Disney Lorcana Draft Rules: How It Works

Ravensburger and Disney’s TCG Lorcana came out of nowhere and completely upended the card gaming world. The hype for the first set, The First Chapter, was astronomical, with collectors and players alike clamouring to get their hands on these colourful cards of their Disney favourites.

There’s lots of reasons to love Disney Lorcana. It brings together a century of Disney history into one game, and lets you collect, trade, and brew decks with everyone from Robin Hood to Elsa. It helps that the art is stunning, with a modern storybook style that’s simply delightful, and reimaginings of characters in radically new ways you’ve never seen them before.

One of the best things about Disney Lorcana, though, is its accessibility. It streamlines the rules that can bog down other TCGs, and is a perfect choice for newcomers to the genre. It may be simpler than the likes of Magic: The Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh!, but it isn’t a Baby’s First TCG, either: there is a shocking depth of strategy available, which is perfect for hardcore brewers looking for the perfect constructed deck.

Regardless of how you like to play Disney Lorcana, though, there is one format you simply have to try out at least once: the draft. Drafting is a staple in TCGs, giving you the chance to play with cards you’d never considered and appreciate the finer points of the game in a whole other way. Drafting in Lorcana is simple, but there’s still some things you’ll want to keep in mind before joining your first pod.

The idea of drafting is simple: you and a group of other players all open booster packs, and pick a card from it, before passing the rest of the pack on to the next person. In draft, deckbuilding is as much a competition as shuffling up and playing: you need to identify niches and play mindgames with your table to ensure you can get the strongest cards possible.

Drafting is what is known as a limited format, because you can only use the cards found in the booster packs circling around the table. You can’t bring in anything from the outside, meaning you may end up having to make some tricky decisions and make a sub-optimal deck. However, drafting can help improve your skills at Lorcana, by teaching you deckbuilding and introducing you to cards and synergies you may have shied away from when solely playing a constructed format.

To draft Disney Lorcana, you need a few things. First, you need a drafting pod – or the table of players you’ll be drafting with. For some games, like Magic, this is usually eight people, but for Lorcana you’ll often find pods of six. This is because each player needs four booster packs, fitting perfectly into the 24 packs found in a Lorcana booster box.

If you can’t amass the people and packs needed to play a draft yourself, keep an eye on the events at your local game store. That way, the cost of a box is spread across the entire pod, and you’ll be more likely to find people willing to play!

Once you have your pod and your packs, it’s time to draft. Each player opens up the first of their four booster packs, and chooses one card from it. Once you’re done, pass the remaining cards to the next player – usually the one on your left. Someone else will pass the rest of their pack to you, and you need to pick another card and repeat the process until every card in the first set of packs has been chosen.

Other than reversing the direction you pass the packs – so if you passed the pack left last time, pass it right this time – you repeat this process for all four of your packs. It can be a lengthy process, but at the end you'll have your own pool of 48 cards that you need to make a 40-card deck from.

Building a deck in a Disney Lorcana draft is different to the usual process. Other than the lower minimum of 40 cards, you’re also allowed to use every colour of ink in the same deck, and you can include as many copies of a card as you want. This means, if your draft was especially lucky, you could run eight copies of Be Prepared in your deck that has all six ink colours in it.

When drafting, you want to be aware of what you’re passing to the next player, as well as what’s coming back to you. Try and identify any niches other players aren’t building into to give yourself the best chance of getting good cards. To successfully draft, you need to be observant and flexible – sticking too rigidly to your gameplan will often end in disaster if someone else decided on the same strategy as you.

Other than competing with other players for an archetype, one of the biggest mistakes you can make in a draft is not focusing on your ink curve. You don’t want to take nothing but expensive cards with high ink costs, or you’ll not be able to play anything in time. Likewise, don’t just draft the cheapest things, as you’ll be muscled out in the late-game. Try and ensure your costs form a bell curve, with a few cheap cards, a few expensive ones, and the majority sitting somewhere in the middle.

To borrow an acronym from another game, Magic: The Gathering’s old draft mnemonic BREAD can really help with drafting Disney Lorcana. Bread helps guide which cards to pick first, and stands for:

• Bombs – these are the cards that will close out a game and help you win. Characters with high lore values are great bombs.
• Removal – anything that can get rid of your opponent’s cards. Whether it’s straight banishing or bouncing back to their hand, the longer you can keep threats off the board, the better.
• Evasion – this is easy enough to remember, because Lorcana has a keyword literally called Evasive. This also applies to cards that let you generate lore up in ways your opponent can’t react to, such as an item or an ability on a character.
• Aggro – Perhaps the least in-line with Lorcana, these are cards focused on challenging and dealing damage. In Lorcana, this is arguably more important than evasion, as challenging and playing aggressively is how you keep your opponent at bay.
• Dud – This is everything else. These might be synergistic with other cards in your deck, or help guide an archetype, but aren’t strictly game-winning pieces to watch out for. This is going to be the most likely thing you pass to an opponent.

If you want to elevate your Disney Lorcana drafting game, you’ll need to learn which cards are great for the draft environment, and which ones you need to pass on if possible.

For instance, while something like Freeze looks good at first, it’s actually an expensive card for a minimal effect that Elsa, Snow Queen can do repeatedly for just one more ink. Or Break, a card that destroys items which are surprisingly rare in The First Chapter’s draft format.

Fortunately, there is a big overlap between cards that are good in draft and good in constructed formats. You’ve still got your heavy-hitters like Elsa, Spirit Of Winter and Tinker Bell, Giant Fairy. If you see a Be Prepared or a Rapunzel, Gifted With Healing, absolutely take it as one of the bombs in your deck. But keep in mind that some cards seen as great in constructed will struggle to find a home in drafts. For instance, A Whole New World is a big threat in constructed, but often gets passed over in a draft, as draft games can last longer and it increases your chance of decking yourself out.

It's tempting to just make a pile of all-ink Good Stuff in a draft deck, but experts know to focus in on a few and really play to their synergies. Some inks naturally go well together, like Amber and Amethyst or Emerald and Steel. You’ll still want to hone in on one gameplan – going wide, controlling the board, big questers, and so on – and use the other colours for support, instead of just trying to snaffle up all the best bits in every colour.

Disney Lorcana Strategies

Some good strategies to look into include:

• Control: You want to stall your opponent out and deal with their biggest threats, potentially either making them run out of cards or simply not have the things they need to win. For this strategy, you want the likes of Elsa, Spirit Of Winter, Let It Go, and Mother Gothel, Selfish Manipulator.
• Ramp: This deck is all about speeding up your ink generation and playing big cards ahead of your opponent. Sapphire and Steel are a fantastic pairing for this, thanks to the likes of Gramma Tala; Mickey Mouse, Detective; and One Step Ahead letting you rush out something like Gantu or Maui, Demigod before your opponent can deal with it.
• Evasive: Focus in on creatures with evasive and make a slippery board full of unchallengeable characters. Pascal, Jetsam, Peter Pan; Goofy, Daredevil; Pongo, and Genie, On The Job can all be big threats when your opponent doesn’t have an evasive character of their own to take it out.
• Items: A severely underrated deck theme, you can use items to quickly generate lore, and with minimal removal for it in The First Chapter it can become an unsolvable problem very, very quickly. Maurice, World-Famous Inventor; Belle, Inventive Engineer and Ariel, Whoseit Collector are the winners here, and with them you can play tons of items for super cheap, and quest each time you do for a huge lore advantage.

These are just a few of the strategies you can pull off in a draft, though. The beauty of drafting is everybody is scrabbling for the same cards, which means you’ll often find yourself playing cards you’ve never thought about before and finding they’re absolute winners.

Drafts are some of the most fun you can have playing a TCG, so either head down to your local game store and ask about upcoming events, or buy a Booster box through Magic Madhouse and get your friends together for something slightly different. Happy drafting!