How to Play Disney Lorcana TCG for Beginners

Oct 3

Learning any new skill can be daunting. Learning a new trading card game is definitely learning a new skill. With hundreds of cards to learn, complex strategies, and having to make multiple decisions every turn, it can be so overwhelming that many give up before ever trying.

Relax.

Playing Disney Lorcana is not hard. You can learn, and we’re here to teach you how.

How to Play Disney Lorcana TCG – the Basics

There’s so much involved in playing this TCG that it’s hard to cover every single aspect of the game in a single guide. For this reason, we have several additional resources that will help you be the best Lorcana player you can be.

This guide is going to focus mostly on the actual gameplay of Lorcana – how to draw your first card, and play your first turn, all the way to gaining 20 lore and beating your foes.

However, playing the game is only part of what’s involved in a TCG. First, you have to have a deck.

To help you out in that department, we’ve put together a comprehensive guide on deck building in Lorcana. This guide is not only ideal for understanding how to build decks, it will also help you understand the differences between card types, and understand card types in more detail.

If that’s a little too much info to get started, get one of Disney Lorcana’s starter decks and you’ll be ready to start playing straightaway.

Setting Up the Game

Once you have your deck ready (following the guide above), it’s time to play!

To get setup, you’ll need just a few things.

Your 60 card Lorcana deck.
Damage counters (dice work best).
Lore counter (use the Disney Lorcana TCG app from Ravensburger to track lore efficiently).
A playing space big enough for two players to face off against one another.
A dice to decide who goes first (high role, or call evens or odds).

Optional Setup

In addition to what you absolutely need to play, there are a few optional things that will enhance your play experience while not being strictly necessary. These are:

Card sleeves: they keep your cards clean, in good playing condition, and make shuffling and handling. Here’s our guide for the best sleeves for card games.
A playmat: playmats are cheap to come by and make handling your cards easier, while also making your card sleeves last longer.

Playing the Game

Shuffle and Cut the Deck

Now that you are setup, it’s time to play the game. To start, you’ll need to shuffle your deck thoroughly. Once done shuffling, it’s good manners to offer your deck to your opponent to “cut.”

Cutting a deck usually just means taking half of it from the top and putting it at the bottom. This is a measure in competitive play to ensure no one is cheating, but also just a sign of respect to your opponent.

If you are playing casually with friends or family, you can skip cutting the deck. However, shuffling thoroughly is always necessary.

Select Who Goes First

You can do this in any way that works for you, but most people either role a diceto see who has the highest number or calls evens or odds.

Draw Your Cards

Now that you know who is going first, you can draw your cards. It’s important that you decide who who goes first before seeing your cards, as that information could impact your decision.

In Lorcana, the starting hand is seven cards. That means you draw seven cards to start. Once you have your starting hand, you can choose to exchange cards for new cards. It’s called taking a mulligan and we’ll tell you how that works in the next step.

Take Your (Optional) Mulligan

Once you see your starting hand, you can choose to put cards back into your deck and draw new ones. The way this is done is as follows:

Select any number of cards you wish not to have in your hand
Put those cards at the bottom of your deck
Draw as many cards back as you put at the bottom of your deck from the top of your deck (you should have 7 cards in your hand after taking a mulligan).
Shuffle your deck. Play then starts.

It’s really important that reshuffling your deck happens after you draw your cards. This ensures you will not draw back the same cards you put into your deck.

What cards should you choose to mulligan?

When you first begin playing, it can be challenging to know which cards you should mulligan and which you should keep. As you play more, however, you’ll begin to understand the core strategy of your deck.

As a general rule of thumb, however, you want to have low cost cards in your starting hand – having a character with a cost of one in your hand means you can play that character on your very first turn.

Similarly, having a character of cost two means you are likely to also get a character into play during turn two.

The Player Who Goes First Does Not Draw a Card

Unlike other TCGs like Pokemon, you don’t draw a card on your first turn if you are going first. Otherwise, your turn always begins with readying your cards and drawing a card.

Take Actions in Any Order

Another difference between Lorcana and other TCGs is that once you have readied your cards (more on that later) and drawn for your turn, you can then take actions in any order that you want. Actions that you can take include:

Ink an inkable card from your hand (see our deck building guide for more info on inkable vs non inkable cards)
Play a card from your hand (as long as you have enough ink to meet its cost)
Challenge an exerted character with one of your characters that have been in play at least one turn (ink needs to dry – more on that later).
Quest for Lore with one of your characters.

On your first turn, you won’t be able to do a whole lot. You will only have at most one ink in your inkwell, meaning the most you will likely be able to do is play a low cost character or action.

As the game progresses, however, you will be taking multiple actions in a turn. Sometimes, the order in which you take these actions will massively impact the game, however, due to card effects.

Why Do Characters Need Their Ink to Dry?

One important mechanic to keep in mind when playing characters is that you cannot simply play a character and start using that character to challenge, quest or sing etc. In Lorcana, you need to wait a turn for “the ink to dry.” This has to do with the lore of Lorcana, but also just helps keep the game balanced by not enabling players to just steam roll their opponents by playing a bunch of characters at once and winning the game.

Basically, any character that you play cannot do anything the turn they are played.

There are notable exceptions to this rule, which you can learn more about in our card abilities guide.

Additionally, abilities that are passive in nature and don’t need to be activated do come into play the turn cards are played. One example of this is Belle’s Strange But Special ability which enables you to ink an extra card during your turn.

How Does Challenging Work?

How to play Lorcana — Strength/Willpower

A character’s strength is the number inside the circle, whereas its willpower is the number inside the shield.

Challenging is Lorcana’s combat system. While you don’t need to challenge in order to win (you win by getting 20 lore which you get through questing), it will help you keep your opponent in check while you build up your own lore.

Challenging is not super complicated, and can be managed in a few simple steps.

Select your character you want to challenge with (characters need their ink to dry and be in play at the start of the turn). Exert that character (turn it sideways).
Select opposing character you want to challenge. In order to challenge characters, those characters must be exerted (more on that later).
Once a challenge begins, each character does damage to the other equal to their strength level.
Once the challenge is resolved, banish characters with damage equivelant to their willpower.

What Does Exerting a Card Mean?

Exerting cards is another fundamental aspect to playing Lorcana. Cards can be exeretd in one of several ways.

Exert ink in order to pay the cost of cards you want to play.
Exert characters in order to quest, sing songs, challenge, or activate specific abilities that require the character to be exerted.
Exert items when items say to do so in order to activate them.

How Does Questing Work?

In Lorcana, you win the game by reaching 20 lore. But in order to reach 20 lore, you need to quest. Each character has an amount of lore that they are able to gain via questing. To quest a character, simply exert that character and lore equal to their lore count.

Your Turn Ends When You Pass

In Disney Lorcana, your turn ends when you say so. There is no mechanic that says your turn must end (unless, of course a card says to end your turn). When you are done with your turn, simply tell your opponent so. You can just say “pass” if you don’t know your opponent very well.

Any cards that were exerted during this turn remain so until the beginning of your next turn.

And that’s about it! Gameplay continues until one of you has 20 lore!

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