Rave🌟nsburger has taken a different approach to Ursula’s Return’s reveal season from anything we’ve seen before. For the first three expansions, there was a steady trickle of near-daily card reveals throughout the two months leading up to the new Lorcana exp🃏ansion.
Ursula’s Return launches in exactly one month, and so far we've only seen 21 cards, 17 of which were shown off during the Lorecast stream where the expansion was first revealed. As someone who covers Lorcana professionally, I prefer a more condensed, concentrated reveal season, and I think it’s better for hype-building overall. But man, I was simply ravenous for some card reveals.
The community seems to share my desperation too. This week, during an episode of the This Week In Ink live podcast, hosts Brandon () and Jonti () revealed Record Player, a new Amber item card, and it’s been the talk of the town. I don’t blame them, and in fact, I want in. There’s so little theory-crafting to be done with the ꩵrapidly upcoming set, so let’s overanalyze a fairly niche common item card that probably won’t ever see play. Or will it?
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Record Player is a two-cost Amber iཧtem with two abilities. Look At This! lets you give a chosen character -2 Strength until the start of your next turn whenever you play a song, and Hit Parade makes your characters named Stitch count as having +1 cost to sing songs.
Amber is half of the Steelsong deck and Singer is quite a powerful ability, so the primary uses for this should be self-evident. But let’s talk about the actual use cases for this carꦕd.
Between the two abilities, Look At This! has a lot mꦓore general use. It’s a static ability, which means you can play as many songs as you like during your turn and this item will repeatedly trigger, letting you spread -2 Strength modifiers across the board or stack them on a strong target. We’ve seen similar abilities in Amber with cards like Patch, Intimidating Pup; which sees no play, and Kida, Protector of Atlantis; which saw some early Inklands experimentation, but has not yet found a home in a meta deck.
The benefit of Record Player is that it offers a semi-permanent, repeatable ability that triggers every time you do something you already want to do anyway. An Aggro Amber/Steel deck, which is currently in an experimental phase, could get use o💛ut of thisꦍ to protect its low Willpower characters like Piglet, Pooh Pirate Captain, if the two-cost tempo loss doesn’t slow it down too much. That’s always a concern in Aggro.
There are other possibilities. Strength decreases synergize well with abilities that care about the strength of a character. With a Record Player, a song can put all but 25 characters (not including characters with Ward) in range of Madam Medusa, The Boss’s ability to be banished. Same goes for Ratigan, Very Large Mouse; and even Kit Cloudkicker, Tough Guy can get some benefit. Amber/Ruby and Amber/Emerald are not the most popular ink combinations right now, but there&rsไquo;s potential here.
The second ability, Hit Parade, is easy to dismiss. It effectively gives Stitch cards Singer with a value of one higher than whatever their actual cost is, but because Singer is a flat value rather than a stacking buff like Resist (meaning it has to specify an actual number rather than just “+1”), the Record Player has to be worded in such a way that it increases the cost of Stitch cards. Th💮is might be the most significant part of the entire ability.
This is the first ability 😼that changes the c꧙ost of a card, even if only for a specific purpose. Lantern and Doc, Leader of the Seven Dwarfs allow you to pay one less for your next character, but they don’t actually change the cost of a card the way Record Player does.
This opens a teeny, tiny crack in the door for other cost-adjusting abilities. Maybe we could have a character like Mother Go๊thel, Selfish Manipulator that, when exerted, makes your opponent’s characters cost one more. And maybe, just maybe, you could have an ability that lowers the cost of your opponent’s characters after they’re played so thꦚat they won’t be able to challenge Gantu, Galactic Federation Captain. It’s happening Gantu, your time is nigh.
It’s unlikely you’ll get any 🎶value from Hit Parade, at least with the Stitch cards we have right now. This does let both Stitch, Rock Star and Stitch, Abomination sing Be Prepared, but that would be a very strange line to play. The same with Stitch, Little Rocket, who could sing the wide variety of three-cost songs in the game, assuming he isn’t banished while rushing 🍌in to challenge the turn he’s played, which is the whole point of him.
An🐽d with that, we’ve taken the deepest dive into a fringe common item card anyone has ever taken. As a Stitch fan, I love the flavor of Record Player, and I’m always excited to see abilities that add new concepts to Lorcana. Hopefully by this ti🎀me next week we’ll have a big pile of new card reveals to obsess over. Please, we’re begging for it.
