Celebrating a Year of Lorcana

Lorcana has been around for an entire year.

Crazy, right?

It feels like something with as massive as an impact as Lorcana should have been around a lot longer than just a year.

And yet, the game only seems to be growing in popularity as time passes. Indeed, some amazing sets have been released over the course of the last year, competitive play as flourished, and everyone seems excited about what’s next.

With that being said, I feel we are incredibly lucky to have been involved with something like Lorcana from the ground up, and it’s hard to say when we will see a game so beautifully illustrated, so well designed come into creation again.

So, for now, let’s just look back on every one of the best moments Lorcana has had since it started back in the distant past of late summer, 2023.

A severe product shortage drives Lorcana’s popularity

I will admit, one of the things I enjoyed most about Lorcana from the start was the pure pandemonium around the game. It was the likes of which something I hadn’t seen since the height of the Pokemon craze during the pandemic.

You absolutely couldn’t find Lorcana product anywhere!

I had already been writing about Lorcana for sometime before I ever even saw a Lorcana product at a store that wasn’t being handed out as a prize for entry into an event.

It was a wild time to be alive.

Lorcana products were going for three times or more their suggested retail price, and people were rapid.

Part of that was because of the incredible number of cards you could sell for money back then. It was like this during the height of the Pokemon craze, too. Relatively unassuming cards even could fetch a few bucks, while there was a wide range of very valuable cards.

Cards that now only fetch a few dollars on the secondary card market would earn you ten times as much during that time.

But it wasn’t just the money and craze that made that First Chapter set special.

The First Chapter was pure magic

People came to Lorcana from all backgrounds. Old. Young. Rich and poor. I was amazed at the variety of people playing this game and showing up at game stores for semi-competitive events. The First Chapter had that special something that is so incredible rare in games: and people loved it.

The game mechanics struck the exact right cord. The artwork fulfilled something that Disney-fans didn’t even know that they were missing: it offered an extended, alternate universe for their fantasies to run wild.

Meanwhile, the game was relatively easy to pick up and play. It was just challenging enough to be captivating, and just easy enough to be accessible. I think people who had never played a TCG before loved it for this reason, while TCG vets from other games enjoyed the peaceful gameplay by comparison, where turns were limited to a few key choices as opposed to the incredible speed and hyper competition that you find in games like Pokemon (as fun as they are, they are tough).

Of course, any successful trading card game needs more than just an opening set in order to be viable. But subsequent sets like Rise of the Floodborn and Into the Inklands didn’t diminish the magic. While nothing could replace the sheer bliss of that time when Lorcana first hit the shelves, subsequent sets furthered the magic, offering a smorgasbord of deck building options and an open playing field where it felt like just about anything was possible.

But all good things have to come to an end.

Ursula’s Return was Lorcana’s first “mid” expansion

Honestly each set was so good that it felt like Ravensburger was impervious from hitting anything that wasn’t a home run. But eventually they found their less than amazing set. While ironically Ursula’s Return was a solid set, it fell short of the best of them so far by a bit. Indeed, no new decks were really added to the meta, and instead the meta only narrowed. A game that had just been rich and open with possibilities became oppressive, a terrible dystopian Disney future ruled by a squirrel dictator.

But, like a narrator directly interfering with the journey of their own book, Ravensburger stepped in and chopped the squirrel down to size. Now, we have hopes of something great to come, and it feels like everywhere everyone is joining in one big party celebrating the monumental achievement one year of Lorcana is. The theme for Shimmering Skies is very aptly set.

What’s next for Lorcana?

There’s a lot more that happened this year than just the set release specific stuff, but I think the journey of those expansions tells the story just as well as anything. But also there was the rise and fall of Pixelborn – the online gaming client used for Lorcana and built by Pavel Kolev. I got in on Pixelborn relatively early and it helped foster my love for the game, and accelerated my learning. Without an online client, indeed it feels like we as a Lorcana community were suddenly thrust into the dark ages, using smoke signals to communicate what’s working and what’s not to one another.

Beyond this, competitive play took off much more quickly than anticipated. What took a game like Pokemon decades to achieve was achieved by Lorcana in a few months: massive tournaments selling out in seconds.

Still, Lorcana doesn’t actually hand out cash prizes yet, and its competitive scene remains more of a game of bragging rights when compared to other competitive games.

And that’s okay to me. I think Lorcana has an opportunity to do something that perhaps no other TCG can: bridge the gap once and for all to the mainstream. Trading card games were never destined to be something played only in card shops, at convention centers, or in quiet corners by a few with bowed heads. It seems more and more clear to me that TCGs like Lorcana are destined for greatness. They’re to be enjoyed by everyone, everywhere, as ubiqutious as other loved games like checkers.

I think Lorcana is a step in that direction.

And what a wonderful thing it’s been to be a part of.