What are Inks In The New Disney Lorcana TCG?

Right from the moment you open your first pack of Disney Lorcana, one of the first things you’ll notice are the six colours of cards. Though it’s not too different from Magic: The Gathering’s colours or Pokémon's types, mastering Lorcana’s six inks will be key to being the best Illumineer you can be.

Whether you want to go wide with Amber or control the board with Emerald, Lorcana’s inks help decide what kinds of cards you can play, the decks you build, and even your overall strategy. It may be a new game, but it’s already massively popular, and learning how to use inks in the Disney Lorcana TCG is crucial.

Disney Lorcana is set in the world of Lorcana, where you take on the role of an illumineer. Wielding the inkcaster, you can take magical inks and use them to create various Disney characters to help defend the world. Ink is everything in Lorcana, and so it is no surprise that it plays such a big role in the game.

There are six types of inks in the Disney Lorcana TCG: Amber, Amethyst, Emerald, Ruby, Sapphire, and Steel. Each ink has its own colour, with cards in each ink being yellow, purple, green, red, blue, and grey respectively, and have their own main ways of playing and what kind of gameplay effects they have access to. If you’ve played Magic: The Gathering, you’ll already be very familiar with this concept, as Magic also makes use of a five-colour ‘colour pie’ for many of the same thing.

The Disney Lorcana TCG inks are a much bigger part of your deckbuilding than Magic’s colours, though. In Lorcana, you are only allowed to have a maximum of two different types of ink in your deck. This means you could, for example, make a deck with Amber and Emerald cards, but not one with Amber, Emerald, and Amethyst cards. The only time this isn’t the case is when you’re playing Lorcana in a draft or sealed event (usually in your local game store), where you’re allowed to run cards of any ink type all together.

Also keep in mind that “ink” also has a second meaning in Disney Lorcana: the resource you pay to play cards. Unlike Magic and its lands, or Pokémon and its energies, Lorcana has you place cards from your hand into your inkwell. Once per turn, you can reveal a card from your hand that has a gold border around the cost in its top left corner, and then place it face-down on the table. This card has now been placed into your inkwell, and can only be used to exert to produce one ink each turn. These can then produce ink to play any card in your deck, not just those of a particular ink type.

The key to understanding inks in the Disney Lorcana TCG is to understand what each type does, and how to best build for it. As mentioned, each ink type has its own strategies, and part of the challenge is combining these together to make the most of their individual strengths.

The first ink type is Amber. Amber is the ink focused on ‘going wide’, or playing lots of cheap characters and flooding the board with cards. It also protects characters more than the other inks, with lots of effects to heal your characters or otherwise protect them. As it’s the ink most tied to characters, it’s also the one most tied to the song cards, which can exert a character to be played for free. Some of the standout cards in this ink include Rapunzel, Gifted With Healing, Ursula’s Shell Necklace, and Stitch, Rock Star.

Next, we have Amethyst. Amethyst is the ink that likes controlling the game by slowing your opponent down. It loves to exert characters, like with Freeze and Elsa, Spirit of Winter. It also has a high number of evasive creatures to let you comfortably quest for lore, and can help you draw cards to ensure you always have a way to bring the game to a crawl for your opponent. Alongside Elsa, also keep an eye out of Dr. Facilier, Agent Provocateur, Ursula, Power Hungry, and Jetsam, Ursula’s Spy.

Emerald is another highly controlling ink, and can outright stop your opponent from questing with cards like Mother Gothel, Selfish Manipulator and Jasper, Common Crook. It also tries to dissuade your opponent from challenging your characters, whether it be through buffing them with a Vicious Betrayal or having on-challenge effects like Flynn Rider. Emerald and Amethyst are very similar, with the main difference being Emerald has more to do with challenging, while Amethyst does a better job at drawing cards.

Any MTG player will immediately know what the red Ruby ink does: direct damage, quick lore, and fast play. You’re racing your opponent to 20 lore, and Ruby is perhaps the best ink to do just that. It can rush in and challenge threats with the rush keyword found on the likes of Mau, Hero to All and Captain Hook, Ruthless Pirate. It can directly knock down your opponent’s lore with a Tangle or Aladdin, Outlaw Hero. It can even completely banish opposing characters with a Dragon Fire. If you want results and you want them now, Ruby is the Disney Lorcana ink to play.

Sapphire loves two things: playing item cards, and ramping up your inkwell to play yet more items. It’s the only ink that can put extra cards into your inkwell (such as on Hades, Infernal Schemer and Mickey Mouse, Detective), making it a fantastic secondary ink for practically any deck. Items are a big part of its identity, too, with plenty like Scepter of Arendelle, Magic Golden Flower, and Coconut Basket to choose from. A particularly scary play is combining all the ink you’ve ramped up with Ariel, Whoseit Collector and a hand full of items to quest and ready up loads of times in a single turn.

Finally, we have Steel. A straightforward ink, it’s all about challenging and putting up a big wall for your opponents to have to break through. It’s the ink with some of the biggest characters, like Maui, Demigod’s whopping 8/8 stats. It also has bodyguard cards, which your opponent will need to break through before they can challenge your questing characters. It’s also a good ink for dishing out direct damage, with Grab Your Sword being one of the best song cards available. Notably, it’s the only ink that can banish item cards, thanks to the action card Break. It’s also home to one of Lorcana’s most beloved cards, Tinker Bell, Giant Fairy.

As Disney Lorcana matures, and more cards come out for it, we’re likely to see the boundaries of what each ink can do be pushed. Maybe we’ll see more item destruction in non-Steel inks, for example, or maybe Amethyst and Emerald will become more specific in their methods of control. Part of the appeal of a TCG is following how it evolves over time, and keeping an eye on how each ink’s identity shifts and changes as we go from set to set will help you keep your deck up to dateand ready to go.

If you want to succeed, you’ll need to understand how to use inks in the Disney Lorcana TCG. Your deck can only use two inks in it, so finding two that gel together and highlight how you want to play the game is one of the most important decisions you can make when building a deck. For instance, a control-focused deck would likely want to use both Emerald and Amethyst, to ensure you have the best of Emerald’s anti-questing tools and Amethyst’s card draw.

Meanwhile, if you want to have a deck full of big, heavy-hitting challengers, maybe Amber and Steel would be the way to go. That way, you can play big, Steel characters, and then use Amber’s healing properties to keep them in play for so much longer. Or maybe you want to just rush your opponent out, using Sapphire’s ramp with Ruby’s low-cost and direct lore-draining cards to outpace them.

Personally, one of the first decks I want to build for Disney Lorcana is an Emerald and Steel deck focused on characters like John Silver, Beast, and Simba. I’ll be able to prevent my opponent from doing much other than challenging my ever-growing wall of beefy characters with Emerald’s control properties, while taking out the few that slip through with the hard-hitting nature of Steel.

There isn’t any single answer on what the best ink colour is, or which two are the “right” options to put together. Lorcana is all about creativity, and making your deck fit how you want to play it. Have an experiment, build lots of decks, and see what works and what does. By picking your inks to maximise your advantages and minimise the weaknesses of each ink, you’ll already be halfway to making a deck that can grind out that lore and win in Disney Lorcana.