Lorcana: Disney's Trading Card Game to rival Magic: The Gathering

In 2023, Disney will be 100 years old. That's right, a century of existence influencing the pop culture and cinema with its animations and more recently with the stories of superheroes and Jedi Knights.

As a kind of warm-up for the celebration of this milestone, an event full of announcements of the company's upcoming releases in the format of the well-known panels organized by Wizards of The Coast and video game companies such as Sony and Microsoft took place over the weekend between the September 9th and 11th, the D23.

Even before the event, we already had access to some information about a collectible card game based on the company's animations that would be a kind of evolution of the game "Disney Villainous Worst Takes It All" produced by Ravensburger. This game was released in 2018 and brought us the possibility to control several villains present in all franchises owned by Disney in a confrontation for control of the entire multiverse of the company.

According to an interview given by Ryan Miller, a former Wizards of The Coast employee, to the Polygon website, Lorcana will have another premise: each player will be an Ilumineer, that is, a powerful sorcerer who has the power to summon the various characters from fairy tales and Disney animations to venture out and face challenges in a place called "The Great Illuminary", a kind of center of the Disney animation multiverse.

Another important fact present in the interview is the distance between this card game and the competitiveness present in games like Magic: the Gathering and Pokémon TCG. In this way, I could understand that, possibly, the famous competitive scene of the other card games will be left aside. Probably the great appeal of this game will be the collectors and the affection of the players with the characters present in the cards.

Miller also stated that we will have a long journey after the launch of this game next autumn with several expansions and cards with special treatments, such as Magic's foil cards and Pokémon's Ultra Rares

In fact, the first cards of the game have already been presented, and one of them can be acquired with a special treatment only by people who are in person at the D23 panels in a package very similar to the Secret Lair drop from Magic.

The package, D23 Expo Collector's Set containing foil cards and identifying the first special edition of the game, can be purchased for $49.95 USD. The Mickey card based on the 1938 Brave Little Tailor animation will be available in the first edition of the game, Disney Lorcana: The First Chapter, but in a regular version.

After Miller's interview, the first cards revealed for the game were: Maleficent, Captain Hook, Stitch, Robin Hood, Elsa, and Cruella de Vil.

As of the writing of this article, I haven't found information about the game's mechanics — however, there is information that in addition to each character's special abilities, the cards already present us with card activation cost, attack and defense power, a text about the character present on the card and well-visible symbols in the right corner that could inform the card's power level or possible rarity.

In my humble opinion, the intention of the Ravensburger company not to invest in a competitive scene for the game can be a good attraction for fans of casual games and for those fans of animations who aren't used to playing card games, whether on tabletop like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh!, or virtual games like Legends of Runeterra and Hearthstone.