Disney Lorcana has come a long way since the launch of its first set in August of 2023. We've seen sets being released at a steady pace that have created countless new archetypes. In both the casual and competitive scenes, Disney Lorcana is flourishing.
As more and more sets get released, new players are continually flocking to Disney Lorcana and enjoying themselves. While this is easy to do, especially thanks to Starter Decks, many players will want to get creative and build their own decks. Unsurprisingly, this leaves many players asking the all-important question of "How do I build a Disney Lorcana deck?"
Deck building in Disney Lorcana - or any Trading Card Game (TCG) is not an easy process. Thankfully, we're here to help smooth the learning curve with our own tips and tricks.
Before we begin, while these tips are focused on Disney Lorcana deck building. That being said, a lot of this information can be utilized by other TCGs like Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh! etc. Additionally, this information is not ranked in any particular order.
Keeping the Fundamentals in Mind
If you’re new to Disney Lorcana -or any TCG- your first order of business is to learn the fundamentals of the game. While this may seem like the obvious first step, it’s always good to revisit the rules as well as the reasons for playing this game.
What makes the game fun for you? How do you want to win your matches with others? Are you playing just for fun or aiming to win? Do you care about using your favorite Disney characters?
These are just some questions even veteran players could ask themselves while making their deck. Once you're done asking these questions yourself, you can look at what each ink color has to offer.
- Amber: an ink color that has access to healing capabilities, high willpower characters, and characters with the 'Singer' ability to allow the controlling player an earlier timing when using 'Song' action cards.
- Amethyst: a well-rounded color offering both robust character stats for board control and card advantage with its numerous tools for card draw.
- Emerald: a more subterfuge-focused ink color, emerald offers disruption effects like discard and the ability to bounce cards back to hand. When brute force is necessary, a lot of high lore questing characters will answer the call.
- Ruby: a very aggressive ink color focused on direct board removal. Whether by fielding high-attack-power characters or by action cards that just wipe out their targets wholesale, Ruby is very good if you just want blunt force in your arsenal.
- Sapphire: has the distinction of having the tools to ink more than a single card a turn. This allows the player to get to a higher inkwell sooner and overwhelm their opponents either through quality of higher costing cards or by sheer numbers hitting the board.
- Steel: has access to widespread damage removal, making it useful for countering any opponent that likes to build wide boards with a lot of characters. Coupled with some direct item/location removal, Steel also offers some draw utility and more resilient bodies. The 'resist' ability is on full display here to help mitigate incoming damage from challenge trades or direct damage action cards/abilities.
Know Your Goals
A deck is a collection of cards brought together to enact a strategy for the controlling player to win the game. Whether it be aggressively questing for lore with the likes of Merlin - Goat or by quickly ramping up the inkwell with the likes of Sail the Azurite Sea, a player must know the capability of the cards they are using.
One good way is to look at the results of organized tournaments and dissect the best-performing decks for inspiration.
For example, in some current tournaments, Sapphire-Silver is currently seeing a lot of success because of Belle - Apprentice Inventor, coupled with the variety of 1 ink cost item cards that are supplied by both colors.
If building a highly competitive deck does not seem appealing, casual decks focused around a favored Disney character or strategy can still see success. They may not have the highest win rates, but rogue strategies do exist and can still be worth pursuing.
Knowing how your cards interact with each other, how they help you reach the goal of your deck’s winning strategy, and when to apply these tactics in a match can help in its optimization in a way you believe works best for you as a player.
Figuring Out the Math
Probably one of the more difficult aspects of deckbuilding is figuring out the math of it all. How many copies of a specific card do you need? What is your ratio for inkable cards versus uninkable cards?
For something a little more concrete as copy ratios, there are actual standards that the community has come to an agreement over most of the time:
- x4 copies: These cards are absolutely crucial to your strategy; you’d want to see at least one of them in every match, and getting more of them furthers the winning plan by leaps and bounds.
Cards like Pawpsicle are an example that fall into this category as they are cheap to get onto the board, easily keep your hand stocked, and can be used as a resource to fuel other abilities that require the presence of an item card.
- x3 copies: These are the cards that are helpful; they accelerate your win condition, are important enough that you’d want to see them at least once, but they aren’t 100% a necessity.
High ink cost cards like Ruby’s Maui - Half-Shark or utility cards like Chernabog's Followers - Creatures of Evil can fall into this category.
The former is a big body that can threaten any opposing glimmer that is exerted. Maui also comes with some utility attached in the form of his lore gain and action card recursion.
The latter is an early game lore gain that can float into card draw to keep the tempo of your deck going. You probably won’t lose sleep over not drawing it for your opening, if at all, if you have other 1 ink cost cards that serve the same function.
- x2 copies: These are the cards you want to have in a pinch. They are usually the answers to specific situations that creep up and may prevent you from winning the game. They’re good to have but aren’t really needed to achieve your goals.
Emerald’s Mother Knows Best is an example of a card that can easily be slotted in at 2 copies.
As a 3 ink cost, uninkable card, you really don’t want to see this early. But, if you do draw into it in the mid-to-late game when there’s a huge roadblock like Maui - Half-Shark on the board, you’d be thankful to make Maui a non-issue, if only briefly.
- x1 copy: This one of the hardest numbers to justify a card into because if you just want to have any card as an emergency response, you’d have to ask yourself, why don’t I just run this at two copies for better consistency?
These are the cards that have an extremely specific use, but you’d want them in the deck so that you can at least have an answer to the said niche situation should it crop out.
It also helps if you have other cards that can search or allow you to dig for that single copy.
An example of a card like this is Sapphire’s Lucky Dime. It doesn’t change much in the overall board state on its own. If you happen to have it and can get it onto the board, however, then that extra 1 lore it provides can easily stack up with each successive use.
Bringing it back to the previous point, Sapphire decks do have access to Scrooge McDuck - Resourceful Miser. Scrooge allows players to look at the top 4 cards for an item of choice before moving the rest to the bottom of the pile. This makes digging for that single copy of Lucky Dime a whole lot easier than normal.
As for inkable versus uninkable cards, this is a lot easier to mull over. It's a question of how often you want to see cards that can be used as a resource.
There’s no set standard when it comes to the inkable vs uninkable ratio, but a good rule of thumb is to set your ratio to about 80:20 (inkable vs uninkable) [48:12 cards].
That way, you’ll always have something you can play into your inkwell every turn to make sure you can activate all your high ink cost cards. You can always move these ratios around to see what works best for you.
Test, Refine, Optimize
Probably the most important and crucial aspect of deck building is adaptation. No plan survives first contact with the enemy, so your deck will need to be tested against other players so you have a chance to see how it stands up in actual play.
Testing your tactics in a hypothetical scenario is one thing, but piloting your deck against skilled opponents is another. After you’re done playing, you can start to refine your deck.
What card helped you the most? What card wasn’t as useful as you thought it was at the beginning? Should you slim down the number of copies or replace a specific card for something else altogether?
Like a science, constant testing and refinement are needed to find that sweet spot you would be satisfied with. While luck can sometimes brick even the most efficient of decks, that’s just part of the game.
The player is as much a part of the deck-building process as any other card used. You refine your tactics, you learn from each experience, and eventually that leads to also knowing when to break modern conventions.
Like with anything in the TCG world, advice, tips, and conventions are mostly based on sound judgments and experiences. That, however, doesn’t make them absolute.
Take the time to experiment, explore your options. The magic of deck-building isn’t always in the science and math. It can also be found in the creativity of players willing to look beyond what is known and venture out into the frontiers.
After all, in the wise words of Walt Disney himself, “When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.”