Posted in: Card Games, Collectibles, D23, Disney Lorcana, Games, Tabletop | Tagged: disney lorcana, Ravensburger

Disney Lorcana D23 Interview: Growing The Lorcana Challenge

D23 was this past weekend and we got to enter the Disney Lorcana Booth and talk to their incredible team about the hit Trading Card Game

This past weekend, D23 delivered a thrilling array of reveals from all of Disney's mighty franchises. Bleeding Cool's Editor-in-Chief, Kaitlyn Booth, embraced the event's energetic atmosphere and even got some up-close interviews. We are continuing our discussion with the Disney Lorcana TRading card game from Ravensburger with Ryan Miller, Brand Designer, and Steve Warner, Lead Game Designer and Co-Designer. In May 2024, Disney Lorcana announced the new Lorcana Challenge, a new competitive circuit for illumineers to test their skills against other fans and the possibility to obtain some pretty impressive prizes. We got to find out about how the team does game balancing and tackling these new circuits, which are selling out spots fast.

You guys have a massive variety of different kinds of players. You have kids were very young, we're barely getting going and then you have people who are playing like Magic the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Pokémon for years, years and years. How do you keep the game balanced when you have such a wide variety?

Steve: It's a lot of testing, a lot of practicing. We have a great development team that works really hard on making sure that the cards are fun and fair and that there are all sorts of options, we have a great design team to kind of back him up with that, too, but whenever things need to change and get better.

So, the Disney Lorcana Challenges are selling out like crazy; I think it was told to me that places like  Vegas sold out in minutes. Is there a plan to try an accommodate and get it bigger?

Ryan: "On 100%. The thing is like, really, what we don't want to do is bite off more than we can chew. So originally, but we lost the challenge of 512 was the cap, and then literally within a day, we quickly realized that was not enough. No, we went up to 2000, and we kind of stopped there because there are two big considerations. I think one is just a venue, finally given you that's bigger than that. But I think the other guests, as an organization, are still working on building up our kind of calm and competencies in that area. So we don't want to overdo it."

"We want to deliver the best experience we can provide because those folks who are spending their time and money on what we're doing, and we owe it to them. So what we don't want to do is go to 4,000 or to 10,000 and then we have this kind of subpar experience because of that. We want to build up to that, and so I think next season, we'll see some changes for the season after, but for now, we just want to be able to make sure that we can handle the size that we have, and in the future, we're going to get it right. We're going to iterate to get it right."

Are you looking to like the way Magic does their stuff and like looking at other card games and how they do it?

Ryan: "I mean, we would be silly not to you; Steve and I come from Wizards of the Coast like we came up. No, I mean that's how we met really was in retail at Wizards of the Coast and then came through R and D."

Steven: "Yeah, I was there for 16 years."

Ryan: "I was not there that long, but I was there for 10 years."

Steve: "Yeah we keep track of like all the games out there. We have a lot of our play teasers play multiple games, so it's always good to kind of have those strategies and understand the nuances of all sorts of games, even more games of things that can help us with our designs and with our development."

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