Disney Lorcana – Into the Inklands Review

With the upcoming big box store launch of Disney Lorcana: Into the Inklands, I wanted to quickly jot down a few thoughts about the latest release for the Trading Card Game. Things get a big change with Into the Inklands with the release of locations, and I think it’s a really good thing for the game. Let’s dive in and chat about whether this release is worth picking up and adding to your decks!

The big change this time around is the inclusion of Locations. Locations can provide Lore at the start of each turn, and also at times provide different buffs to your characters if they are at a specific location. Each location has an Ink Cost associated with moving a character to that location.

The inclusion of Locations not only provides ongoing Lore if the locations are not banished from play, but they also provide different buffs and abilities. Some of these are minor, albeit interesting, such as the ability to put banished characters from a location straight into your Inkwell. Others, however, are much more interesting, and allow players to build out really cool decks.

One of the more difficult keywords to deal with in Disney Lorcana is the Evasive ability. Evasive characters can only be challenged by other evasive characters, which makes them hard to kill. Even harder yet if you have no Evasive characters in your deck. Enter locations, some of which give characters at the location the Evasive trait. There is even a location that gives both Ward AND Evasive – that’s pretty darn good.

I also found this chapters items and songs much more interesting than those from the past. There are more ways to draw cards now, and ways to score Lore whenever you do draw cards. Putting these into your deck and working them into the other cards you are looking to play is a great way of creating some secondary Lore for yourself and potentially winning the game. It also makes building decks just a bit easier, as you now can setup a few different ways to win, as opposed to waiting for that one perfect combo to materialize in your hand.

As always, the art on these new set of cards is phenomenal, and again I will argue that Disney Lorcana is the most collectible trading card game currently available. We recently took Star Wars: Unlimited for a spin, and while the game is really good, I don’t have a desire to collect and showoff the cards being released. With Disney Lorcana, I still feel like I’m getting a great game, with a great collectible feel to it. It’s the best of both worlds and one of the reasons the game is so hot right now.

Although not provided by Ravensburger for review, I was able to pick up one of the Trove’s for this release. The Trove’s have changed just a bit, and are much more alike to Pokemon Elite Trainer Boxes. Trove’s now come with a Lore dial for keeping track of lore, card separators by Ink type, and dice to use as damage on characters. There was as light increase in the MSRP of these boxes, but they are definitely worth the price in our opinion!

Overall, we are really happy with Into the Inklands, and cannot wait to get more packs and hopefully pull more outstanding cards!