Lorcana’s Missing Archetypes

At a large event recently someone turned and asked me “so what are deck archetypes in Lorcana?”

While explaining them and their rough gameplans and then I found myself with a problem. Normally this list ends with ‘Control’ decks and ‘Ramp’ decks, but in Lorcana it feels like there’s a huge amount of overlap and no pure version of either seems to exist right now.

It feels like two playstyles have merged, leaving us missing a true version of either

Coming from a Magic The Gathering background I’m used to seeing Green or GreenBlue decks fuel their resources into mana sources for several turns, grabbing as many land cards to put into play as they can manage before turning their attention to pouring that mana into huge swings with massive dinosaurs or explosive spells. Control decks on the other hand tended to have a Blue, Black, White or even Red flavour — anything but green. Ramping effects are nowhere to be found and instead hand disruption, removal and ‘permission’ spells were king.

In the post-rotation meta of Lorcana it seems that if you’re playing a grindy, late game deck with removal and card advantage you’re almost certainly playing the full package of all of the best ramp cards, which to me feels completely at odds with itself.

Traditionally a control deck is defined by it’s ability to:

• maintain tempo parity (similar clock on their ability to end the game)
• draw extra cards to gain a resource advantage
• by having the property of inevitability (Should a game go long enough, they will win)

For such a heavy ramp package to be present in control decks that uses up our ability to put out early tempo, we need to explore the thesis that one of the assumptions we’ve made must be incorrect within the context of Lorcana;

• Early interaction is required to maintain tempo parity
• Ramp decks have deckbuilding constraints at odds with control
• Early interaction is more effective than alternatives
• Control decks have inevitability without ramp

Early Interaction & Tempo Parity

For control decks to be playing interaction early over ramp (investment) cards, there must be sufficient pressure to do so. This pressure can present itself in several ways;

• Threats that can end the game quickly (Mono-Red can often end the game by turn 4)
• Threats which if left unanswered become less efficient to interact with (such as no longer being targetable by less-than-x-strength spells)
• Stability requires several turns to achieve (access to sweepers etc)

Here we start to see part of the picture, as even the more aggressive decks within Lorcana’s metagame aren’t likely to threaten to close out the game by turn three or four.

Aggressive decks in Magic also tend to feature creatures with high strength, as that’s how they deal the damage to win the game, meaning they will often slowly drain the defending player’s supply of blocking creatures. In Lorcana the opposite play pattern is often present, with aggressive creatures simply being one-sided fodder and unable to pressure that element of the opponent’s resources.

With rotation, cards like brawl are out the window

It’s also worth talking about how rotation has changed the nature of removal. Cards like Brawl, Let The Storm Rage On and Sisu are no longer in the core constructed format and without suitable low-cost interaction, players are forced to use more costly cards to keep control of the aggressive decks.

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Typically, there is a risk-reward dynamic between investing in additional resources (by ramping) and not having parity of board presence or threat. In Lorcana, cards like PrincePhillip, Clarabelle, UnderTheSea can quickly stabilise that parity, turning your opponent’s early investment into board state into a liability.

The Deckbuilding and Play Cost of Ramp

Ramp often requires you to lose a card (play a land) in Lorcana that’s often not even true with sail and cindy and in fact sometimes lifts the restrictions on inkability, giving you more ‘lands’ than non-ramp decks! Some cards that accelerate a player’s ability to play cards like Lantern or Willow give a pure discount, bypassing the land/ink requirement entirely.

This funky little guy lets you get an extra land into play from your hand on turn 1

Magic however does anchor it’s balance around the ability to get extra lands or mana-producing creatures into play as early as turn one, making it cheaper mana wise if not more expensive with regards to the cards being spent from hand to do so.

Ramp decks typically require lots of ramp effects, lots of land to fuel those effects and a few payoffs. Anything that doesn’t feed into that gameplan is going to make the deck inconsistent. Without the concept of land, we can instead keep control cards in the deck and simply ink them as needed, as we don’t need to keep a second resource in the deck to fuel our ramp cards. This makes it far easier to combine the two archetypes as they put much less pressure on the deckbuilding requirements.

Costing of interaction

For a control style strategy to run early interaction, it needs to be more effective at achieving the deck’s goals than other cards. We’ve looked at how ramp is surprisingly efficient, but the other side of the coin is how removal is fairly inefficient right now.

Aside from characters, interaction is often more expensive in Lorcana than Magic as a baseline. The equivalent of classic staples such as Wrath or Murder have a much higher printed cost and aren’t able to be played until later turns. Early removal cards also don’t tend to do much beyond sprinkling damage around the board — which would be fine if aggressive strategies didn’t lean so heavily on willpower as they don’t need strength the way aggressive magic strategies do.

The equivalent effects in Lorcana from Magic are often almost twice as expensive

As a result control players are needing to invest in ramp to be able to enact their gameplan in time. Weaker interaction just isn’t cutting it and so they have to adopt this greedy control style where they can get to their larger, more efficient removal cards.

Part of this costing likely comes from the lack of colour-specific mana being required, so getting to a given amount of mana is more consistent in Lorcana than getting to double white or double black would be in a game of Magic.

We’re starting to see experiments with slightly more conditional removal or removal with flexible costs (Firefly Swarm and Twin Shot) that allow cards to act as early interaction that still has value into the later turns, but it doesn’t seem to quite be enough to justify using over the more expensive alternatives.

What about ramp decks?

Ramp decks are often a huge fan favourite, spend a few turns setting up and then unleash huge powerful cards with almost unmanageable stats that will bury your opponent!

While Lorcana has printed a large swathe of inkwell-growing effects (about 5% of all cards printed, compared to magic’s 2–3%) only a very small handful actually get played. In fact, three of the most popular (Let It Go, Into The Unknown and Hades Infernal Schemer) ramp your opponent not you!

three of these eleven popular ramp cards ramp the opponent, not you

While decks playing these cards might spend one or two cards & turns ramping up their inkwell, but that isn’t the majority of their gameplan — there’s no monsterous 10-cost card they’re hoping to slam down to warp the game.

In fact when we look at the most expensive cards that see play, they fall into a few categories that really start to tell the story of control across the sets in Lorcana.

There are cards that get played for their full cost in control-ramp strategies like Be Prepared, Sisu, and Tamatoa.

There are cards also played in control-ramp strategies but for discounted shift costs (so they’re not really top end cards) like Prince Phillip and Clarabelle.

Last but not least, cards that are so heavily discounted they’re actually typically only 2–3 ink when they get played, or even sung for free like Tramp, Chernabog or Under The Sea.

We don’t see cards get played purely with the goal of ramping to them and winning by virtue of them hitting the board outside of control strategies. The powerful payoff cards just don’t seem to be there yet. Maybe they need to be costed even more aggressively, with how consistent the ability to ink every turn is compared to similar games 8–10 ink as a cost just might not be high enough to go out of your way for.

There are cards out there like Te Ka — Elemental Terror which might fit this kind of playstyle perfectly, but it’s been restricted to only the colours that have no access to ramp whatsoever.

Could Set 13 open the door?

With Set 13, Attack Of The Vine, around the corner there’s an opportunity for new control cards to enter the scene and change up how the game is played. Cheaper or more cost efficient removal might allow for a more oppressive gameplan to return or more aggressively questing characters may necessitate it, punishing players who try to bridge the two archetypes as they do now.

Tipo and Sail The Azurite Sea are rotating out, which is a big blow to ramp decks, but with new cards coming in we might just get the fuel we need to get up to those high ink costs and we can always hope for some fun new expensive toys at the top end to really bring the hammer down once we’ve ramped up.

I’m looking forward to seeing how archetypes change up in the future, there’s plenty more Lorcana to play.