Last month, Pavel Kolev finally got the email he’s been dreading for over a year: a request from Disney to shut down his unofficial digital Lorcana client, Pixelborn. Even though he always knew this day would come, it still hit him hard.
“My heart is shattered to pieces,” Kolev wrote in a Discord post announcingthe imminent shutdown of Pixelborn. “I’ve put everything in this project for the past year and a half. Every night, weekend, and holiday. I know it meant a lot for many people as the only way to experience the game we all love.” Per Disney’s request, Pixelborn servers will go offline before June 16th.
I sat down with Kolev to talk about the legacy of Pixelborn, the process of shutting it down, and what kind of impact its loss will have on the Lorcana community. It’s only been a day since making the announcement, and Kolev is uncharacteristically reticent. After the interview, he tells me he found it difficult to express his feelings in English (Kolev is Bulgarian and English is his second language), but while talking to him it’s clear he’s still processing what losing Pixelborn means to him and the community that has grown around it.
When I asked Kolev how he reacted to seeing an email in his inbox from Disney, he says the first thing he felt, surprisingly, was relief. “With the exponential growth [of Pixelborn] that started this year, I was getting more and more anxious and worried that they would issue a full-blown lawsuit against me and jeopardize the future of myself and my family.”
He describes having an overall positive interaction with Disney, given the circumstances, and says he was contacted with a formal request to take Pixelborn offline, rather than a cease-and-desist that would have carried an explicit legal threat. “The first instant, emotional reaction was relief that I’m not being sued and that we can resolve this in a friendly manner.”
Planning the end of Pixelborn was a delicate task that Kolev wanted to ensure wouldn’t distract from the upcoming Disney Lorcana Challenge events, especially considering Pixelborn is such a valuable practice and deck-tuning tool for players planning to compete. He intentionally waited to make the announcement until after the first tournaments in Lille and Atlanta. “I wanted to wait until a couple of days after that, but I didn’t want it to be too close to Chicago because it would have been another distraction.”
By announcing the shutdown last Wednesday, he hoped to get the bad news out of the way early so that everyone could still enjoy the event in Chicago. At every stage of Pixelborn’s development, Kolev has always tried to make choices that best serve Lorcana, not just Pixelborn.
The news rocked the Lorcana community. Many were shocked and saddened to learn their main way of playing Lorcana was going away. Catastrophizers across all social media announced this was the beginning of the end for Lorcana. Streamers and YouTubers who rely on Pixelborn to create content suddenly found themselves without a way to grind games for their audience anymore. Pixelborn briefly trended on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon. Regardless of how you feel about Pixelborn, its end represents a sea change in how Lorcana is played.
Kolev had anticipated disappointment, but never expected such a big reaction to the news. Before making the announcement, he bought himself a booster box of Ursula’s Return and planned to crack packs while responding to messages, but he never got the chance. “The amount of messages and reactions from the first second… I couldn’t get to the box. It was impossible.” Kolev spent the entire next day replying to messages of both support and disappointment. He’s still trying to reply to everyone. “There’s a lot of people supporting me and expressing their gratitude and their stories. It feels nice, I feel the appreciation at the moment, but my emotions are a cocktail of a lot of different things mixed up.”
The big question is: why now? The game has been live since last May, when it just used the handful of cards from The First Chapter we’d seen at the time, and neither Disney nor Ravensburger has attempted to contact Kolev about Pixelborn previously. Kolev has some theories about the timing, but he mostly chalks it up to Pixelborn’s incredible growth over the last year. “I think Pixelborn burned too bright and too fast and grew too big,” he explains. “Many famous players from other games started to play and give attention to Pixelborn. I think it was time for Disney to step in and shut it down.”
Kolev suspects there are a multitude of reasons for why Disney came after Pixelborn now when it could have done so at any point prior. He thinks the tournaments offering cash prizes were likely a “red flag”; the most prominent organization using Pixelborn to host semi-weekly tournaments is The Pack, offering prize pools as big as $10,000.
Kolev wasn’t involved with those tournaments, and when I ask him if he thinks he should have tried to discourage them from happening to protect Pixelborn from scrutiny, he says it wouldn’t have been possible. “There are at least three online tournaments per day that aren’t organized by The Pack,” he says. The majority of people running tournaments on Pixelborn have never been in contact with Kolev.
Another reason to go after Pixelborn now is because Lorcana seems to be shifting into a new phase going into its second year. Ravensburger North America CEOStephane Madi said in an interview recentlythat the company has “new, robust marketing and engagement activations” that will start rolling out in Set 5 this August. Kolev thinks the new focus on marketing Lorcana to a bigger audience may have been a factor in deciding now is the time to shut down Pixelborn.
But because Pixelborn was able to survive for so long, losing it will have much bigger ramifications. Kolev thinks that had Pixelborn been shut down pre-launch when there were only about 4,000 players, it wouldn’t have had much of an impact. Now, with close to 200,000 players, a significantly larger number will be affected.
Kolev says content creators who rely on Pixelborn will be the most affected, but his biggest concern is for all the people who can’t play Lorcana at all anymore, either because the game isn’t available where they live, or because other limitations that prevent them from being able to collect cards or go out to play the game. “I feel really sad for those people that won’t be able to experience the game that they grew to love in the way they’re used to experiencing it.”
Kolev has heard countless stories from players about ways Pixelborn has touched their lives, and it saddens him to think it won’t be around anymore to create meaningful memories for more people. He shares one story with me that means a lot to him.
He was visiting London for a series of events celebrating the launch of Rise of the Floodborn. During one of the events, he noticed a woman he guessed was in her 60s, who stood out from the crowd. “It was noticeable, you have all of those nerds and one old lady, playing in all of the events.” At the last event in the final round, Kolev was seated next to her when she leaned over and, to his surprise, thanked him for his work on Pixelborn.
She explained that she lives in Canada far away from her kids and grandkids in London, but they found a way to connect by playing Lorcana on Pixelborn. She arranged to visit her family during the launch of Rise of the Floodborn so she could see her family and play Lorcana. Kolev says he was touched by her story, and that he’s heard hundreds of similar stories from people who have formed deeper connections to Lorcana, and other people, through Pixelborn.
Though many will be affected, Kolev doesn’t believe losing Pixelborn will be detrimental to Lorcana. “The dooming of Lorcana is over-exaggerated, " he says. “We all know the game will live on and people will find other ways to play online, that’s inevitable.” Along with other platforms like Tabletop Simulator and Inktable, Kolev believes there will be new ways to play Lorcana online too. “I’m pretty sure someone will code something similar to Pixelborn sooner or later if Ravensburger doesn’t do it first.”
There have been rumors that Kolev agreed to take down Pixelborn because Ravensburger offered him a role in helping create an official online version of Lorcana. Kolev denies this. “I’m not sure Ravensburger is looking for someone with my skill set to be involved in Lorcana.”
When asked if there’s anything he would have done differently, Kolev says no. “At some point, it was community-driven and I couldn’t stop the growth or make it more secret. It was my creation that everyone took on and continued to grow and expand and create a huge community around it.”
People have been offering Kolev all kinds of advice about “shenanigans” he could pull to keep Pixelborn alive, but he says he’s not into it. “I’ve received messages from lawyers suggesting different ways I can handle it to keep Pixelborn running, but I’ve always said that if they ask me, I’ll shut it down. I’m keeping my word.”
What’s next for Kolev? He isn’t sure yet. He’s currently looking for work, something he has a lot more time for now that he doesn’t have to provide full-time player support for Pixelborn. “It really depends on what job I take and the free time I will have, but I will definitely be doing something in my free time or full-time related to card games.”
In the meantime, he’s started a new project that he thinks the Pixelborn community - which still has over 73,000 members (six times the size of the official Lorcana Discord) - will be excited about. Pixelborn Connect is a web platform for ranked play that brings many of Pixelborn’s features like matchmaking, ranked ladder, and stat-tracking to webcam play.
He plans to fund Pixelborn Connect through Patreon just as he did with Pixelborn. After covering server costs, the rest of the money raised on Patreon each month is donated to charity. Kolev estimates that when Pixelborn’s Patreon shuts down, the community will have donated around $90,000 to charity.
While it’s hard to let go of something he’s poured so much of his life into, Kolev is satisfied knowing how much Pixelborn meant to people. He says since making the announcement, he has “the most gratitude for the support and the kind words. I really appreciate all the messages I’ve received.” He also hopes no one will direct their anger over losing Pixelborn to Ravensburger. “I believe in the hands of Ravensburger, Lorcana’s future is bright,” he says. “They’re giving it their all, they’re extremely passionate, and they’re making all the right choices for the game. Don’t blame them for anything that’s happening now. We just have to follow the law.”
As we’re wrapping up, I share a perspective about Pixelborn that I’m not sure how Kolev will react to. Pixelborn made such an impact on so many people in its short life. It expanded the reach of Lorcana to new players, helped people make connections, supported charities, and gave people the freedom to play Lorcana any time they want to. It was a beautiful project built by a passionate community who gave their time for no other reason but for the love of Lorcana. It’s one of the most successful passion projects ever and, in a way, watching it die in its prime makes it even more beautiful. Kolev laughs, and humbly agrees.
