Disney Lorcana Designer Reveals How They Decide Rare vs Common Cards

Disney Lorcana isn't reserving certain Disney characters behind various rarities. Yesterday, Disney Lorcana officially revealed all 204 cards in The First Chapter, the debut set of the card game that's coming out next month. When discussing the game with ComicBook.com, Disney Lorcana co-designer Ryan Miller revealed that the designers opted for a different approach when it came to deciding what cards were "Legendary" cards, that is the rarest cards in the set. "What we didn't do was reserve a character for rarity," Miller said. If you like a character, especially popular characters, you'll see that character at various rarities. There's more than one Moana card. There's different versions of her at different rarities."

"We tend to reserve the more specific and more complex cards for the higher rarities," Miller said. "We assign rarity right off the bat and then our narrative team assign as many characters as they can. So when we design a card, we know how rare it is and what character it is. Our goal is to tie as much story to the card as we can."

In the initial set, there are 12 Legendary cards, which include a mix of popular characters and powerful abilities. Some cards like Te Ka, Heartless, can attack characters while still collecting Lore, while other cards like Belle, Strange But Special allows players to put a second card into their Inkwell every turn. If a player has at least 10 Ink in their inkwell, Belle becomes a powerful 5 Lore card. Each booster pack contains 2 Rare, Super Rare, or Legendary cards, along with one Foil card of any rarity.

Disney Lorcana will be released on August 18th at game stores and at Disney Parks. The game will then be released to big retail chains on September 1st.