Lorcana Has Landed

Welcome to The Drip, ending your week with a BANG! Here’s what’s in store for today:

• Lorcana is Here! A Full Breakdown

Ladies and gentleman, the moment you’ve all been waiting for - Disney’s collectible card game (CCG) Lorcana has finally landed. This is the game that people lined up for 14 hours at Gencon to try. It’s the game that has had the board and card game community a buzz for months. It’s the game where you can play as Mickey and slap Goofy in the face. Starting today, we can finally get our hands on the over 200 cards in this first chapter of Lorcana.

A Brief Product Breakdown

There are a few different products that will be available for Lorcana’s release -

Starter decks:

There are 3 starter decks that contain two colors each (it’s unclear what the color play styles are at this point) and foil cards of their main characters:

• Moana & Mickey - Straightforward and likely best for complete beginners to CCGs

• Cruella De Vil & Aladdin - Aggressive and a bit more complex. Good for those who have spent a lot of time with CCGs.

• Sleeping Beauty & Simba - A standard control deck in the vein of Magic. A step up from Moana/Mickey and good for those who are familiar with CCGs.

These starter decks are the best way to get up and running quickly with Lorcana. Each deck includes all the tokens, rules and other things you need to learn and enjoy the game. As a bonus, a booster pack of 12 randomized cards is included. It’s not clear if it’s possible to hit extremely rare cards in the starter deck booster packs. I image it isn’t possible but we should find out more over the next few weeks.

With an MSRP of $16.99, starter decks can be purchased at game stores online or in person.

Next up is what has collectors most excited, the booster packs:

These come sleeved (in a cardboard package) or unsleeved (no difference between them) and contain 12 random cards. These can contain any rarity and (hopefully) have some big hits. It’s unclear what the hit rate is at this point but that number will be released in the next week or so I’m sure.

Booster packs have an MSRP of $5.99. A booster box of 24 packs can be purchased for $143.76 MSRP.

Finally we have collector sets:

The Illumineer’s Trove and First Chapter Gift Set contain multiple booster packs, deck holders, tokens, oversized cards, etc… These are similar to Pokemon releases in that they are a bit overpriced but also come with a limited promo card (First Chapter Gift Set) that may be desirable.

The MSRP for the Illumineer’s Trove is $49.99 while the First Chapter Gift Set is $29.99.

Rarity Breakdown

As collectors this is one of the most important things to understand: what are the rarities looking like in Lorcana? Unlike Pokemon and Magic, rarities can be found on the bottom of cards in the form of symbols:

Here is an example of the Rare symbol on the bottom of a card:

Above these rarities is the king: Enchanted:

You see this symbol and you have hit big. There are 12 enchanted cards in chapter 1 to chase and each contains full art and foil:

Enchanted cards are all going for $300+ raw at this point on the secondary market, so let the hunt begin.

In addition to rarity, cards come in a standard (base) or foil version. Foil will be more desirable of course and is akin to Pokemon’s reverse holos.

Already Released Promos

At the D23 Expo (Disney’s yearly event) a pack of 6 promo cards was released. There was also a 7th promo available that was not part of the pack. These cards are extremely valuable with sets going for around $20k on the secondary market. If you can find any for cheap, these are a great investment to grab and throw in a safe for long-term holding.

The cards, as with other rarities, have a symbol at the bottom showing they were D23 promos:

So What Can We Expect?

There’s a collectible aspect here that Disney fans (even those that don’t want to play the game) are going to go wild for. I imagine this first set is going to get scooped up quick and values are going to be through the roof for a while till supply and demand level off.

Collectability aside, Lorcana will live or die based on how well the game is received. The gameplay needs to be fun, replayable, and easy to get into. Ravensburger needs to offer support and a robust tournament circuit for fans to compete in locally. Communities need to start forming to generate excitement leading to more product sold and ripped. Without any of this happening, Lorcana is going to be just another CCG that was cool but ultimately faded quickly. The reason Pokemon and Magic have such staying power is because of the interesting gameplay, tournament circuits and strong communities that have built up surrounding the games. Lorcana needs to do the same if cards are going to have any long-term value.

The good news is that initial impressions and reviews of Lorcana have been positive. The Dice Tower, a popular board game review site, gave Lorcana their highest approval and said it was promising and fun (this was an unpaid review by the way). Other sites have been fairly positive on Lorcana as well.

The art is also incredible on these cards. It’s clear that Disney and Ravensburger have put a ton of TLC into this product. If anyone can crack into a new market and make a big splash it’s Disney. They also have a deep well of IPs to dig into to keep the game feeling fresh and exciting.

In terms of investing now - I would not run out and buy any of the D23 promos at the moment. Prices are far too high for a game that is still unproven. If the launch is successful and a second chapter of Lorcana is announced then the risk might start to dip but at this point it’s still high. If you purchase now you’ll be buying at a potential market high. Prices could easily drop over the next few months as product gets into people’s hands and some of the frenzy and hype surrounding the game dies down. Picking up boosters to chase legendaries, super rares, and enchanted for flipping makes total sense. Depending on how the next few weeks go it might also be worth buying booster boxes to keep sealed for resale in a few years.

I personally am excited for Lorcana’s release and will be attempting to grab the starter sets sometime in the next couple days to see how the game plays. I’ll also be buying some booster packs to attempt to pull some hits for resale (and use non-hits for deckbuilding). I’ll report back in the next few weeks on my impressions.

Note - Today’s release is for online and in person game stores. Lorcana will hit mass market locations like Walmart and Target on September 1st.

BREAKing News

Some hits from recent days:

• Great Ronaldo

• Larry Legend

• This is gonna be an awesome card if he pans out

• An enchanted hit from Lorcana

Release Calendar

Wallets like 🤑:

• Today -

  • Disney Lorcana

• 23rd -

  • 2023 Panini Immaculate Baseball

  • 2023 Panini Chronicles Racing

• 30th -

  • 2023 Topps Allen & Ginter Baseball

  • 2023 Panini Donruss Elite Football

  • 2023 Panini Encased Football

  • 2023 Panini Prizm WNBA Basketball

  • 2023 Topps Cosmic Chrome

  • 2023 Topps Chrome Star Wars Galaxy

Show Me That Card 📷️ 

I want to highlight a couple cards that can be found in Lorcana. These are two cards that I will be chasing down in their foil versions and grading for my PC.

The first is Captain Hook. This was a promo card at D23, but the same art makes it into the non-promo first chapter card set. This art is just amazing. I was never a huge Peter Pan fan, but this card just makes Captain Hook look a bit intimidating and dangerous.

The second is an alternate version of Scar that is made seemingly from lava. This artwork is just flat out impressive and hopefully a sign of things to come. It’s totally unique to this game, but has such strong Disney vibes that is does not feel out of place when compared to more traditional characters.

Meme of the Day

A slam dunk for a future Star Wars CCG