D23 recently hosted a panel focused onLorcana’s past, present, and future, hosted by Ravensburger, where devs shared new details about its success and its future. For example, the devs detailed how over 1 billion cards have been sold, while also revealing new details aboutLorcana’s sixth set in November 2024. On top of that, the devs confirmed thatThe Black Cauldronwill be added in 2024,Pocahantasin 2026, andPixar is being introduced intoLorcana. However, fans shouldn’t expect details about Pixar until 2026 either.
Game Rant sat down afterward with two of the panelists, co-designers Ryan Miller and Steve Warner, to discussLorcana’s journey, the new additions to the TCG, and their various challenges since day one. Of course, we also had to ask about Pixar.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Lorcana’s Journey: Past, Present, and Future
Q: The panel focused on past, present, and future, so I wanted to start with how we got here. Two years ago, the game hadn’t come out and there wasn’t a full understanding of what you had. Now, it’s different. What is it like to be at the one after that?
Miller: It’s almost a homecoming becausethis is really where we started. We got such a great reception two years ago. It was one of those times when you really hope that it’s going to do something big. You hope it’s going to make a splash. You hope it’s going to be exciting for people, but you never really know until there’s something out there. Two years ago, I remember we had dinner at Morton’s the night before. It was that Thursday night before the show, and both Steve and I were like, “I don’t know how to feel right now,” right? I was anxious.
Warner:Cautiously optimistic.
Miller:Definitely cautiously optimistic. We’ve been in this business a long time, and it’s a very difficult market to make a big splash in. Of course, the next day, we realized that we had something very special here.
Warner: I mean, it opened up, and it was still kind of nice and calm initially. As word slowly spread about what we were doing, then yeah.
Miller: Later that day, it just got a huge crowd, and they were like, “oh my god!” Of course, the rest of the weekend was history.
Q: Was there any particular moment where you want, “Okay, we’re going to be okay?”
Miller:It still hasn’t happened for me yet.[LAUGHS]
No, I’m kidding. Well, no, because the thing is, mosttrading card gamesdon’t pass their third year, right? To me, I think year four is when I’ll be like, ‘Alright.’ Now I believe very firmly that we’re going to make it, but still. There was definitely a moment at that D23 when the lines got really packed, when we were down the hall, out the side. I was like, ‘Okay, we’ve got something that people are very excited about."
These are Disney fans too, right? This is not a gamer convention where we would have felt more comfortable at the beginning, right? To have Disney fans show up the way they did was very exciting, but we don’t want to jinx it, right?
Warner: I’m always that cautiously optimistic.
Miller: We don’t want to jinx it, right?
Warner: But at the same time, there was also a point where we were told we were going to get loaned some cast members and Disney folk to help manage the line. When that happened, it just became quite apparent that it was very well received and people were excited.
Q: Before you had this huge response, every decision you made had to be informed by what you think people might like.
Miller:One hundred percent.
Now that you know what people like and have a sense of what people like, how does that inform the decisions you make?
Miller: We have a much better idea of what people like now. For example, before we launched, we had to decide how much paper to buy, right? And like, how do you know that? As a result, whenwe first launched last August, we had some problems, but what was amazing is how our production team and our production partners really came together. I would say, November or December that year, we were back in the running. Scarcity is just one of those things, so it was exciting to really, finally get all the cards into the players’ hands, into collectors' hands, that sort of thing.
Making Lorcana
Q: In terms of choosing what characters to use and what kind of decks to lean toward, does that change at all based on before and after?
Warner: I don’t think so. We have always had the same sort of mentality in what we do with design. We’ve always wanted to create things for each category of players because there’s going to be crossover from each of them, and there’s going to be things that each of them like. We’ve always tried to come at it from different perspectives of who wants to be very competitive, who wants to make a fun deck, who wants to makea theme deck, and who’s just going to want to collect some cool things. That hasn’t changed. We follow that very closely.
Q: During the panel, the concept of “the dream killer” was brought up. I’m curious how much do you guys feel like you need to be the dream killers for fans versus, you know, if they say, ‘Oh, it would be nice to do this.’ How much do you lean into what they seemingly want versus telling them, ‘No, here’s what we think you want?’
Miller:I don’t like to tell people what we think they should want. When I say dream killer, it’s obviously pretty tongue-in-cheek, right? That refers to this point in game design where you’re very excited about your idea, but it hasn’t been really thoroughly vetted yet. You get all excited, and then I’d showed it, you know? There are several games that I would show just full game designs of, and if I show it to Steve, he would just bust them in half. He’s kind of like a surgeon, right?
He could really quickly find the problems and point to them, and I always want him to do it before the fans because that balance is what leads to longevity. It’s not about my opinion or telling them what they want. It’s just, as Steve said, different people want different things, and the nice thing about trading card games is we can make cards for different people because there are so many cards. We can have cards that are just fun for the people who like big things happening, and for the really entrenched tournament player, we have cars for them. Of course, for the deep-cut fans, we have the Atlantis cards, we’ve gotTreasure Planetcards, that sort of thing. It really comes down to not just franchise choice, but in game design, how we can make a set that is appealing to different groups for different reasons, right? That’s what it comes down to.
Q: Do you find it becomes more or less challenging with every card that you add?
Miller:More challenging
Warner:Oh, yeah, definitely more challenging. There’s just so many more interactions. I mean, with 200 cards, you’re looking at about 40,000 differentinteractions between cards. You add another 200 cards to that mix, and you’re at 160,000, and it just gets completely wild: the level of complexity that you can get into and making sure that none of that gets to be too powerful, but still trying to make sure that things are fun and exciting for whichever fan gets that card.
Q: I imagine it’s difficult to say, ‘Okay, well, we want to release a new expansion. We want people to be excited, but we also don’t want people to feel like their old cards are no longer useful in play." How do you approach that kind of thing? How does that happen?
Warner:A lot of people refer to this aspower creep, yeah. Obviously, there is a build-up in how the sets went, and there were no cards out beforehand. We’ve been very cautious about how we’ve released cards and what the power levels are so that we don’t obsolete those old cards. A lot of the time, what we’ve done is made cards that may not have been as good before that, later on, will be sleepers.
Miller:That’s one of the best things about trading card games, I think, is that you can get those cards that maybe when they came out, they were just kind of decent cards. As more cards are released, they almost wake up all of a sudden. Now these are clutch cards, and it’s just super fun because of this discovery. This exploration and discovery element, you’re never really done with.
Q: There’s Lorcana, but there’s now new introductory stuff, Gateway. It’s very rare for a TCG to have something that explains the ins and outs; a lot of people just get thrown into the deep end. It seems like you guys wanted to have something where you could learn each step and then get familiar with it. Could you talk about the advantages of that?
Miller: We are getting a lot ofDisney fans who have never played a trading card game. Our game is fairly welcoming and easy to pick up for typical TCG fans, but it’s still a different type of game than most of those types of folks have played before, right? It’s just very different. The idea of building your own deck can be kind of mind-blowing, right?
I remember one time I was on one of the Disney cruises, and I had this great table full of grandmas. They were just the sweetest, most delightful ladies, and they really wanted to learn the game so they could play with their grandkids. I’m like, ‘Okay, I am here for that.’ I am going to help you guys do that, but the first thing that happened is this one lady–I always say, “draw seven cards, that’s your opening hand”–and she immediately goes, “I’ve got four threes.” I kind of went, ‘Okay, well, that’s great, but this is a game where what you get on the table matters and your hand doesn’t matter as much."
It’s one of those things we realized through teaching the game. We’ve been doing this a long time. Steve and I, we’ve probably taught games thousands of time, but for the Disney fan, it’s just a different kind of game. We have to treat them a different way and take better care of them in some cases. Gateway is that care, right? You start out with 30-card decks, and it’s three Actions and twenty-sevenCharacters, right? All with very simple abilities. As you go, you open these packs, and you unlock these packs that add new things to them. You don’t have to learn about Items or Songs right off the bat. You fold those in as you play, so you build on that concept.
It’s something I haven’t seen a lot of in this space. It’s kind of an unknown. We did some consumer testing, and we’re continuing to get feedback on it. We’re hoping this really helps people get into the game and ease them into it. If you’re an existing trading card gamer, then single-player decks are the best way to start, right? If you already know TCGs and you’ve played some, then I totally recommend the single-player decks. You just pull it off the shelf, shuffle up, and learn how to play. But Gateway is great if you’ve never played a TCG, and it’s also great if you have played but you have friends or family who haven’t. It’s a great tool for that.
Lorcana, Pixar, and Beyond
Q: Of course, I have to ask. You teased Pixar. Fans have been wanting it for a while now, but what is it like saying, “Okay, we’re going to actually extend beyond core Disney?”
Miller:I think Pixar is such a wonderful collection of stories and characters, and I think that the wonder and whimsy is there, right? I think that that meshes so well with the Disney feature animated films, the shorts like Mickey and Friends. You know, it feels like, it feels like it could exist in theworld of Lorcana, right? So that was a natural thing.
What it feels like, however, is when you’re buying someone a gift and you can’t wait for them to open it. That’s what it feels like, right? You’re excited for them, you know, or you feel very strongly that they’re going to like it, and you can’t wait for them to open it and start.
Q: How long ago did these conversations start?
Miller:Long ago on a dewy November morn[LAUGHS]
I don’t know. It was a while back, yeah, and Pixar is just an amazing group of creatives. It was so neat to meet with them, talk to them, and go down to the Pixar Studios. That was an amazing experience. Yeah, it was wonderful. They’re wonderful people, and I’m really excited that they’re going to be part of Lorcana.
Q: What are your favorite Pixar movies?
Miller:Coco. I love Coco. It’s a great film. It’s beautiful. It’s wonderful. It’s about family. It made me want to celebrate Dia de los Muertos to really honor family. In my home, actually, we have my wife’s great-grandmother’s apron. This is an ancient apron. It’s this wonderful thing, we have it in our home in a frame, and it’s kind of like saying good morning to her every morning when I walk my son down from waking up. You know, it’s that kind of thing. I just love it; it’s just a wonderful film.
Warner:Wall-Eis mine. I just really enjoy it. It’s weird. There’s so much done by the characters in the way that they act and in their facial features. There’s very little dialog, but you still get such a great immersive story about it all.
Miller: Pixar is the master of that. I think they just like the shorts that they do, and some of them have no dialog at all, right? But they convey so much, like thefirst five minutes of Upthat has you crying. It’s just wonderful, and it’s such an exciting part of our job to start working with them.
Q: During the panel, there was a lot of conversation about the stories players craft by playing. Does it ever cross your mind to expand these stories beyond a TCG?
Miller:We call that a Bruno question, andwe don’t talk about Bruno, okay? Yeah, we don’t talk about Bruno, unfortunately, but we are very proud of the world we’ve created. I think it’s one of the things that was super important from the very beginning, because without the world of Lorcana, it’s a bunch of characters from a bunch of franchises in a deck, right?
That’s not good enough. It’s not good enough for our players. It’s not good enough for Disney, it’s not good enough for Ravensburger, right? So that was actually the first work we did. We didn’t do any game design. It was all world-building because we wanted this world where it made sense as to why you have three Mickeys out, for example, or why you have a giant Tinker Bell, like, why? How does that work?
That was very important to us, so we’re super proud. We have an amazing team of narrative designers and writers. We have a novelist who has something like 16 novels published. You know, we just got a great team here, we’re super proud of it, and we’re excited for the fans to see where it goes.
[END]
Disney Lorcana
As an Illumineer, you’ll wield six magical inks to summon glimmers of Disney characters. Glimmers can appear as familiar friends or in fantastically reimagined forms. Recruit glimmers to your team as you travel through the realm of Lorcana.
