Disney Lorcana: Into The Inklands Review

Highlights

• Inklands brings new locations that add complexity and strategy to gameplay, setting the foundation for diverse deck-building options.
• The expansion includes Disney Channel cartoons and adventurous themes, maintaining quality while exploring new design elements and typal synergies.
• Despite some concerns over errata and misprints, Inklands enhances the Lorcana experience with location cards and flavorful, adventurous artwork.

Into the Inklands is Disney Lorcana’s second expansion and its first big shake-up. The introduction of Locations adds a new dimension to gameplay that is already reshaping the meta game just in the first week. Below, TheGamer’s tabletop editor Joe Parlock and I dive deep into the design, mechanics, quality, and impact of Into the Inklands: a beautiful set with a strong theme and an even stronger foundation for the future.

Design

Joe: Into the Inklands feels like the second set we should’ve gotten instead of Rise of the Floodborn. Floodborn just felt like more of the first set, with a vaguely defined Floodborn-matters theme not doing enough work to differentiate it.

On the other hand, the set manages to maintain the quality we’ve expected from the first two, while also setting out its own themes and aesthetic. It’s an adventurous set full of rogues, outlaws, and explorers, placing the focus on similarly swashbuckling source material like Treasure Planet, Atlantic, DuckTales, and TaleSpin. The focus on locations also helps make this globetrotting adventure come together in a more cohesive package than either set before it.

Speaking of DuckTales and TaleSpin, Inklands’ introduction of Disney Channel cartoons feels like a watershed moment for the game. We’ve now strayed away from Walt Disney Animation Studios movies for the first time, and the results are a natural, sensible inclusion into the game that further pushes Inklands’ themes of exploration and adventure.

Into the Inklands is also showing signs of Lorcana finally settling into its art style, and being willing to have fun with it. It’s only in minor ways, but some cards play with the format of the card itself, like Genie, Cramped in the Lamp constraining him into the rectangular box. Legendary rare cards often break out of the card frame in a way we’ve never seen before, and the enchanted rares all have a cohesive, painterly art style previous sets haven’t attempted.

There’s also some incredibly flavourful cards here. Lilo & Stitch’s Nani makes her debut, and with her bodyguard keyword is the big sister we loved from the movie. Dreamborns and Floodborns go the other way, with cards like Jafar, Striking Illusionist conjuring massive sand-snakes, or Alice, Tea Alchemist becoming the Mad Hatter herself. It’s always great to see how many different ways Lorcana can reimagine characters, and Into the Inklands shows no signs of that slowing down.

Eric: It’s probably for the best that Rise of the Floodborn ended up being more of the same considering how hard it was to find to product the first few months – wouldn’t want the game changing dramatically before a lot of people even had a chance to play it. That said, I totally agree that Into the Inklands has a stronger and more cohesive theme and identity. I love the little touches and attention to detail like the Genie you pointed out, as well as the dollar sign motif in the Scrooge foils.

There’s a sense of adventure and storytelling that comes through the artwork that definitely transcends the marketing. There is an innate sense of adventure to opening packs and playing TCGs that Into the Inklands gels with beautifully.

There’s countless flavor wins in this set, like the Nani you mentioned. It encourages you to really look at every card because you never know what kinds of secrets or little details are hidden inside. I love the way Motunui sends your banished characters to your ink just like Gramma Tala; the ones we’ve lost still helping us from the beyond is such a cool way to tie game mechanics back to Moana. The whole thing with puppies is also adorable, and even better than the Seven Dwarfs synergy from Floodborn. Design-wise, Lorcana continues to impress.

Mechanics

Joe: As mentioned, the big thing for Into the Inklands was the introduction of Location cards, and they’re a huge shakeup for Lorcana. Now, instead of idly questing and challenging characters, we have a split in your priorities: do you try and outpace a location and stick to your guns, or do you change focus and try and take it out before it can give your opponent too much of a lead?

It would’ve been reasonable to think Ravensburger would play it safe for their debut, but Locations range from the nice and simple vanilla ones like Nottingham, Prince John’s Castle, to hugely complex ones like RLS Legacy and The Bayou. The latter of which has immediately blown open the game with a new combo that uses it; Beast, Relentless from Rise of the Floodborn, and The Sheriff Of Nottingham. Lorcana has long been lacking in the complexity of other TCGs, so it’s great to see the theorycrafting and wild plays Locations have added to the game.

The one area where I’m concerned with Into the Inklands’ mechanics are the number of errata we’ve had since it launched. Errata is when a card is changed to work differently from how it’s printed. For Inklands, we’ve already had one: Ursula, Deceiver Of All was originally printed as a Storyborn, not a Dreamborn.

It’s a small change that only has edge case implications, but this is the third set. Lorcana hasn’t set out a first errata policy the way other games have yet, so whenever we see a card get changed like that, or in more extreme cases mechanically overhauled like the earlier change to Floodborn’s Yzma, Scary Beyond All Reason, it makes me more nervous of what future releases could mean for the game.

Despite that, Into the Inklands has made me eager to build decks in a way Floodborn never did, thanks to its greater focus on easily identifiable synergies. Emerald and Steel Discard decks are now more than viable, but my personal favourite so far is the rise of the Mentors. With cards like Gramma Tala and Mama Odie, Mentors have gone from a decent supportive character to a fully-blown deck in their own regard.

More complex, more engaging, and more fun to brew around, Into the Inklands feels like Ravensburger is just about done laying down the foundations for the game before an utterly wild second year in a couple of sets’ time.

Eric: When Locations were first revealed there was some doubt about whether or not they’d make a big impact, but it’s clear that a handful of the most powerful ones like Queen’s Castle, RLS Legacy, and Jolly Roger are very playable, are the meta is going to need to shift around this new card type. This is the kind of shakeup the game really needed after six months of Ruby/Amethyst dominance, and while it’s too soon to say how the meta will settle, what I care most about is deck diversity, and it’s clear that locations open the door to lots of new ways to play the game.

The errata concerns me too, and it’s a kind of quality control issue as well. The speculation around that Ursula has inflated the price of an already valuable legendary, so I think it’s really important to avoid those issues as much as possible and, as you say, there’s already been a lot of them in Lorcana. There is no ‘dreamborn matters’ card yet, but if there is, this Ursula is going to become a huge headache for players.

The typal synergies are definitely the most exciting thing about this expansion for me too. You can see so many strategies starting to come together between pirates, princes, villains, bodyguards, and now Titans, and those kinds of archetypal decks are just going to get more viable as the game goes on. This expansion solidifies the direction for Lorcana in a lot of ways and while I have some concerns, I’m overwhelmingly pleased about the way things are going.

Product Quality

Eric: I looked back at our discussion about The First Chapter so I could better sense of how Into the Inklands’ products have evolved, and I’m pleased to see some of the issues we brought up then have been addressed in the new expansion. Booster boxes are shrink-wrapped in plastic branded with Lorcana logos, ensuring they can’t be tampered with before opening, which is a huge win for both players and collectors. The Troves also got a nice upgrade with the lore counter and dice, and I’m especially fond of the new dividers they come with that. I’m very disappointed to lose the player guides though. I’ve collected those from Pokemon ETBs for years and I was looking forward to collecting the Lorcana books as well. I hope they come back.

All the other accessories are same old same old. The sleeves are still unshuffleable and easily destroyed, I’ve taken to double-sleeving them but that makes decks difficult to handle. I like the playmats, still don’t care for the deck boxes – though no new stink issues, thankfully.

My big concern is around the quality of the cards. I wrote about this earlier this week, but Into the Inklands has a lot of the previous print-quality issues, plus a bunch of new ones. There are seemingly entire batches of booster boxes that don’t have any non-foil legendary cards. During the launch event at my store, we had to trade out the pack from all of our starter decks for new ones because it had already been discovered that they all had commons and uncommons in the rare slots. Opening packs is quite a gamble as it is and I think it’s really important that customers trust that they have at least a chance to win. Some of these packs are rigged slot machines, and that’s a big problem.

Even when the packs have the right odds there’s issues. The color variance between cards is huge this time around, with some being extremely saturated versions of the others. I know this happens in every TCG, but to me, this is compromising the artists’ work. I went through all my playsets and I couldn’t put together four copies of any card that all look the same, and all I want is to see the work that the artist actually created.

I’ve also got misprints that are unplayable. A couple of my cards have splotches of black ink covering the ink cost. People at my local store have shown me cards that have their text boxes completely covered in black. I know there’s a market for these, and there will always be anomalies, but this feels like a systemic issue in quality control at the printing level. There’s just too many issues to excuse.

I’m most disappointed to see the Stitch, Rock Star enchanted promo cards showing up in regular packs. If I manage to win one at my store’s Set Championship this season it will be one of my most prized possessions, and while it doesn’t take anything away from my accomplishment, I really don’t like the idea that there’s a bunch of copies floating around out there that no one had to earn. I hate to say it but it makes them less special, and that bums me out.

I spend a lot of money on Lorcana and I enjoy doing it. Like I said before, these issues don’t have any impact on the game, the community that’s been built around it, the opportunities it’s opened for me as a player and content creator, or my appreciation for the artistry and quality of the work. So many people have worked so hard to make Lorcana what it is, and I’m disappointed that these printing and packing issues put a blemish on that work. I hope it’s something that can be resolved soon.

Joe: It looks like Europe has been mostly spared from the print problems you’ve noticed, as all of my packs have been absolutely fine. I’d love a few misprints, but apparently I had to live somewhere with product quality assurance…

I’ve also not had the chance to look at the accessories yet, but it’s generally a given in TCGs that card sleeves with art on aren’t great. Just go for Dragon Shields and Vault Xs, it’s a little bit more of an investment but it’s nice to have a deck you can actually shuffle.

I really love the new Troves. Card dividers to help organise into ink colour is a godsend, and the addition of proper damage counters over the naff cardboard thing we’ve had up to now is great. I like that it doesn’t go the full Pokemon route of throwing in rubbish card sleeves and acrylic nonsense just to bump the price up – it’s simply the things you need to organise and play the game, and it makes the Trove perhaps the best bundle any TCG has done.

Impact

Eric: This is the big question: How will Into the Inklands change Lorcana? I had expected that by doubling the card pool Rise of the Floodborn would totally transform the meta game, but it didn’t. The best decks got better, the fringe deck fell further behind, and while we saw the rise of a couple new archetypes like Ruby/Sapphire Pawpsicle and Emerald/Steel Discard, the game that was already feeling stale at the end of The First Chapter felt exactly the same three months later.

A new expansion brings renewed hope for change, but this time things are different. No really, I swear! We’ve already talked about locations, a new card type that throws a major wrench in Ruby/Amethyst’s board control plan (except Maui). To the dismay of many it would appear Ruby and Amethyst got all the best locations, and with the power of Jim Hawkins could end up being the top deck once again, but I don’t think that will be an issue as long as it’s not the only winning deck, and at least right now it doesn’t seem like that will be the case.

The thing I was missing most from Rise of the Floodborn was new deck diversity, and we’re clearly getting that from Into the Inklands. Locations don’t just add new wrinkles to old archetypes, they open the door for all kinds of new deck-building options. Ruby/Steel Pirates and locations are new and seemingly powerful, there’s that pseudo-infinite combo in Emerald/Steel with The Bayou. One of the first big cash events from the previous weekend had an Amethyst/Emerald deck in the top cut, an ink combo that has had virtually zero representation previously.

No telling what will end up on top, and I’m worried about toxic decks emerging – the all-Jafar Amethyst/Steel deck is an early contender for this set’s most-degenerate build – but I’m excited about this expansion in a way I never was about Rise of the Floodborn. We might not end up with a perfectly balanced meta with a healthy number of equally-competitive decks, but the introduction of locations is going to throw things into flux in a very good way this set.

Joe: As I mention in the mechanics section, locations have permanently changed Lorcana for the better. They’ve brought a new layer of complexity the game didn’t have before, and throwing in a new decision you have to make when challenging is fantastic.

One thing the Lorcana community really needs to come to terms with, though, is combos. We’ve had numerous combos proposed since Inklands was revealed, and the community has whipped itself up into a frenzy of them being “instant wins”. Sometimes they have a chance of being good, like The Bayou, Sheriff of Nottingham and Beast, Relentless, but other times it’s a pile of seven expensive cards you have to assemble perfectly and then wait a turn to win with.

A set isn’t defined by what you can do in a vacuum with no interaction. Instead of focusing on those combos and getting distracted by setting them up, it’ll still likely be the midrange decks that take the day. Generically good cards focused on high value will almost always beat an unwieldy combo like the ones proposed.

With that in mind, I’ll also restate my claim and say Mentors are going to grow in popularity over this set. We’ve already got a lot of them, and their abilities usually revolve around card draw and ink ramp – the two things just about any Lorcana deck wants to do. They might not pack the greatest punch, but I’ll be shocked if we don’t see at least one Mentor-heavy meta deck by the time set four rolls around.

Next: These Underused Lorcana Cards Could Finally Find A Place In Into The Inklands