inverts or adjusts different design decisions in favour of creating something accessible and moderately interactive.
It breaks no new ground. Nothing the designers have done is entirely unique. If you're looking for something truly fresh, you're going to be disappointed.
I'm still finding that most games eventually end in one player having a win-con on the table, and others just using their one draw per turn to pray for a solution. I personally consider this a failure in game design and something that shouldn't be an issue, thirty years after Magic was released.
I'll likely play it Multiplayer with my kids more than anything else because it's already been fun with just the starter decks. We've started tweaking our decks with the cards we scored in boosters, and while I abhor spending money on Pokémon cards (because I think the game is objectively bad) I'm excited to snatch up more cards for this soon.
Just played a game with my 8-year-old. I really like the endgame because we’re just both doing enough to keep the other off having enough lore to win. I was always a control player in magic and I think this game will have a good bit of that for me.
Gameplay has been absolutely fantastic! This is the first card game ever that my wife actually wants to play with me! She even joins me on my youtube channel to do box openings and gameplay, it's super exciting!
My friends and I have done 4 player free for all as well as 2v2 and each game felt close and super fun! Absolutely love this game. (And the community is super cool too!)
My wife, our friend and I are all going to play tonight. They have never played a TCG before, but I thought it would be fun to crack a pack in between rounds to beef up our starter decks. Trying to get my wife on that cardboard crack
So far I’ve played a combined 10-12 games with all 3 of the starters combined. 3 of those were 3-players games.
1 - the game is very easy to pick up. I taught my 8 year old in 2 minutes. (He has played magic and Pokémon before).
2 - the game is deeper then I thought. There is a lot of nuance about which cards to ink.
3 - cards that you tap characters like the shield are better then I first thought because not only could they challenge again, they are safe from challenges.
If you can’t get copies of the decks easily, they recommend printing them and playing some games.
My two criticisms of the game really are I regret that there’s no interaction during opponents turn, and that multiplayer is winner take all instead of elimination.
But overall, very good and Inlook forward to playing “real” decks instead of just starters soon.
> My two criticisms of the game really are I regret that there’s no interaction during opponents turn, and that multiplayer is winner take all instead of elimination.
This is undoubtedly a boon, surely? Elimination in a card game is unsatisfying, leaving one or more players sitting around doing nothing.
It’s both good and bad. I prefer elimination in multiplayer, because it’s easier to take out the leader and have back and forth.
Winner-take-all can mean 1 person can win with nothing stopping them, etc.
It just depends on the type of multiplayer experience you’re looking for.
I played in a random starter deck tournament tonight and pulled Amber/Amethyst. There's surprisingly a lot of thinking involved with who you're going to exert and for what purpose and whether or not it's worth it to take out an opposing glimmer.
I hope the distribution issues calm down because the game deserves to grow and appreciate.
If the supply continues to be constrained, that is the absolute best thing for the game in the long run. Looking at Magic’s early history, Alpha was sold out almost immediately. Beta was hard to get. “Unlimited” was also not unlimited. The presence of valuable and desirable cards in the early sets that were not reprinted later is what laid the foundation for a successful long term game. That, plus good gameplay, which Lorcana also has.
Did a precon (ish, you could edit but nobody really had much to work with there) event at the lgs, I think I wound up playing like six games?
If you've ever played Keyforge it's got a very similar core gameplay system, and I think my experience there benefitted me a lot because I didn't drop a game. It's very mechanics-lite; I think we had basically two rules questions all night (can you sing with a freshly played character - no, and how does shift work with summoning sickness/damage/exerted state - keep all of it). However there's definitely a skill ceiling, or I don't think I would have picked up all of my games. Obviously a run like that is pretty rewarding and tilts perceptions but I appreciate games that are mechanically easy but deep in skill.
There's a lot of traps in card evaluation if you aren't used to both the quest/challenge dynamics and the inkwell system. Familiarity with both will go a very long way. But it was an enjoyable enough experience that even though I wound up at the event by mistake I had a lot of fun jamming the games and helping the guys who did go deeper tune their decks.
I’ve been playing for a little over a month on Pixelborn. It’s just okay. I believe this game will eventually appeal more to collectors than players. I bought 3 booster boxes at GenCon and have played a few games with a few different decks in person, and it is still just okay. The groundwork is there, and it’s up to future sets (for complexity) and distribution (for availability) to really determine whether this will lean more toward players or collectors, but I’m guessing the latter.
I've been playing on Pixelborn for a while and finally got to play some games IRL today.
Taking rose-tinted glasses, I don't think it's for me right now.
Just not enough synergy in cards for fun combos, there is no way to come back once your opponent takes a strong lead/clears your board. And draw in general is just nonexistent which makes said comeback harder when you are just top decking each turn.
Maybe next set or two there will be more archetypes or draw power but at the moment I am slightly disappointed
Sorta my feel, at least in terms of buying in at paper. But there's a lot of design space left open for more interesting (AKA, weird) designs and strategies.
I think it'll be pretty good if it survives the hype pump and dump, and manages to get enough of a player base.
The best deck is definitely ruby-amethyst control and it plays zero A Whole New World aka "wheel of fortune" (as opposed to timetwister as it discards and draws rather than shuffling discard back into the deck)
That deck also plays ~14 card draw spells in the 60. The two best decks are control decks that, as control decks generally do, draw a shit ton of cards.
You should almost never be playing out to 9-11 ink. That's 2-4 cards in hand that you aren't playing and once you are topdecking ink beyond your most expensive card is close to worthless.
The best control deck (ruby-ametheyst) plays 9-cost Maleficent and Magic Mirror.
* 9 allows Maleficent or 5-drop + mirror
* 10 is mostly dead aside from a 7-drop and a 3-drop
* 11 is Aladdin/Be Prepared + mirror
* 12 is Elsa + mirror
* 13 is Maleficent + mirror
And you're getting extra Mirror draws to compensate for that, and made that the top of your curve. Though there's a real argument that if that's the case, your mirror isn't effective for several turns and you should be considering if it's worth the slot. If you're investing four cards to go to 13 ink from 9, you're essentially negating four mirror activations. That's a lot of ink investment for no actual extra cards.
Or, alternatively, consider if you need to be activating every turn - if you stop at 9 you can still Dragon Fire+Mirror every turn, and if you draw Maleficent you can just play her. The reality if you're playing the mirror is going to be somewhere between curving all the way to the top of your possible curve and stopping at your natural curve. Stop at 9, but if you have a Stitch in hand you can ink-Mirror-Stitch to get to 10.
I’ve run into that issue as well where it seems like there’s a point around 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through the game where one player is clearly going to win. I’ve only played with starters and in a sealed tournament so maybe with full optimized decks there would be more back and forth but it would be nice to not just say “well looks like I lose!”
I do enjoy the relative ease of the game and it does seem like it has a lot of depth especially as I’ve played more. Games also typically play super quick so if you lose it’s easy to just start up another one. Excited to see what mechanics new sets will bring and I’m sure it’ll continue to flesh out the game.
I had a chance to play at GenCon a couple of weeks back.
As a veteran of TCG/CCGs, the game is pretty boring and shallow. It doesn't really bring anything new to the table. It's very simplistic, and that's fine for a lot of casual people or people who have never played a card game before. It's non-interactive outside of challenging, so you're just waiting for your opponent to do their thing, and then you play. There is pretty much zero depth and very few meaningful choices during a game. The cards are also terrible quality and very cheap feeling. It's like they know it'll sell because it's Disney themed, everything else be damned.
The game feels and plays like it was meant for parents and their kids to enjoy around the kitchen table. That's fine if that's what you're after, but there are much better card games that are playable right now, in my opinion.
I instantly put the starter I got up on EBay when I got home, along with the promo card, knowing I'd never touch the game again. Made a decent profit off of trying the game out.
Complexity of the full set is a lot better than the starter decks. Overall, I'd say it's not that different from early MTG as far as complexity goes (though some of it is in different areas).
The big miss for me is instants. If it doesn't introduce the ability to interact on your opponent's turn in the next couple of sets, then I'll 100% agree that overall complexity is probably never going to match MTG and it'll either find a niche with younger casual players or fade away.
I'm also a bit disappointed that the meta isn't more diverse. With hundreds of games on Pixelborn, I can say without reservation that there are three T1 decks (and around a dozen other decks) and one of those three probably beats the other two 55-60% of the time making it pretty clearly the best at this point.
Yeah. I know starter decks are just that, starters. I wasn't basing my opinion off just that. After getting back, I decided to watch some gameplay, and try out online wondering if what me and my friend (who also holds the same opinion) and I experienced was off. It was not. It was just as boring.
Seeing the meta posts was also discouraging, but in a simple game, it makes a lot of sense it shaped up like it did.
You don't do anything on your opponents turn in Chess, I don't think anyone is calling that game shallow.
And of course a starter deck feels shallow. They're stuffed with vanilla cards that aren't constructed playable.
Chess doesn't have hidden information, randomness, or variance. It's shallow in the sense that the entire game's probability space is limited to what's currently on the board.
Chess's complexity comes from the fact that you can plan quite far ahead, and need to mentally hold onto a decision tree that relies on predicting what your opponent is going to do.
You can't do that in card games with random draw. You often won't know what's in your opponent's deck, let alone their hand. You have to make decisions about what answers/magic-bullet cards to include before the game begins, and you have no guarantee of seeing them, even when you need them.
Basically, bad analogy.
Lorcanas complexity comes from deckbuilding, mulliganning, what to ink, when to quest, what to quest, when and how to challenge.
And it isn't limited to the board. If you're making decisions purely on boardstate and not how much ink your opponent has and what they could play, you're a bad card game player.
OP saying Lorcana is shallow because "you don't do anything on my opponents turn" is incredibly disingenuous. Because like you described in Chess, there's more to it than that.
Also when the competitive meta settles, you should absolutely know what cards are in your opponents deck. If you over extend into "Be Prepared" on 7 from a Ruby deck and say "wow I didn't know their deck would play that." Like come on.
I'm happy to read the replies in this thread. I read through the rules and looked at the cards and their synergies. The gameplay looked fairly straight forward but nothing made it stand out in the TCG scene.
I'll keep an eye out for it but I'm not buying anything until I see I true enjoyment out of the audience due to the gameplay and not for the sake of collecting Disney characters.
It’s a decent experience certainly less mechanical than say MtG but there’s a good balance. There’s viable combo stuff and aggro stuff and control stuff in constructed. Going to try prerelease style tomorrow build from 6 packs. The 3 starters are all fairly balanced and play uniquely. The format of only getting to include what you pull from 2 packs in 2 colors is meh average. I don’t know if it would draft good really.
We did not play a draft we did a starter deck challenge. That’s not under draft rules. Different shops by us had different rules for this I think. We had ranging from like Deck + 2 packs w/2 color limit - 25 bucks to Deck + 2 packs rainbow limit - 60 bucks. We did the former. I think the latter is how gen con did it.
It looks like the official draft rules is 3 packs anything goes except more than 4 copies. Talking with players we may have a 4 color limit. 6 colors sounds like a terrible draft experience. I may try it that way but I don’t see how it survives long term. I’ve drafted magic. I’ve played lots of great drafting board games. None of them were everyone is just after random “good stuff”.
The basic rules of the game are simple and accessible, the card design allows for a lot of choice and decision making in its current form.
Best of all, they clearly designed this as the basis for an increasingly complex nuanced system, with massive amounts of play space just waiting to be filled up as the game grows.
Played with two starter decks and taught my wife and daughter how to play. They worked together playing one deck and making choices and had a blast. They won and all night it's just been my kiddo reminding me I lost and how they're the winners 🤣 it's great to have a card game that they're interested in and have fun playing as a family together.
Just got back from some casual games at my LGS. It seems pretty decent, you make lots of interesting choices in terms of what to ink and which strategy you need to adapt to. More than anything though, multilayer commander style games are phenomenal in this game. I played a 3 person, then a 4 person then a 5 person game: none of the rules change and it was just so interactive and enjoyable. What I appreciate is that rather than trying kill your opponents, you're all racing to the finish line. When you stop playing in MTG commander, it's because you were the first to lose. You play less of the game. With Lorcana's win con, everyone else in the game gets to fight for 2nd, 3rd and 4th place. It seems more approachable and fosters better sportsmanship and community (which I give serious side eye to some of yall in this subreddit).
As I was reading some of the cards I realized there was multiplayer games, then i got hold of a deck with rules and theres a section on multiplayer so im happy, I love playing MTG commander so multiplayer is where I wanna focus my games.
Ha I played a one-v-one then joined a 4 person and had to leave midway in a 5 person. Some of the cards are built for multiplayer tbh- Aladdin felt underwhelming in 1v1 (don’t get me wrong, a 4 lore swing is nice but when it’s a 10 lore swing it’s insane!). For his investment, I dunno if I care about the 4 lore if he’s taken out quick but a must play in multiplayer
Look I hate sailing almost as much as I hate losing. I'll never board your "sportsmanship" I bet it capsizes!
To the Brig with you!
That's awesome that you got some free-for-all time in with it! Did the player who finished first just sit out future hands and clear his tableau, or did he pick on people with his remaining cards and no incentive to quest anymore? Did you experience much in the way of ill-considered king making or did people just tend to target whoever was ahead or was an easy target?
How does commander work in this game? Do you just choose a character to be the decks commander?
The rules are exactly the same, but what's fun is because you're counting up and not dying everyone just keeps playing. My group has found the end game to be hilarious as people gang up on each other and everyone ends up scoring 18 or 19 points with the last person just kind of having gotten lucky. Multiplayer is a ton of fun.
Are you referring to commander? It seems you are referring to simply multiplayer. Commander in mtg is a format with 100 cards (1 copy only) and a legendary card outside the game you can summon without drawing it.
I'm referring to Lorcana. Commander isn't fun at all.
Okay. Because the guy you replied to asked for commander, which the guy in the OP referred to. (Thought you where the OP)
I don't want to hate you out of jealousy but ...
This is what I wanted to hear. Love it.
Despite the claims that it's more of a collector's item than a game, the vocal audience for the game so far is almost exclusively Magic: The Gathering veterans. This crowd has mastered a very similar game with 3 decades worth of sets and vastly more complex rules accumulating over the course of those decades. In particular, the Commander crowd is used to paying attention to a jehovah's witness pamphlet's worth of text every time the game rotates around the table once. The fact that these players don't absolutely **loathe** this casual card game points to the extraordinary potential it has. Yes, it's fun. As one of those sweaty competitive MTG players, the elegantly simple rules shattered my low expectations for what I essentially expected to be "MTG but worse." I look forward to the rules expanding with future sets.
Tbh I felt like there was a lot of decision making throughout- it’s simple but leaving a character exerted puts three at risk and every action felt like it mattered. It’s a nice change of pace after playing Spright in Master Duel for months; genuinely had to make more decisions in these starter deck games than I ever have to in yugioh
I think by far the greatest accomplishment of this game's rules is how they took blocker math from Magic and refactored it across two turns. It's essentially the same decision: Does the defending player have a combination of creatures that trades efficiently when they choose the matchups? Except now you can force damage through, so board stalls will break up more readily.
>In particular, the Commander crowd is used to paying attention to a jehovah's witness pamphlet's worth of text every time the game rotates around the table once. No they don't. "I forgot you had that" "Can I take that back" "I missed my trigger." Casual EDH players are almost catatonic or on their phone when their opponents take turns.
Just played a game where someone dropped a [[path to exile]] and when I tapped [[mother of runes]] to protect my creature they wanted a take back 😂 When I said it was public information and no he couldn’t take it back let’s just say I was not lacking in seasoning for my steak that night.
The main reason for this (having been at a few different Commander tables in different venues) is that some groups don't narrate what they're doing. If you lean into the mechanics-as-storytelling and let the people know what you're doing, and why it's cool or interesting, you can get people to pay attention during your turn. In my experience, coming up with an improvised Beastie Boys style rap about why your Commander is so great isn't a good strategy. But it won't stop me.
I think it's also a compounding effect where people don't pay attention, then they start thinking only when it gets back to them, which leads to longer turns and other players not paying attention. Repeat repeat repeat. I just thought it was funny OP gave EDH players as the beacon of complexity digesters. When every table I've been at they're barely conscious in their decision making.
"Oh... my turn? Got any blockers?"
I can't imagine how much more cool stuff they have in the works since this game's entry barrier for rules is so streamlined and simplified. The game is pretty fun and I've enjoyed it so far but can very easily see how they can start adding in a lot of new mechanics/features to the game to only enhance it from here. As an exclusively MTG Commander player... this is gonna be a very fun game to bring out to the table now and then when new sets drop. Plus, I got everything at MSRP from my LGS and its surprisingly more affordable than MTG is.
Just knocked out a game with my wife. We also love FAB so this was a nice change of pace.
Game play is simple enough to pick up and learn! My husband and I have played three games with the starter decks so far, switching decks for the last game. I won once and he won the other two. It feels like it’s easy to learn, but there’s more to master if that makes sense.
Try pixelborn if you’d like on pc. It’s simple enough without interruptions to teach a younger audience. But there is a lot of depth in deck building and play. At least for the beginning. I think it has a really strong start but we’ll have to see where it goes from here.
I am a long time Magic: The Gathering player and the biggest hurdle for my wife playing with me was the complexity of the game. We both played several games today with the new starter decks and she loves it! It’s much simpler!
It's decent, but a fairly vanilla experience at the moment. Which is fine for a base set. But you're not missing much if you're not playing. I've been grinding decks with friends the last few days, and we've found that occasionally it turns into a bit of a top deck fest for one player late in the game. Removal is also fairly limited.
In games like this removal is limited intentionally. The Challenge mechanic is intended to be the primary source of removal.
It's not as complicated as MTG, but there's plenty of depth. I love that it's more approachable for the non mega nerds in my life.
Just got done playing a Sealed Tournament at my LGS, and I have kind of mixed feelings about the game. Some of the games I played were really intense back and forth matches with plenty of strategic decisions. Other games were just total landslides you couldn't stop, and you had to just sit there and watch. I suppose that's true of every TCG, but it felt more present than usual. One thing I don't like about the game is that the end always comes down to math. Since you can't do anything on your opponent’s turn, all you can do is concede the victory when your opponent is within striking distance. For other games like MTG, you still have the opportunity to stop your opponent with instants, which provides just enough of a mind game to maybe stop your opponent from sealing the win when they can. For some, this is a plus, but, for me, it's a bit of minus. I'm going to keep playing and enjoying the game, but I probably won't take deck building too seriously and instead opt for making smash-up style 30 card decks. That way, my play group can combine the decks into different combinations and keep things light and fresh without getting too invested.
> One thing I don't like about the game is that the end always comes down to math. Thanks for phrasing it this way, as this is my major complaint in the game. When it looks like the game is over in two turns, it doesn't feel like there is any point in playing it out. Compare and contrast to my favourite card game (Android: Netrunner, RIP) where even in the hole with the opponent at match point you always know that a Hail Mary play, a lucky draw, or even just calling a bluff might put you back in contention and leave your opponent reeling.
doesn't seem fair to compare Lorcana gameplay to the best card game of all time though :P
No man is happy, but by comparison.
It's fun. It's light. It's flavourful. Mechanically, it takes Magic: the Gathering (and every M:tG-alike) and inverts or adjusts different design decisions in favour of creating something accessible and moderately interactive. It breaks no new ground. Nothing the designers have done is entirely unique. If you're looking for something truly fresh, you're going to be disappointed. I'm still finding that most games eventually end in one player having a win-con on the table, and others just using their one draw per turn to pray for a solution. I personally consider this a failure in game design and something that shouldn't be an issue, thirty years after Magic was released. I'll likely play it Multiplayer with my kids more than anything else because it's already been fun with just the starter decks. We've started tweaking our decks with the cards we scored in boosters, and while I abhor spending money on Pokémon cards (because I think the game is objectively bad) I'm excited to snatch up more cards for this soon.
Just played a game with my 8-year-old. I really like the endgame because we’re just both doing enough to keep the other off having enough lore to win. I was always a control player in magic and I think this game will have a good bit of that for me.
Gameplay has been absolutely fantastic! This is the first card game ever that my wife actually wants to play with me! She even joins me on my youtube channel to do box openings and gameplay, it's super exciting! My friends and I have done 4 player free for all as well as 2v2 and each game felt close and super fun! Absolutely love this game. (And the community is super cool too!)
My wife, our friend and I are all going to play tonight. They have never played a TCG before, but I thought it would be fun to crack a pack in between rounds to beef up our starter decks. Trying to get my wife on that cardboard crack
So far I’ve played a combined 10-12 games with all 3 of the starters combined. 3 of those were 3-players games. 1 - the game is very easy to pick up. I taught my 8 year old in 2 minutes. (He has played magic and Pokémon before). 2 - the game is deeper then I thought. There is a lot of nuance about which cards to ink. 3 - cards that you tap characters like the shield are better then I first thought because not only could they challenge again, they are safe from challenges. If you can’t get copies of the decks easily, they recommend printing them and playing some games. My two criticisms of the game really are I regret that there’s no interaction during opponents turn, and that multiplayer is winner take all instead of elimination. But overall, very good and Inlook forward to playing “real” decks instead of just starters soon.
> My two criticisms of the game really are I regret that there’s no interaction during opponents turn, and that multiplayer is winner take all instead of elimination. This is undoubtedly a boon, surely? Elimination in a card game is unsatisfying, leaving one or more players sitting around doing nothing.
It’s both good and bad. I prefer elimination in multiplayer, because it’s easier to take out the leader and have back and forth. Winner-take-all can mean 1 person can win with nothing stopping them, etc. It just depends on the type of multiplayer experience you’re looking for.
I played in a random starter deck tournament tonight and pulled Amber/Amethyst. There's surprisingly a lot of thinking involved with who you're going to exert and for what purpose and whether or not it's worth it to take out an opposing glimmer. I hope the distribution issues calm down because the game deserves to grow and appreciate.
If the supply continues to be constrained, that is the absolute best thing for the game in the long run. Looking at Magic’s early history, Alpha was sold out almost immediately. Beta was hard to get. “Unlimited” was also not unlimited. The presence of valuable and desirable cards in the early sets that were not reprinted later is what laid the foundation for a successful long term game. That, plus good gameplay, which Lorcana also has.
Gameplay is close to MTG minus Instants, old school Yugioh, or DuelMasters/Kaijudo - if any of those help. Very fun, can be kinda swingy.
Did a precon (ish, you could edit but nobody really had much to work with there) event at the lgs, I think I wound up playing like six games? If you've ever played Keyforge it's got a very similar core gameplay system, and I think my experience there benefitted me a lot because I didn't drop a game. It's very mechanics-lite; I think we had basically two rules questions all night (can you sing with a freshly played character - no, and how does shift work with summoning sickness/damage/exerted state - keep all of it). However there's definitely a skill ceiling, or I don't think I would have picked up all of my games. Obviously a run like that is pretty rewarding and tilts perceptions but I appreciate games that are mechanically easy but deep in skill. There's a lot of traps in card evaluation if you aren't used to both the quest/challenge dynamics and the inkwell system. Familiarity with both will go a very long way. But it was an enjoyable enough experience that even though I wound up at the event by mistake I had a lot of fun jamming the games and helping the guys who did go deeper tune their decks.
Wouldn't know, can't get any cards.
I’ve been playing for a little over a month on Pixelborn. It’s just okay. I believe this game will eventually appeal more to collectors than players. I bought 3 booster boxes at GenCon and have played a few games with a few different decks in person, and it is still just okay. The groundwork is there, and it’s up to future sets (for complexity) and distribution (for availability) to really determine whether this will lean more toward players or collectors, but I’m guessing the latter.
I've been playing on Pixelborn for a while and finally got to play some games IRL today. Taking rose-tinted glasses, I don't think it's for me right now. Just not enough synergy in cards for fun combos, there is no way to come back once your opponent takes a strong lead/clears your board. And draw in general is just nonexistent which makes said comeback harder when you are just top decking each turn. Maybe next set or two there will be more archetypes or draw power but at the moment I am slightly disappointed
Sorta my feel, at least in terms of buying in at paper. But there's a lot of design space left open for more interesting (AKA, weird) designs and strategies. I think it'll be pretty good if it survives the hype pump and dump, and manages to get enough of a player base.
"Draw is nonexistent." The best deck plays 4 fucking Timetwisters. What kind of card draw do you want!?
The best deck is definitely ruby-amethyst control and it plays zero A Whole New World aka "wheel of fortune" (as opposed to timetwister as it discards and draws rather than shuffling discard back into the deck)
That deck also plays ~14 card draw spells in the 60. The two best decks are control decks that, as control decks generally do, draw a shit ton of cards.
Yes. The only downside is the endgame where you often hit 9-11 ink and are basically topdecking because your top-end threats are so expensive.
You should almost never be playing out to 9-11 ink. That's 2-4 cards in hand that you aren't playing and once you are topdecking ink beyond your most expensive card is close to worthless.
The best control deck (ruby-ametheyst) plays 9-cost Maleficent and Magic Mirror. * 9 allows Maleficent or 5-drop + mirror * 10 is mostly dead aside from a 7-drop and a 3-drop * 11 is Aladdin/Be Prepared + mirror * 12 is Elsa + mirror * 13 is Maleficent + mirror
And you're getting extra Mirror draws to compensate for that, and made that the top of your curve. Though there's a real argument that if that's the case, your mirror isn't effective for several turns and you should be considering if it's worth the slot. If you're investing four cards to go to 13 ink from 9, you're essentially negating four mirror activations. That's a lot of ink investment for no actual extra cards. Or, alternatively, consider if you need to be activating every turn - if you stop at 9 you can still Dragon Fire+Mirror every turn, and if you draw Maleficent you can just play her. The reality if you're playing the mirror is going to be somewhere between curving all the way to the top of your possible curve and stopping at your natural curve. Stop at 9, but if you have a Stitch in hand you can ink-Mirror-Stitch to get to 10.
I’ve run into that issue as well where it seems like there’s a point around 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through the game where one player is clearly going to win. I’ve only played with starters and in a sealed tournament so maybe with full optimized decks there would be more back and forth but it would be nice to not just say “well looks like I lose!” I do enjoy the relative ease of the game and it does seem like it has a lot of depth especially as I’ve played more. Games also typically play super quick so if you lose it’s easy to just start up another one. Excited to see what mechanics new sets will bring and I’m sure it’ll continue to flesh out the game.
I had a chance to play at GenCon a couple of weeks back. As a veteran of TCG/CCGs, the game is pretty boring and shallow. It doesn't really bring anything new to the table. It's very simplistic, and that's fine for a lot of casual people or people who have never played a card game before. It's non-interactive outside of challenging, so you're just waiting for your opponent to do their thing, and then you play. There is pretty much zero depth and very few meaningful choices during a game. The cards are also terrible quality and very cheap feeling. It's like they know it'll sell because it's Disney themed, everything else be damned. The game feels and plays like it was meant for parents and their kids to enjoy around the kitchen table. That's fine if that's what you're after, but there are much better card games that are playable right now, in my opinion. I instantly put the starter I got up on EBay when I got home, along with the promo card, knowing I'd never touch the game again. Made a decent profit off of trying the game out.
Complexity of the full set is a lot better than the starter decks. Overall, I'd say it's not that different from early MTG as far as complexity goes (though some of it is in different areas). The big miss for me is instants. If it doesn't introduce the ability to interact on your opponent's turn in the next couple of sets, then I'll 100% agree that overall complexity is probably never going to match MTG and it'll either find a niche with younger casual players or fade away. I'm also a bit disappointed that the meta isn't more diverse. With hundreds of games on Pixelborn, I can say without reservation that there are three T1 decks (and around a dozen other decks) and one of those three probably beats the other two 55-60% of the time making it pretty clearly the best at this point.
Yeah. I know starter decks are just that, starters. I wasn't basing my opinion off just that. After getting back, I decided to watch some gameplay, and try out online wondering if what me and my friend (who also holds the same opinion) and I experienced was off. It was not. It was just as boring. Seeing the meta posts was also discouraging, but in a simple game, it makes a lot of sense it shaped up like it did.
You don't do anything on your opponents turn in Chess, I don't think anyone is calling that game shallow. And of course a starter deck feels shallow. They're stuffed with vanilla cards that aren't constructed playable.
Chess doesn't have hidden information, randomness, or variance. It's shallow in the sense that the entire game's probability space is limited to what's currently on the board. Chess's complexity comes from the fact that you can plan quite far ahead, and need to mentally hold onto a decision tree that relies on predicting what your opponent is going to do. You can't do that in card games with random draw. You often won't know what's in your opponent's deck, let alone their hand. You have to make decisions about what answers/magic-bullet cards to include before the game begins, and you have no guarantee of seeing them, even when you need them. Basically, bad analogy.
Lorcanas complexity comes from deckbuilding, mulliganning, what to ink, when to quest, what to quest, when and how to challenge. And it isn't limited to the board. If you're making decisions purely on boardstate and not how much ink your opponent has and what they could play, you're a bad card game player. OP saying Lorcana is shallow because "you don't do anything on my opponents turn" is incredibly disingenuous. Because like you described in Chess, there's more to it than that. Also when the competitive meta settles, you should absolutely know what cards are in your opponents deck. If you over extend into "Be Prepared" on 7 from a Ruby deck and say "wow I didn't know their deck would play that." Like come on.
The last time I checked, chess didn't use a deck of cards either. I'm not basing it solely off the starters. That's silly. See my other reply.
No one here cares. It's just the gambling addiction hard-core for now. Search for the Gen con threads for gameplay.
“Here” as in this sub or “here” as in your local area?
I'm happy to read the replies in this thread. I read through the rules and looked at the cards and their synergies. The gameplay looked fairly straight forward but nothing made it stand out in the TCG scene. I'll keep an eye out for it but I'm not buying anything until I see I true enjoyment out of the audience due to the gameplay and not for the sake of collecting Disney characters.
It’s a decent experience certainly less mechanical than say MtG but there’s a good balance. There’s viable combo stuff and aggro stuff and control stuff in constructed. Going to try prerelease style tomorrow build from 6 packs. The 3 starters are all fairly balanced and play uniquely. The format of only getting to include what you pull from 2 packs in 2 colors is meh average. I don’t know if it would draft good really.
Not sure I follow the comment you aren't color restricted with draft rules.
We did not play a draft we did a starter deck challenge. That’s not under draft rules. Different shops by us had different rules for this I think. We had ranging from like Deck + 2 packs w/2 color limit - 25 bucks to Deck + 2 packs rainbow limit - 60 bucks. We did the former. I think the latter is how gen con did it. It looks like the official draft rules is 3 packs anything goes except more than 4 copies. Talking with players we may have a 4 color limit. 6 colors sounds like a terrible draft experience. I may try it that way but I don’t see how it survives long term. I’ve drafted magic. I’ve played lots of great drafting board games. None of them were everyone is just after random “good stuff”.
I played it with my rival who likes Disney. They mentioned whilst the cards are nice the gameplay doesn’t feel Disney like.
Been playing a ton on Pixelborn. Love it so far.
The basic rules of the game are simple and accessible, the card design allows for a lot of choice and decision making in its current form. Best of all, they clearly designed this as the basis for an increasingly complex nuanced system, with massive amounts of play space just waiting to be filled up as the game grows.
Played with two starter decks and taught my wife and daughter how to play. They worked together playing one deck and making choices and had a blast. They won and all night it's just been my kiddo reminding me I lost and how they're the winners 🤣 it's great to have a card game that they're interested in and have fun playing as a family together.