Disney Lorcana embraces the winter with Winterspell, a new set that adds an intriguing new keyword and several new characters from Disney’s vast character portfolio. Winterspell isn’t an overly flashy set, but it has one of the most cohesive visuals seen in a set so far. It also attempts to fix a longstanding issue with the game by giving the player going second a chance to retake the tempo advantage. Overall, Winterspell is a great addition to the Lorcana portfolio, with enough flashy cards to make the set feel memorable without overwhelming the metagame.
The Disney-themed card game survived its recent soft reset last year, with the first year’s worth of cards cycled out of competitive play. While there are less sets now available for competitive use, it’s offset by the recent set Fabled. That set added a host of reprinted cards back into the fold. With the meta now reset, designers had two choices. They could return to the proverbial well (an irony perhaps, given the last set was literally named Whispers in the Well). Or they could attempt to innovate with new mechanics and gameplay options. With Winterspell, the designers chose to balance both.
Winterspell, as its name suggests, has an overarching winter theme to the game. The storyline for the set is that an Elsa Glimmer unleashed an inadvertent flurry of cold into the world of the game, pushing its various characters into a wintery wonderland. Almost every single card in the set features a wintery theme, either with characters frolicking in the snow or going about their usual antics with the snow as a backdrop. Disney does have a handful of shows/movies set during the wintertime (Mickey’s Christmas Carol notably makes an appearance in this set). However, the real joy of Winterspell comes from seeing characters like Moana or Aladdin in a snowy setting.
If you’re a Disney fan, there’s a special kind of excitement from seeing the characters you love in a new setting. While previous Lorcana sets have focused on new Glimmers transformed by magic, Winterspell opts for a more subtle “fish out of water” setting. Players will get to see Stitch play with snowballs or Tiana bundled up in a warm outfit. The whole set feels a bit like one of those Christmas-themed Disney books you’d find on your grandma’s bookshelves set aside for the kids. It honestly feels like a bit of a missed opportunity that this set wasn’t released just before the holiday season, simply because of the very strong winter theme aside.
Winterspell introduces three new sets of characters to Lorcana. Darkwing Duck is probably the headliner, continuing a growing trend of 1990s cartoon characters joining the Lorcana universe. Like Gargoyles, there’s plenty of room for Lorcana to build up the Darkwing Duck IP within the game. Darkwing and some of his friends and foes receive a spotlight in the set. But they obviously kept some meat on the bone so that more characters (mostly villains) can appear in future sets.
Another new movie introduced to Lorcana in Winterspell is Pocahontas. She’s the last of the Disney princesses to be introduced to Lorcana, mirroring how the character is often overlooked among the slate of Disney heroines. Pocahontas comes with a more complicated real world history than Ariel or Moana. Lorcana wisely chooses to treat Pocahontas with a level of careful respect. One of the most impactful cards of the set – Grandmother Willow – Ancient Advisor – comes from Pocahontas.
This card allows players to passively reduce the cost of one character played per turn by 1 ink, adding a massive accelerant to Amber. Fans are already rumbling about the outsized impact of Grandmother Willow, marking the latest example of a minor character making a major splash in the game. Notable absences from Pocahontas include Meeko and Flik, so there’s definitely room for Pocahontas to grow within the game in the future.
Outside of the new characters and the new theme, Winterspell also attempts to fix one of the greatest flaws of Disney Lorcana. The game’s rules gives an inherent advantage to whoever goes first, with players able to play ink and put a character out immediately at the start of the game. If the first player has the right 1-Ink cost card, they have an immense tempo advantage. Some stats from 2024 indicate that the player who goes first wins 60% of the time, a massive advantage within the game.
Winterspell attempts to correct this with the new Underdog keyword. Players who go second can play a 2-Ink cost card with the Underdog keyword for one less Ink. There’s only a few Underdog cards in the set. But they often have secondary keywords like Singer or Evasive that make them very formidable in the early game. Being able to Sing for 3 on the second turn of the game is a powerful ability, as is pulling out a character with 2 lore that early in the game.
While Underdog cards aren’t too overwhelming in Winterspell, I think they have the potential to be a deck-defining trait in the game. Of course, Underdog cards have an incredibly niche usage (after all, a player will only benefit from Underdog 50% of the time, and even then they’ll need to have a Underdog card in their hand on the first turn) and it’s still too early to say whether pulling out a marginally more powerful card on Turn 1 offsets the first player’s ability to score first and dictate the pace of a game. Still, this is Lorcana’s first notable attempt to really combat its Turn 1 problem and I’m curious to see how the fanbase adapts to the new keyword.
Overall, there’s a lot to like about Winterspell. It has meta-relavancy via its new keyword, introduces some new characters to the game, and features the most cohesive theme we’ve ever seen in a Lorcana set. I know that Disney Lorcana likes to keep up with its metaplot, but I’d love to see more sets fully embrace a theme the way that Winterspell has rather than try to balance making IP-pleasing cards and trying to worldbuild simultaneously. The Disney characters are strong enough that Lorcana can put the characters in new situations without sacrificing any joy or recognizance. Newcomers and veterans will have a ton of fun cracking open packs of Winterspell.
Winterspell‘s pre-release is on February 13 and it will be available everywhere on February 20.