Mushu Has Finally Come to Lorcana – and He’s Tough

Revealed via an official Lorcana stream, Mushu is finally coming to Lorcana, and his card looks strong.

A Dual-Ink card with Ruby and Steel Ink types, Mushu can only be used in decks that run both Ruby and Steel. While Ruby/Steel has been something of an off meta pick to date, following the release of this powerhouse card, Ruby/Steel could become a much more popular choice for players.

Breaking Down Mushu – Majestic Dragon

Apart from being Dual-Ink like many of the cards coming out in Archazia’s Island, how strong exactly is Mushu?

Well, in certain decks he could be quite strong. A five-cost, Inkable character, Mushu has solid stats with four strength and four will power, adding some stickiness to this character who will be out of range for lethal plays like Medusa, as well as surviving many songs that can be thrown at it via Steel.

However, the strongest thing about this Mushu card is the powerful Guardian of Lost Souls ability. This grants a blanked 2 lore whenever one of your characters banishes another character in a challenge.

Gaining lore when banishing historically is a powerful effect

This is not the first time a similar effect has been introduced into the game, and in the past whenever this ability has shown up it’s been quite strong. For example, the formidable Robin Hood – Champion of Sherwood became infamous when it debuted in Into the Inklands for having essentially the same ability, albeit limited only to when he banishes a character.

Meanwhile, more recent characters like the powerful Calhoun has seen success in Steel decks for the same reason.

Now with Mushu, you could theoretically up the amount of lore you gain each time you banish a character with one of these characters to four per banished character. That’s a lot of lore, further insentevising you to challenge rather than simply quest.

If you really wanted to go crazy, you could double down on this strategy via the handy Thebes card which also grants lore for challenging, granted the character must be at the location at the time of challenging.

Additional challenge-happy cards like Goofy who gains you lore just from challenging could be paired effectively here, especially against aggro decks with low will power to gain an insane amount of lore.

And as if that ability in itself weren’t strong enough, Mushu also grants resist +2 to challenging characters, helping insure that your already powerful attackers will likely take less damage and survive until the next turn.

The impacts of a challenge heavy deck on the meta

Challenge-focused decks have not done overly well as of late in the meta, with (of course) a few exceptions. However, if more decks like these that really like to play aggressively on the challenge side – while still gaining lore - become more popular, it could change things in a meta that has gone overly aggro in part to counter the heavy-handed control decks like Ruby/Sapphire.

However things pan out, Ravensburger has done a solid job with the design of this Mushu character card and just ups the excitement Lorcana enjoyers are already experiencing for the upcoming set.