Grip.Cards

Lorcana’s Magic Bones, Showing Through

From youtube.com

To my earlier point: the bones are similar enough that existing MtG experts can just apply their skills and be kind of instantly really good.

Last Lorcana link for a while, mostly prompted by MtG content creators like Rebell and LoadingReadyRun taking a stab at it today, though I may return to it briefly as a comparison point.

Lorcana's First Chapter reprints not hitting store shelves until 2024

From dotesports.com

Disney responded to the shortage of products available on Aug. 31, announcing booster products that should trickle in throughout Sept. and Oct. A reprint of The First Chapter is also taking place, with products slated to drop during the first quarter of 2024, shortly after the release of The Second Chapter in Dec.

Last bit of banging the Lorcana drum here, and moving soon off of the thing, but… wow. Wow. What a fucking mess.

Flesh and Blood's Round the Table: TCC × LSS

From fabtcg.com

I don't usually cover product launches because that's most, if not all, of the xCG coverage you can get from literally every interested site. Making an exception for this one, though, as I've been surprised at how much I'm liking the idea of a ready-in-box symmetrical multiplayer experience as an entry point (and possibly even stopping point!) for games, and this one is designed in collaboration with The Professor from Tolaria Community College, whose passion and intense care never fails to reflect in his output.

This is notable as being the first product support LSS has produced for Ultimate Pit Fight — no cards were tailored for multiplayer play in FAB prior to this point. This was a particular sticking point because multiplayer formats reward social interaction, but interactions in UPF are usually limited to players to your left and right; two out of the four heroes in the package both have well thought-out carve-outs that circumvent this restriction.

Not Even The Game We Deserve

This is usually a linkblog, meaning that the article just links to an external site in the header. However, this article does not: when I saw gamesradar+ publish this terrible piece about how Lorcana is ‘the card game we need right now’, I wanted to make sure you understood I am not endorsing this article at all.

It did stop me in my tracks, nonetheless.

This article is emblematic of the kind of attention extensible card games get as an object of design. Thousands of hours of BGG-board-style thought are put into play-and-store tabletop games that do not require time investment beforehand, but so, so little is spent on xCGs other than the common refrain of treating them like a known quantity because we’ve all had a brush with the people who play any of the Big Three and we know something in passing about them.

This article, for instance, acritically repeats that this game is ‘good for beginners’ without interrogating that assertion for one second. In fact, it catches itself not knowing how to couch the fact that this game has second-order, not-readable-on-the-board stuff that is not simple! (It does so with the other regular thought-stopping idea, ‘easy to learn hard to master’, that also gets repeated uncritically from time to time.)

What parts of a game are easy to learn?

What parts of a game are necessary to understand but not available to learn?

What is the learning curve to mastering? Has it been engineered to be kind to a beginner, or not? In what concrete way?

That’s why I started this linkblog — because these questions are just not asked and I wanted to at least put them into the world, even as I do not have immediate or satisfying answers to them.