Disney Lorcana: Happy 1st year anniversary!

As impressive as it can be, it is finally here: Disney Lorcana celebrates this month the very first anniversary since its release in 2023. Happy Birthday! I struggle to believe that it is already one year since this amazing TCG hit the shelves of our local game shops and found its way into the hearts of so many players around the world. As you may know, I started playing since day 1 and I was quite excited for the release of the fifth set, Shimmering Skies, that happened in the same month I started playing The First Chapter. This anniversary deemed a great celebration thus I headed to the Disney Store in London to celebrate this amazing milestone with many other players.

Shimmering Skies Launch Party

As usual, the newer Disney Lorcana set released first in local shops on the 9th of August and it has just become available for online order on Zatu on the 23rd of August. As you will read later, it is an amazing set thus I strongly recommend to pre-order it while stock last.

This release was quite exciting as together with the new set Ravensburger made available the limited “D23 2024 Collection Box”. For those who may not be familiar, “D23” is the name of the Official Disney Fan Club founded in 2009 that promote a number of initiative for all the members including an yearly Convention. Disney Lorcana was actually promoted first during the 2023 event and the Pins released during it are now quite valuable for all the fans and collectors.

To celebrate the first anniversary of the game, this year Ravensburger created a limited edition Collector box that will only be available at Disney Stores and Disney Parks (and at the now completed D23 convention). The box is an impressive collection of 6 foil Enchanted promo cards specifically designed for the event. Each of these are fan-favourite cards from each set with expanded artwork, unique foiling and text box decorations. The sixth of these cards, “Oswald – The Lucky Rabbit” is actually a preview-card from a set that will only be released in November making this box even more spectacular.

Considering the amazing artwork of the cards and the limited availability, there was a lot of excitement about this release leading to very long queues at the Disney shops on the 9th. When I arrived at the one in London there were more than 600 people waiting for the store to open and some of them were there since 11pm on the day before. Luckily for everyone, the store had enough stock for everybody. The Disney team also surprised every customer with an amazing gift: a golden 1st year Celebration pin representing Mickey Brave Little Tailor. Let's also not forget that the artist Jochem Van Gool was also there signing his amazingly beautiful cards and all the promo cards that were handed over to the fans. I spent quite some time there but it was well worth it!

What the new set looks like? First pulls and what to expect

As you may imagine, it would have not been a proper launch party without some packs and the very first pulls from this set. I was quite pleased with my luck (for once) as I was able to get a couple of very good legendary right after the first set packs. Among them, I was quite excited to pull the new Legendary Mirabelle from the movie Encanto. Not only the artwork on this card is really stunning but it is also illustrated by Emily Abeydeera, an artist we interviewed at the Launch event for Ursula's Return set. As fun as it can be, the Zatu team and I met Emily also at the last London Card show where we had a chance chat about the new cards from the set.

Together with finding Mirabelle, I was also quite surprised to see that Ravensburger changed the design of all legendary cards of this set as the main character on them is now embossed with a glossy finish. This change seems to also carry over on the foil version of the same cards making the artwork on these cards even more stunning. Personally this is quite an interesting change in direction as also the Enchanted cards of Shimmering Skies have been revisited to have an extended artwork. I saw a few of them pulled during the Launch event and they are definitely impressive.

In terms of Gameplay, Shimmering Skies is definitely going to shake up a lot the previous competitive scene with some extremely powerful cards and combo. To name just three: Daisy Duck, Donald's date”, “Prince Naveen, Ukulele Player” and “Mufasa - Ruler of Pride Rock”. We discussed a bit this last one in the preview of the set due to its tremendous ability to ready all the exhausted Ink in your Inkwell EVERY time it quests. The cards value on the secondary market is quite high at the moment and the expectation is that Sapphire/Ruby and Sapphire/Steel will be quite present in the meta game.

Prince Naveen, on the other hand will make the joy of every Amber/Steel Song player considering its on-play ability to sing a song of cost 6 for free. Steel song has been among the most consistent decks since Chapter one and it will definitely be among the big contenders in the next set championship.

The last one, Daisy Duck, is among the most interesting new cards from my point of view considering she can quest for 2 and has 4 willpower with just a cost of 1. In addition, when played she allows the player and the opponents to play the first card of their deck as far as it is a character card. Considering all these characteristics, Daisy is a great addition for every deck that focuses on Questing as fast as possible. These decks, generally called Hyper Aggro, were quite efficient in the past set but the addition of Daisy will make them even more interesting in competitive games.