Written on December 29th, 2023
We wish you a Happy New Year’s Eve and a Happy New Year 2024!
As we hit a lull in our Pokémon trading card business, I picked up some Lorcana Rise of the Floodborn decks. My goal was to play and teach the family over the holidays. That’s a work in progress. Here’s our initial impression of Lorcana compared to Pokémon TCG.
Lorcana Pros
- Cards have different attack and defense which are easy to find
- The descriptions on the card are easy to understand. See the picture above. The description is one sentence.
- We started organizing the extra cards, there are only six main colors, which makes sorting easy. All colored cards are in the same section.
- The game itself is easy to play compared to Pokémon TCG. The first person to get 20 lore wins. The instructions are only 2 pages long.
- The ability to play different versions of cards (shifting) on top of an existing one is a nice twist.
- The idea of certain character cards being used as ink (the currency to play cards from your hand) and eliminating energy in the deck allows more useful cards to be played.
- There are only three kinds of cards, Characters, Actions, and Items. Singing a song by using an existing character to sing and play an action is a nice Disney twist.
- I expect future games with the family to be fast paced and finish in 20 min.
- All you can do in a turn is place ink, add items to Dry (means you can use them the next turn), move items to Ready, draw a card, Quest, and Challenge. That’s it.
- Having multiple characters questing at once speeds up the game compared to Pokémon TCG.
- Packs include 12 playable cards
- Lorcana rares and uncommons actually have some value, whereas Pokemon rares and uncommons are so common many are worth less than 5¢ each.
- Decks are limited to using 2 colors each. That could be a pro or con depending on which TCG you came from.
Lorcana Cons
- The price of packs is not cheap. Current price of a Rise of the Floodborn pack is $6.75. A booster box has 24 packs, for a cost of $125, or a cost of $5.20 a pack.
- We didn’t realize that the same card can be a non-holo or Cold Foil version. Cold Foil cards are more valuable. Newer Pokemon sets change the description coloring on the bottom to identify Reverse Holos. That’s not the case on Rise of the Floodborn Cold Foil cards.
- The idea of drying character inks for a turn before being ready takes some time to understand and is different than Pokémon TCG, where played Pokémon are available immediately. Consider a drying character your temporary bench from a Pokémon perspective.
- We got confused if an Item is permanent. It is listed on the instructions that Items are permanent and Actions last one turn.
- The playset provided with premade decks is too small to use.
Conclusion
Lorcana artwork brings back the magic of familiar Disney characters. The decks are decent, with a lot of strategies available to get to 20 lore. Rise of the Floodborn availability is far superior to First Chapter availability. Premade deck prices were $17 each on Best Buy and include one pack, a reasonable cost compared to premade Pokémon TCG decks. There are more positives than negatives for playing and collecting Lorcana. Lorcana prices are not tracked on PriceCharting.com but are available on tcgplayer.com. This looks like a game we can collect, play and sell on our eBay store going forward.
Rating: 4.5 / 5
Sincerely yours,
smilingdad
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