How Lorcana Location Cards Work + Every Location Card Revealed
How do Lorcana location cards work?
Ravensburger announced brand new location cards into the popular Lorcana game. These location cards will be getting their grand reveal in Into the Inklands. Ravensburger had a special session to let the Lorcana community about these impactful cards. The reason the Ravensburger team member Richelle gave for why they were announcing how location cards worked is because a lot of cards that are going to come out in Into the Inklands will be referencing location cards.
So what are location cards? In this guide, we’re going to be going over everything that has been revealed by Ravensburger about what Location cards are and how they work within the game.
*Updated February 18 An error that stated character cards could not move in-between locations was amended.
Into the Inklands is all about location cards
If you’ve seen the trailer for into the Inklands, you’ll see that at the end of it, the characters are going out into the magical world in which Lorcana takes place. These “inklands” are what the location cards basically are, according to Ravensburger today during their session on their official discord. So you can think of locations as a vital part of the Lorcana lore, while also adding extra gameplay mechanics.
Why are Location cards printed horizontally?
Unlike every other card in the Lorcana game right now, Locations can’t be readied – they enter play exerted and stay exerted. That’s probably what inspired the horizontal drawing. As confirmed by a Lorcana team member when I asked the question, locations can’t be exerted because they already are.
What’s up with the numbers on location cards?
Locations are a new and exciting card type. They have an ink symbol like all the rest of the cards, indicating their cost to play the card. They can be either inkable or non inkable.
They have a move cost as well – the move cost indicates how much it would cost for you to move a character to a location. They also have willpower just like characters. However, they don’t have strength. So while you can attack location cards, they won’t be doing damage back. So to sum up:
Locations have an ink cost.
They can be inkable or not inkable (same as all other cards).
Locations have will power – it works the same as will power on characters.
Locations have a move cost. That odd symbol on the left there is the cost it takes to move characters to any given location.
What is the lore symbol for?
If you notice on the bottom right of the card above, there’s something that looks like the lore symbols on existing characters cards, only slightly different.
So what’s really cool about location cards is that they actually gain you lore during the ready phase of the turn. So just by having them in play, you will gain that lore when you start your turn. Although we hardly know the extent to which locations will impact the game, this seems like the most exciting use case for location cards revealed so far. When used strategically, I can see locations have a massive impact on your ability to chase lore.
Do you need characters at locations to gain lore?
No. Locations don't need to have characters on them in order for you to gain lore at the start of your turn. You keep gaining that lore as long as locations stay in play. Some characters will get benefits from being at locations.
How do characters move to locations?
So it’s clear that locations impact the game regardless of whether or not characters are on them. Things like gaining lore passively is enough for me to want to start playing location cards in my deck. Luckily, the Lorcana team gave us a few pointers on how moving to locations works.
It costs ink to move characters: how much depends on the movement cost of a given location (seen on the left side in the image above).
Characters do not need to be dry in order to move to locations. That’s sort of a weird one to me because I thought the rules were that you need to wait for the ink to dry before you can do anything with characters. But whatever.
When characters are at locations, they don’t get banished if the location does. They just fall off. So you don’t need to worry about locations getting destroyed and losing your characters, too.
Some characters gain unique abilities when they are at locations: although I’m sure we’re going to be getting way more info about how characters and locations are going to be interacting in Into the Inklands, for now we just have to take what’s been revealed so far and Ravensburger’s word for it that somehow locations and characters are going to have beneficial gameplay mechanics for our decks.
Characters can’t move from a location except to move to another location. This is another strange rule to me because it seems that you might want to move a character off of a location altogether. But the official rules clearly state you can only move characters from location to location.
Does moving to a location exert characters?
Exerting characters needlessly could really impact your gameplay and odds of winning. Luckily, moving your character to a location will not exert that character, meaning they can still quest, challenge or use abilities.
Can opposing characters move to my locations?
Nope. They can’t.
Do characters with “bodyguard” protect locations?
The bodyguard keyword specifies that characters must choose bodyguard characters instead of other characters. However, it doesn’t say before locations. Therefore, as the Lorcana team pointed out during the session, bodyguard does not protect locations.
Do locations protect characters from being challenged?
Nope – locations do not protect characters. It’s safe to assume that characters can still be challenged, banished or otherwise impacted by opposing cards.
Location cards can be challenged
Lastly, one really interesting mechanic involved with location cards is that they can be challenged, just like any other character card. Unlike character cards, however, they don’t need to be exerted in order to be challenged as they are always exerted from the moment they are played and they don’t ready (hence the horizontal way they are printed).
Reckless keyword ability forces you to challenge locations
As the Lorcana team points out, the reckless keyword ability does not specify whether or not you need to challenge characters. So if your opponent has a location in play and you have a character with reckless in play, you must challenge that location.
When location cards are banished, what happens to characters at them?
Characters that are at locations are not banished or removed from play when the location they are at are banished. Instead, characters just “fall off” locations. They remain in play and nothing else happens to them.
Location cards and deck building
Last but not least, it’s important to know how deck building is impacted by the reveal of location cards. Basically, location cards follow the same rules as any other card. You’re limited to four of any one version of a location card. However, it’s important to note that just being able to include location cards in your deck is going to have a massive impact on the deck building process, and will probably change many of the existing ratios of cards types that players have to juggle when building a competitive deck.
For more info on deck building, read how to build a Lorcana TCG deck.
Will location cards have a big impact on the Lorcana TCG meta?
You shouldn’t underrestimate location cards and the profound impact they will have on the game. As a result of location cards, you can expect these major changes:
They will be a staple in virtually all Lorcana decks.
Players will be forced to challenge more frequently to deal with locations whose only weakness is that they don’t hit back.
Some decks will focus their strategy entirely around location cards.
Learn more about how Location cards will impact gameplay in Five Ways Lorcana Location Cards will Forever Change the Game.
All location cards in Into the Inklands
Now that the entire Into the Inklands card list is available, we know what location cards we will be getting. Each Ink type is getting three location cards (which you can see below).
And that’s pretty much everything you need to know about location cards! If you have questions we didn’t answer, feel free to drop them below! And stay excited for more to come in Into the Inklands!
