Disney Lorcana

You are an Illumineer, and your cards are glimmers: Disney characters pulled out of stories and given form by ink. You send them out to quest, they bring back lore, and the first player to gather 20 lore wins.

That is the important difference from most card games: you do not win by dealing damage to your opponent. You win by racing. Attacking (called challenging) exists, and it is a way to slow someone down or clear a blocker, but it is a tool in service of the race rather than the point of the game.

• No player health, no life total. The score is lore, and it is public.
• The resource system is elegant: once per turn you may put any card from your hand face down into your inkwell, and it becomes one ink of mana forever.
• Only cards with the ink symbol on their border can be inked, so every hand is a real choice between playing a card and paying with it.
• Two ink colours maximum per deck keeps deckbuilding readable for new players.

• Cost, top left, paid from your inkwell.
• The inkwell symbol around that cost: if the border is decorated, the card can be put into your inkwell. If not, it can only be played.
• Character stats at the bottom: Strength (damage dealt when challenging), Willpower (damage it survives), and the lore value in the diamond, which is what it earns when it quests.
• Card types: Characters, Actions (some of which are Songs), Items and Locations.
• Keywords like Bodyguard, Evasive, Rush, Ward, Support, Challenger, Singer, Shift and Reckless. Each is a short rule you learn once and then know forever.

1. 1

   Ready

   Straighten (ready) everything you exerted last turn.

2. 2

   Set

   Start-of-turn effects trigger.

3. 3

   Draw

   Draw one card. The player going first skips their very first draw.

4. 4

   Main phase: ink

   Once per turn, put one inkable card from hand face down into your inkwell. Almost always do this.

5. 5

   Main phase: play and act

   Play characters, items, locations and actions by exerting ink. Quest with ready characters to gain their lore. Challenge exerted enemy characters. Use abilities.

6. 6

   End of turn

   End-of-turn effects, then pass.

And a rule that catches everyone: you can only challenge characters that are EXERTED. A character that stayed home ready is untouchable in combat. So questing with everything is greedy, and holding everything back scores nothing. That tension is the whole design.

• 60 cards minimum, and almost everyone plays exactly 60.
• At most two of the six inks. Your card pool is anything in those two colours.
• Up to four copies of any card by name.
• Aim for enough inkable cards. A hand full of uninkable bombs is a hand you cannot pay for. Many decks target around 40 or more inkable cards out of 60.

A first deck wants: cheap characters with decent lore values to start scoring, a couple of bigger characters to defend the board, some removal or bounce, and a Song or two. The archetype that teaches the game best is straightforward aggression: play a character, quest with it, do that again.

• Core Constructed is the main format, using the current legal card pool.
• Infinity Constructed allows every card ever printed, for players with deep collections.
• Sealed and Draft events use packs on the day, which is the most beginner-friendly way to play at a shop.
• Sets arrive several times a year and are numbered as chapters, starting with The First Chapter.

Lorcana has an original setting rather than borrowing a Disney film's. Illumineers gather ink and use it to summon glimmers, versions of Disney characters, out of the stories they belong to. The Great Illuminary is where that knowledge is kept.

• Because glimmers are drawn from stories, the same character can exist in many forms. That is the in-fiction reason Ariel appears a dozen times with different subtitles.
• The set names are chapters of an ongoing story: the flooding of the Inklands, Ursula's attempt to take the Illuminary, and so on.
• Card subtitles are the flavour: "Ariel, Spectacular Singer" is a different glimmer from "Ariel, On Human Legs", and the deck you build cares about the difference.
• The illustration styles rotate deliberately across a set, from storybook to modern digital, and it is the most consistently beautiful card game on the shelf.

Lorcana on this platform is collect-only. Packs pull from real published sets, and cards land in your binder with the real art.

• Open packs from the card shop in Discord.
• Cards land in your public binder on the website.
• Duplicates feed trading and set completion.
• Bolts only, earned by turning up. Never real money.

• The official Lorcana site hosts the full rulebook and a starter walkthrough.
• Lorcast and similar card databases for searching the full card pool.
• Local game store learn-to-play events. Lorcana leaned hard into these and they are genuinely welcoming.
• Ask in our Discord if you want a deck checked before you buy singles.