Disney Lorcana designer says popular TCG was initially designed with Location cards in mind

Disney Lorcana revealed last week that the popular trading card game will introduce a brand new card type in its upcoming third set, Into the Inklands. Lead game designer Steve Warner visited the official Discord server over the weekend to fill in some details about the mysterious Location cards, including how to banish them and what benefits they grant to visiting characters.

First reported by ComicBook, Warner’s Q&A session on Lorcana’s Discord server confirmed many details that savvy players gleaned from the single card shared with the public during Into the Inklands’ reveal. Locations will have an Ink cost similar to any other card, and some will be Inkable, as well - able to be converted into the single resource needed to cast more powerful and costly Characters, Songs, Items and Actions.

Locations will enter play active and won’t need to “dry” before taking effect. Similarly, newly played Character that haven’t dried themselves will still be able to move onto locations and take advantage of their various effects. Players will need to pay the Move cost of a specific location to shift a Character over, which is displayed on the left of the middle portion below the art and above the rules text. Characters or Locations aren’t exerted when moved, but Characters can only move between Locations - not back to the plain battlefield or onto the same location simply by paying the cost, again.

Location cards earn their controlling players Lore at the beginning of their turn - the total symbols on active Locations are added and gained at the same time. This passive accrual means that Locations will be a juicy target of opponents’ challenges, and they only need to whittle down the Willpower amount listed on the right side of the card to banish them. Once gone, visiting Characters don’t suffer any consequences and stay in play, but any benefits bestowed by the Location immediately vanish with the card.

Characters can choose to challenge Locations directly without taking damage in return, and Warner confirmed the new card type will be exempt from any card effects that specify characters, such as Be Prepared and any healing effects. The introduction of Locations has been planned for a while, the designer mentioned, which is why keywords from The First Chapter carry their specific wording - the team wanted Bodyguard to only target Characters, while Reckless can absolutely affect Locations, for example.

Location benefits can be passive or triggered, while some - such as Forbidden Mountain - don’t seem to do much of anything. That’s because Characters arriving with Into the Inklands will activate one of their own abilities upon visiting a Location. The upcoming third set will feature plenty of Characters and other cards designed to interact with Locations, but the Lorcana team apparently wants to see them in future sets as well. As Warner mentioned in the Q&A, Location cards will be a great addition of complexity to the TCG’s limited environment while simultaneously expanding the kind of themed decks players can craft.

Players can move as many visiting Characters as possible to any one location, and the new card type doesn’t ever exert, ready or change states. They follow the same deckbuilding rules as any other card type, and Warner notes that future builds will need to consider adding Characters, Items or Action that specifically help remove Locations from the board.

Disney Lorcana’s third set, Into the Inklands, will launch February 23rd, 2024, but don’t forget that we’re not that far into Rise of the Floodborn’s life cycle. The second set helped alleviate a lot of distribution issues that plagued Lorcana’s The First Chapter, and Ravensburger is well on its way to satisfying its promise of four core set releases per year - part of the publisher’s 10-year plan to support the TCG’s longterm future.