Competitive Review - Disney Lorcana Challenge in Seattle

Last weekend, October 26-27, we had the last Disney Lorcana Challenge (DLC) of the season, in Seattle!

In today's article, we1ll analyze the event, including the controversies that arose within the community regarding the 2-game format, and also take a look at the champion's decklist. Let's go!

Attendance and Top64 Cut

The Seattle DLC had 1893 participants, just 10 less than the Vegas DLC at the end of September.

After 9 swiss rounds on Saturday, the Top64 played single elimination on Sunday. From Saturday to Sunday, the cutoff was, like in Vegas and Birmingham, again at 45 points, with 6 people on 45 points missing the cut on tiebreakers.

Controversies regarding the 2-Game Format and Intentional Draws

There is a growing debate in the Lorcana community about the choice of the format used for Challenges - as explained in the previous article, the format mirrors sporting events with “home game” and “away game”, that is, you play 2 games against the same opponent. Each win adds 3 points to your total, each loss adds 0 points, and winning 2-0 awards an extra point. Therefore, you can score 7, 3 or 0 points in each round.

The recurring theme is that, since it's more or less certain that the cutoff score is 45 points, most participants, upon reaching five 2-0 wins (i.e., 35 points), just start to intentionally draw (ID) with the following opponents (that is, each one winning a game, ending the match on 1-1), thus adding 3 points for the draw. In other words, in the 4 remaining rounds, ID'ing all four grants 12 points, which when added to the previous 35 gives a total of 47 points, thus guaranteeing the player in Top64 (hence being able to play for much better prizes, money-wise).

On one hand, some people think it is unfair that by playing just over half of the established rounds (5 out of 9), thanks to the participants “collaborating” among themselves, a certain result is already guaranteed. On the other hand, making five 2-0 wins in a competitive Challenge-level tournament is not trivial - and therefore good players are “rewarded” with a “rest” to prepare for the next day.

Sunday's elimination matches are played in a “Best of 3” format (since, being single-elimination, it's not possible to use a game format in which the outcome can be a draw). This also leads to the issue that although it's still the same tournament, the format is different from one day to the next - it is an inconsistency that also bothers some participants.

Fact of the matter is that, in DLC Seattle, 32 participants (that is, half of the Top64) ended day 1 with exactly 5 wins and 4 draws, although it is not possible to say whether these were intentional draws or not. One of these players, in fact, was also the eventual champion of the event, Luke Goodwin, who ended day 1 in 45th place with 47 points.

Let's see the champion's decklist:

The Champion's Decklist

With a decklist almost identical to the DLC Vegas champion (who, by the way, also made top64 in Seattle), Luke Goodwin won it all by masterfully piloting his Emerald/Steel Discard.

The deck combines lots of Emerald cards that discard resources straight from the opponent's hand with lots of Steel cards to control anything the opponent can put on the board. Goodwin's list added two copies of Ba-Boom! in place of some discard cards, as well as a copy of Doc - Bold Knight, giving more early game options for the deck, in favor of reducing the deck's outs against giant characters - likely counting on these threats being preemptively discarded.

Diablo - Devoted Herald once again shows how strong it is, but it's been said a few times now that the real strength of the deck lies in the versatility of Morph - Space Goo, which allows several powerful characters to be used in the same deck without having to worry about any cost restriction, since Morph allows any of them to played using the Shift ability.

Conclusions

In addition to showing the strength of Emerald/Steel Discard, which ends the season with two DLC wins in just a little over a month, the other already established archetypes also had their presence felt. This does not mean a solved metagame, since time and again we see “rogue” decks (that is, slightly unknown decks) also appearing among the winning lists.

In short, Lorcana seems to be in an extremely healthy metagame, with 4-5 decks already well established and somewhat refined, but by no means invincible, as we always have new decks showing potential. In fact, we will analyze some of these decks in coming articles!

I hope that the next edition, Azurite Sea, maintains this balance and that the game continues to be extremely diverse and fun!

So tell us, what did you think of the champion's deck? What do you think about the 2-game format controversies? Leave your comment!

Hugs and see you next time!