Summary
For the last few months, it’s felt likeLorcanahas prioritised its competitive circuit far more than it did at launch. Whether it’s a rigid meta being busted open by Into the Inklands, Set Championships giving the game its first taste of organised play, or introducing its big leagues at the Lorcana Challenge events, the main focus has been on one-on-one, no-holds-barred competitive play.
But that’s not how I like to play trading card games. I don’t care about what’s in the meta or what deck did well at whatever event. I just want to play with cool cards and see fun interactions, which is why Lorcana needs to borrow from Magic: The Gathering and introduce its own Commander format.
In Magic,Commander was originally a fan-made format(a specialised ruleset) that has since ballooned into the most popular way of playing. Instead of having decks with 60 cards and up to four copies, Commander has you make decks of one hundred cards, and only one copy of anything other than a basic land.
Your decks are built around one legendary creature card, your commander. Every card in your deck has to be at least one of the colours found in the cost and rules text of your commander – for instance, every card in my Goreclaw, Terror of Qal-Sisma deck is green, because Goreclaw’s only colour is the green in its casting cost.
The other big difference is that where Magic is traditionally played one-on-one, Commander is intended to be played in groups of four. This was a huge shakeup for Magic, but Lorcana already supports more than one-on-one.
Put all this together, and Commander is a radically different way of playing Magic. It’s a social format where you make deals and put across your personality through your deck. Of course, some like to sweat it out and win above all else, but for the most part it’s all about finding playstyles you enjoy and trying to get your deck to ‘do the thing’.
It’s also much more random than regular Magic. While in other formats like Modern or Standard you can stack your deck with four copies of your best cards, in Commander you have just one copy in a pool of 99. Deckbuilding is a challenge to see how many alternate ways of winning you can fit in there, or at least ways to help you catch back up should your big plan fall to pieces.
These are all things Lorcana desperately needs right now. I’m not a competitive person; following the meta and what’s good when doesn’t interest me.Pawpsicleor Emerald/Steel Discard might be ruling the roost right now, but I’m far more interested in the fringe decks picking up steam. I’m talking about the ones nobody saw coming, like how Mufasa completely sweeped at theLorcana Challengein Atlanta.
I’m definitely not the only person who is disinterested in the competitive aspect of games. I’ve heard numerous anecdotes of people heading to events either to support their friends or just play in the more casual side events, with no intention of trying to take the top spots for themselves. People want to play Lorcana, but right now a lot of Ravensburger’s, and the community’s, attention seems to be on going pro.
Breathing Life Into Forgotten Cards
A Commander format would be perfect for Lorcana. It couldn’t be a perfect one-to-one transcription of Magic’s format, of course, but picking characters (perhaps of a certain rarity) to lead your deck of singleton cards and duking it out with a larger pod of players all feel like great ways to shake up the competitive status quo of the game.
Forcing you to go wide with the cards you run would also help bring back some of the cards that have fallen by the wayside. An unfortunate knock-on effect of Lorcana being so beholden to its meta is that just about every card outside of it is seen as a dud. If you’re not pulling those bomb cards in your booster pack, you might as well just throw it away.
But what if they had life in Lorcana’s own Commander format? A deck that needs to fill so many slots would have to look beyond the current hotness and find underappreciated relics of sets gone by, like finding ways to make Pete, Bad Guy work, or running Weight Set in a deck all about high Strength on characters.
With four sets under its belt, Lorcana is ready to experiment with Commander. Maybe it’d need smaller decks, or the total amount of lore an opponent needs to make would need to be increased. Or maybe there’d be more specific rules on who can lead your deck (maybe two, one of each of your chosen ink colours?). But these are all questions I’d love to see answered, as otherwise we’ll all go back to talking about how good Diablo, Devoted Herald is, and I don’t think I can take much more of that.
Disney Lorcana
Lorcana is a trading card game developed by Disney and published by Ravensburger, featuring iconic characters, settings, and more from the studio’s long history. As an Illumineer, you must build your deck and help protect Lorcana.
