I watched a tremendous number of Lorcana tournaments over the weekend to see how the new meta is shaping up, a๊nd I was overwhelmingly pleased with the current state of the game. While we’re still early in the season, it’s clear that Into the Inklands has given the game a good shakeup, allowing new deck archetypes and color combinations to rise to a competitive level, giving 🌠‘ol Ruby/Amethyst some stiff competition.
More decks than ever had strong showings this weekend. Various local and online events featured Ruby/Amethyst Control,🦄 Amber/Ruby Mufasa, Emerald/Amethyst, Amethyst/Steel Jafar, Ruby/Steel Pirate, Steel Song, Blue Steel,𒉰 and Emerald/Steel among the top cut. Deck variety is at an all-time peak right now, which is exactly what you hope to see in a diverse and healthy meta, and I’m excited to see how the competitive landscape continues to develop over the next few months.
If there’s anything to be concerned about at this point, it’s the power of the coin flip. While watching events on Twitch this weekend, I couldn’t🍎 help but notice how often the winner of the match also won the initial coin flip. In Thea Booysen’s $1600 The Pack event, almost every winner of every match in the Top 16 won the coin flip. Jan Moy, who came in second in the tournament playing a Blue Steel deck, Twitter. When going fir๊st, Moy won 14 out of 15 games.
The p♏layer going first will have their first-played character ready to quest sooner than their opponent, an♑d will typically be able to curve out the next highest-cost card first. To try and balance this out, the first player doesn’t draw a card on their first turn.
There’s undoubtedly an advantage to being on th🧜e play in Lorcana, but one event, or even one whole weekend of events, is not enough data to show that that advantage is statistically significant enough to be a problem. In fact, brand manager and co-designer Ryan Miller that the coin-flip advantage isn’t as dire as it may seem:
“It’s definitely something we’ve had our eye on. Our estimates are closer to 53 percent. It’s never great to feel like the game came up to a coin toss or something like that. I don’t think that’s the case in Lorcana. Obviously if there’s anything higher than 50 percent then there’s something going on there, but it’s something we have our eye on.”
That interview took place before the launch o🍨f Into the Inklands, so if his estimates include data from the new set, it would have only come from internal testing. That being said, 53 percent may be accurate, even if tournament results look quite a bit different. Like any competitive game, Lorcana looks a lot different at the highest level than it d💧oes at a random weekday event at your local game store, but this number is even lower than estimates of Magic: The Gathering’s first-turn advantage, which is usually put between 55 and 60 percent.
When it comes to players who are at the top of their game, who play every turn precisely, who have perfect reads on their opponents, you can imagine that the coin-flip advantage would be more 💦pronounced. In other words, this might be a big problem for professionals that won’t actually affectꦚ the average player at all.
Lorcana's Quality Control Issues Are Completely Out Of Control
There are numerous printing and packing issues in Lorcana's new expansion, some recurring from past sets an♉dꦡ some new ones for Into the Inklands.
A lot of the panic surrounding the coin flip stems from Pixelborn data, where the coin flip winner goes on to win the match 60 percent of the time among top 100 players. That variance drops to 56 percent if only one player is top-100, and goes down to 53 percent across all games. Pixelborn’s data supports the argument that, even if there is a coin-flip problem, it’s only a problem for the top players who hardly ever make mist�꧒�akes.
Still, the competitive scene is a core pillar of any card game, and professional players have a big impact on how the game is perceived, especially now that every pro is also likely a content creator, through their audience. Whether or not it's a problem in the vast majority of actual Lorcana games being played won’t matter as long as there’s a perception that it’s a problem, and that will trickle down from top players.
And they’re saying it. Zefa, a prominent deck builder and top Pixelborn player, . They looked at the next match, Michael Ferrante on Ruby/Amethyst vs. Jan Moy on Blue Steel, and predicted♐ that whoever won the coin flip would win the match. “Throughout my testing with Sky, whoever wins the coin flip wins. When I was on the play, I won, when he was on the play. he won. We would alternate games and I would just win every other game and he would win every other game. All that matters in this matchup is the coin flip.” As we already know, Jan Moy won the coin flip and won the match. Zefa was only referring to that specific matchup, but when it came to the other final four game, a Ruby/Amethyst deck vs. a Steelsong deck, Zefa also predicted the coin flip would predict the winner, and he was right.
If this becomes a big enough issue for competitive players, Ravensburger may need to do something. Other card games have faced the same issue and found solutions. In Hearthstone, the second player starts with a coin they can use to get one extra mana (ink𝔍 in Lorcana) during one turn. In 2020, Pokemon created a new rule that prevents the player going first from using any Supporter cards. New rules could help Lorcana too if the coin-flip advantage is deemed to be too great, but this is also a problem that could be solved through card design.
Right now, there isn’t a deck that prefers going second. A Challenge-focused deck could be one solution, and we’ve already seen some tools for that archetype in Ruby with Sumerian Talisman, Jolly Roger, and Shere Khan, but some things would have to change significantly before we see a deck that gets stronger going second. Locations have helped make characters mꦫore impactful when fighting for board control, so this could be the easiest path to making games more fair no matter who go🐈es first.
