GBP (£)
EUR (€)
How to turn Disney Lorcana Booster Packs into great gaming experiences: Pack Rush and Chaos Draft
Let's be honest, one of the best things we all love about Trading Card Games is opening Booster Packs. Not knowing which cards you will pull builds up the tension that turns into excitement while you go through the cards until you reach the rare spots in the pack. Depending on the pulls, you can of course experience some disappointment, but it will all be forgotten when you find a great card or the one you really wanted for your deck or collection.
In Disney Lorcana, opening Booster packs can often be a mixed experience as the packs and boxes are very random and not seeded. For anyone new to TCGs, this mainly means that each box will have from 3 to 8 cards of high rarity (Legendary in this case) but it also means that you may still not have four copies of all common and uncommon cards in a set after opening two or three Booster Boxes. Although some other Trading Card Games took a different direction for their boxes, the way Disney Lorcana boxes are structured is not necessarily a bad thing, it just means the pulls are much more random than in other games. It also means that the excitement when you pull a Legendary or an Enchanted card is so much higher as you know your pulls were really blessed.
To make opening a Disney Lorcana Booster pack an even more exciting event, players can also consider save their packs to use them in casual Draft or a Sealed event and I wanted to catch an opportunity to discuss briefly all these formats and how opening a pack can be turned into an opportunity to play a game and meet new friends at conventions.
Disney Lorcana Draft and Sealed format
Draft and Sealed formats are very common ways to play in the TCG world. In both cases, players open a fixed number of booster packs and they play against each other using only the cards they obtained from them. As a reference, the opposite of this format is the Constructed where players create their own decks using all the available cards in their collection following the standard deck construction rules of their game of choice.
In the Sealed format, each player usually opens 6 packs and keeps all the cards in order to make their deck. By contrast, in the Draft format each player opens one pack at the time, keeps 1 or 2 cards and then passes the rest to the player to their right or left. Everyone than picks again 1 or 2 cards from those that have been passed to them and repeats till all cards from 6 booster packs have been picked. In both formats, players need then to use these cards to create a deck to play against each other. In both cases, the final deck should have a minimum of 40 cards and it can include more than two Ink colours. It is also worth noting that while these formats can be played casually by any player they are also commonly used in organized events where they may also have some additional rules or differ slightly from the general ones mentioned above.
Celebrating an Year of Disney Lorcana: Chaos Draft Format Interestingly, the latest set released for Disney Lorcana, Azurite Sea, is the 6th of this Trading Card Game and therefore it is now possible to finally play the super-exciting “Chaos Draft” format. As in the normal Draft (of sealed) Format, each player still receive 6 booster packs but they all come from a different Disney Lorcana set including the First Chapter. All the other rules remain the same.
I had the pleasure to enter a Chaos Draft event at my locals recently and it was a bit like embarking again on the magical journey through the Disney realms we experienced since August 2023. We usually play a Draft event every set upon release but using all the sets together this time felt much more engaging and fun and it was also a great way to celebrate the 6th set of this TCG.
Unfortunately, one of the main limits to play Chaos Draft is sourcing the right booster packs, in particular those from The First Chapter that have been very hard to find (and expensive) for a while. You can still play the format using any combination of the sets released so far of course and this approach can actually be a great way to exploit any remaining stock or sale at your local gaming hub.
As an heads-up, I also wanted to flag that the new Collectors Gift Set sets to release in March together with the new set, Archazia's Island, can be perfect to play Chaos Draft. As you may have seen in the latest news, the gift set will feature a new alternate art “Lilo, Escape Artist” promo card, a storage box with the same art, three card storage dividers and five random booster packs from sets 2 to 6.
As simple as it can be: (blinded) Pack Rush Format
To make things even more interesting, Disney Lorcana developers also came up with a simplified format where players can test their skills using decks made only from 2 Booster Packs. “Pack Rush” games have been actually quite popular during the Challenges with a lot of players queuing for it at the side event tables. I personally loved trying it out and I enjoyed it even more when I opened the pack, sleeved, and shuffled the cards without even checking the pulls. Drawing your hand without having any idea which cards are in your deck is super fun.
The value of this format lies mostly in the possibility to turn opening a couple of random packs into an opportunity to play a quick game. This way, players can either be excited they pulled a sought after card they were missing but also enjoy the fact they pulled a useful card that may have given them the victory in the pack rush game. If you want to know more about this format, you can follow this link to the official rule page.