Disney Lorcana: Illumineer’s Trove Review

Illumineer’s Trove…

Disney Lorcana is a new Trading Card Game published by Ravensburger that just arrived on the shelves of every shop. The players take the role of Illumineers, mages that can use the power of six magical inks to summon glimmers of Disney characters. Once summoned to your team, this glimmers can fight or quest for lore in order to beat your opponent Illumineer in a fun yet very strategic card game. Of course, we are talking about Disney, your characters can also sing song all the way to the victory…

The first set of Disney Lorcana (“The First Chapter”) will be released in September 2023. Together with booster packs, booster boxes, starter decks and Accessories, this first release also includes a nice collector box, the “First Chapter Illumineer’s Trove”. The box caught my attention at the launch party event right away thus I decided to give it a try and to share my finding with everyone.

Unboxing The Box: What’s Inside The Trove?

At first glance, the Illumineer’s Trove is designed to be a treasure box for every player and collectors. In a very environmental friendly decision, all Disney Lorcana products do not use outer protective plastic thus the Trove is packed inside a nicely designed cardboard sleeve. Once opened, you will find a beautiful full-art storage box containing two cardboard deck boxes, eight booster packs, a player’s guide, and a sheet of cardboard damage tokens.

The most important feature of the Disney Lorcana Illumineer’s Trove is for sure the eight booster packs. Being a third of a standard booster box, this amount of packs is quite substantial and is quite good for everyone looking to start playing the game or collecting the cards. As each booster pack includes 6 common cards, 3 Uncommons, and 2 Rare or Super Rare or Legendary card plus 1 foil card of any rarity, the Illumineer’s Trove will then provide a total of 96 cards of which 8 should be at least rare. It should also be noted that the Trove may include one of the 12 Disney Lorcana Enchanted card, the highest rarity card type with a very low pull rate. That’s quite a good start for every player!

Although the booster packs can be find in other products or purchased singularly, the storage solution and the Lorcana player’s guide are both exclusive to the Illumineer’s Trove. The storage box is a nice and sturdy box that should be able to hold more than 400 single sleeved cards divided into two short trays. Unfortunately, the trays are opened at the bottom and do not include any spacers. Although these additions would have made this a far better product, the box is still a very nice storage solution and it sits very nicely on my TGC shelf. At the moment, it only stores a few spare items but I am planning to use it long term for the duplicate cards I don’t need.

The 54-pages player’s guide is instead designed to provide more details of the amazing world of Lorcana as well as a complete visual list of all cards in The First Chapter. It also includes some good deck-building tips and game strategies together with hints of potentially good card combinations. I found weird the book or the Trove does not include the game rules but I do appreciate that most players can get a copy through the Starter Deck that is at the moment the best product to get in order to start playing.

The last items in the Illumineer’s Trove, the two cardboard deck boxes and the tokens are of good quality but not overall amazing. The deck boxes are designed to fit a standard 60-cards sleeved deck. Interestingly, the deck holds the cards horizontally that is not too common and their graphic is

quite beautiful. I would not recommend to use this boxes to bring the deck around as they are likely to be damaged a lot during the transfer but you can for sure use them to store any additional decks or cards at home.

The 15 game tokens included are significantly less interesting than those in the Starter decks as they lack the lore counter. The design and quality are of course the same and it is overall nice to have more tokens for your games but if you bought a starter deck the tokens in the Trove will feel a bit redundant.

Final Thoughts: Will The Curator Be Pleased?

As the biggest package of the Disney Lorcana initial release, I had high expectations for the First Chapter Illumineer’s Trove. Overall, I found that the product offers a good variety of contents inside a very thematic box that can be used to store your Disney Lorcana products and cards. The overall quality of the materials is also great and the graphics is impressing as it is expected being this a Disney product.

The key factor of this type of products is usually the overall value to price ratio. Disney Lorcana Illumineer’s Trove contents, in fact, won’t come cheap as this is the second most expensive set in the initial game offer. The first thing to consider is that stacking up the price of 8 booster packs makes up only 80% of the value of the Illumineer’s Trove. Consequently, you would get the main storage box, the two deck holders, the player guide and the damage tokens for the remaining 20% that feels overall about right. I generally feel that having included a standard deck holder instead of the two cardboard ones or at least a pack of sleeves would have made the Trove a much more appealing package although the deal is not too bad either.

In summary, the First Chapter Illumineer’s Trove is a good product to complement your Starter Decks if you just started playing Lorcana. It offers some storage, a lot of additional cards to tune your decks and to start your collection providing some nice insight into the game that can not be found elsewhere. I would not recommend to buy more than one of these though as the single booster packs or the box offer a much better value to build-up your collection.

That concludes our thoughts on Disney Lorcana The First Chapter Illumineer ‘s Trove. Do you agree? Let us know your thoughts and tag us on social media @zatugames. To buy The First Chapter Illumineer’s Trove today click here!