Lorcana Sealed Release Event

I was lucky enough to be able to attend a starter deck+ release event at a local game store near me. Players were given a random starter deck plus two additional booster packs to build their decks. No color restrictions, so any card you opened was fair game! After completing the 3 rounds of play, each player also received an extra booster pack to take home and a promo card (Tinkerbell Tiny Tactician).

I played all 3 rounds and had a blast, so today I will be sharing my experience with the event! I will go over my starter deck, my pulls from the extra boosters, and the games I played. Overall the tournament went well but ran pretty long, as the 50 minute round limits were not adhered to very strongly. But it was a casual event, with a good amount of new TCG players, parents with kids, and older Disney fans, so I was totally fine with things running a bit slow. With that, let's get into it!

The Deck

As decks were being passed out, I received the sapphire/steel starter, while the guy across from me got the amber/amethyst starter. They had said earlier that we were allowed to trade decks before opening them, so I asked the guy if he'd be willing to swap and he was happy to! My reason for wanting the amber/amethyst deck was simple: 4th copy of Mickey Mouse Wayward Sorcerer. Broom control baby! I also view the amber/amethyst starter as the strongest of the 3, but if I'm totally honest I wasn't thinking about that at all. I just wanted that Mickey!

My loot to work with!

So what did I get from the packs? Overall I would say I had average pulls. No huge hits, but some decent cards to work with. Highlights included a foil Dr. Facilier Agent Provocateur, Genie On the Job, Hades King of Olympus, and a foil Lilo Making a Wish.

All my rare and above pulls. Two super rares in three packs is decent!

While I did pull some other decent pieces like Mickey Mouse Artful Rogue and Ursula's Shell Necklace, they didn't really fit with my other cards and thus didn't make it into my deck. I did pull a single copy of Cheshire Cat Not All There (more on him later) and a few other decent commons and uncommons, so I was happy going into deck building.

I once again started by removing all the bad cards from the starter deck and then taking out a few of the vanilla characters and replacing them with some of the better characters I pulled. What I settled on was a bit of a mishmash of different styles, but it could best be described as a balanced tempo deck. I had a pretty solid ink curve and some good board power with 2x Facilier, Genie, Mickey + Brooms, and Cheshire Cat. I also had a decent amount of lore batteries but unfortunately no Simba Protective Cub to protect them (namely Lilo). I took out all the amber songs and most of the items and actions, along with some vanilla characters. I did put Hades King of Olympus in the deck for fun since he's a cool card, and he technically has a shift target! But I wasn't building any kind of strategy around him, so he was mostly just hanging out.

With that though, let's talk about the games! Like I said, it was a 3 round event with best-of-three matches in each round (which I believe is the standard way to play in OP for Lorcana).

The Games

Round 1 paired me with a gentleman who received the sapphire/steel starter deck. I would describe his deck roughly as a ramp deck focusing on getting his big threats like Mufasa King of the Pride Lands and Te Ka Heartless onto the field. He told me he had watched a lot of videos and read through the rules but had never played before, so I was happy to remind him of triggers and rules as we played.

Game 1 was a case of me going wide on the board and building up to a Dr. Facilier Agent Provocateur in the mid game while he worked on his ramp. Ultimately I won comfortably as he couldn't get any characters to stick on the field, and my ability to bring back anything he challenged proved too much to overcome. I think it was somewhere around 20-6 in lore, but I didn't note that after the game.

Game 2 was very close and came down to the last turn. I once again went wide early, but this time my opponent drew into some steel removal and had a really good early ramp. The mid game saw me with a lot of small characters on the board against his Mufasa and Tinker Bell Most Helpful. I was, however, able to stick a Mickey Mouse Wayward Sorcerer and a couple Brooms, so I could keep questing without fear and force him to deal with them. At the end of the game, he finished his turn at 18 lore to my 11 but I had just enough characters on the field to grab that 9 lore to end it in what was my tightest finish of the day. Had I not ended it that turn, he would have won at the start of his turn. He had multiple big characters that I just didn't have answers for, but he mostly quested with them, which allowed me to establish a lot of smaller characters to run up the lore count. Overall a very fun game and a very nice opponent!

Round 2 I was paired against a gal who also had the sapphire/steel starter. She was also playing ramp (and also funnily enough happened to pull Te Ka Heartless just like my last opponent) but she also had a lot more top-end threats and Scepter of Arendelle (one of my favorite cards in the game). She said she had played at GenCon and had several constructed decks with proxies, so she was a more experienced player than me on the tabletop. Hopefully my Pixelborn experience came through!

Game 1 was the Cheshire Cat game. Cheshire Cat Not All There, as I've said before, is a fantastic card. Two lore for 3 ink plus a 1 for 1 trade ability lets him exert so much pressure on the field. The game centered around me questing early and often while playing characters on curve and my opponent ramping into some really big characters. The issue with that for my opponent was that only playing big characters on the field resulted in her not wanting to challenge them into Cheshire Cat and go 1 for 1, so I was able to keep questing every round. Eventually she didn't have a choice and sacrificed one of her big characters into the mighty cat, but it ended up being too late. Solid win.

Game 2 was a closer game, but again Cheshire Cat proved quite the thorn for my opponent. This time I was able to play it plus a Dr. Facilier Agent Provocateur to keep it safe. My opponent simply had to let the cat do its thing since Facilier would bring it right back. I fell behind on lore early but once I got the big Facilier on the field, I was able to take back control and close out the game for the second win. In a matchup with very little removal, Facilier is very hard to beat. He helps control the field and puts a lot of pressure on the opponent to quest themselves or fall way behind. My opponent was awesome and was a pleasure to play against and chat with. She had a very good deck and her experience with the game showed, but my deck happened to match up well into hers. On to round 3, 4-0 in games!

Round 3 is where it all came crashing down. Sorry for the spoiler, but I lost both games pretty convincingly. My opponent had also received the amber/amethyst starter but he pulled really good cards for his strategy. He was running aggro with a very strong set of control tools (Dragon Fire, Tinker Bell Giant Fairy, and Let It Go, just to name a few). Funny enough, we had been near each other for deck building and he had asked me for advice in card selection. I had convinced him to give support from HeiHei Boat Snack and Scepter of Arendelle a try, and boy oh boy did he make great use of it against me.

Game 1 I just got run over by aggro early. I had basically no removal in my deck and wasn't able to draw Mickey + Brooms to help control the board. He got way ahead in lore, and even though I was able to eventually establish the double Dr. Facilier Agent Provocateur loop late in the game and get a solid board, it was far to late. A convincing loss.

Game 2 started out far better but fell apart due to a clutch Dragon Fire from my opponent. I established a solid board early and kept it pretty even in lore, but late into the game I was able to shift my Hades King of Olympus out and present a large threat for my opponent to deal with. He had 6 characters on the field, including two HeiHei Boat Snack and a Scepter of Arendelle, so it was pretty much impossible to challenge or quest as he would just banish my characters on his turn while losing almost nothing due to the support. My plan was to continue building my board while trying to find decent trades into his characters, but I never got to execute on that plan as he draw his single copy of Dragon fire off the top and nuked my Hades. Immediate handshake after that one. He was a turn away from lethal anyway, so it was over. He was an awesome opponent and definitely had a great grasp on his strategy. He went 6-0 on the day, so I can't be mad I lost to him!

That means I ended the day 2-1 in matches and 4-2 in games. I had a blast and was very happy with how I played, so it was definitely a successful day!

Closing Thoughts

I wanted to wrap up here with a few closing thoughts from the day.

First off, my extra booster pack I got at the end of the event had a super rare and legendary in it! Bad news though... see below.

My 5th Mickey Mouse Wayward Sorcerer (now useless after my trade and extra starter deck) and a Gantu Galactic Federation Captain, the worst legendary in the game. So great rarity luck, terrible card luck. But its fine, I might try to mess around and make Gantu work in something. I want to say he'd be a decent anti-swarm card, but even that seems like a stretch. The Tinker Bell Tiny Tactician foil is nice at least!

I really enjoyed the format and hope to play in other sealed events in the future. I think Lorcana works pretty well in a sealed format, and I enjoy the general lack of dedicated control decks. Be Prepared is such a strong card, so playing against people who don't have full playsets of it is refreshing! I will absolutely be getting into constructed, but I really enjoyed this sealed event.

As for some standout (and not so standout) cards in my deck, I need to start with Cheshire Cat and Dr. Facilier. As you could probably tell from my game debriefs, those 2 were the all-stars of my games. They both provide so much in a sealed environment, especially when paired together. Another card that I got a lot of use out of was Rafiki Mysterious Sage. He always seemed to pop up at the right time and got rid of a lot of opposing characters for me. He's a very solid card and should be a staple for a lot of amethyst decks.

I also had a couple cards which disappointed me. Lilo Making a Wish, while an awesome card overall, proved to be a bit of a liability in my deck. I had basically no bodyguard support for her, so it was difficult to find good times to quest with her. That, on top of being uninkable, made her perform a bit worse than I had hoped. I was also disappointed with Genie On the Job. I got him on the field twice and in both cases I was underwhelmed. For 6 cost uninkable, his stats let him down, even with evasive. His ability didn't have much effect on the game and his 2 lore wasn't enough for me to really threaten with as late as he came out. His biggest drawback in my deck, however, was being uninkable. He consistently showed up in my hand when I didn't want him and led to me getting stuck in the first game of round 3 with him plus two uninkable Dr. Facilier Agent Provocateur in my hand. I'm sure I'll find a good deck for him in the future, but this was not it.

Looking ahead, I will be playing in a Lorcana league starting up this coming Thursday. Games are held on Thursdays and Saturdays, so I will try to play at least once per week there. A random starter deck and 2 additional boosters are being provided to each player, and we are expected to only use those cards plus up to 2 booster packs we can buy each week. The game store hosting this event has some pretty absurd prices on their boosters, so I will be sticking with just the starter deck plus whatever I pull in those initial packs until prices (hopefully) settle down. So look forward to coverage of that coming soon!

I hope you enjoyed reading about the sealed event! I encourage you all to sign up for these kind of events at game stores near you, as they are a great way to get involved with local OP and meet local players. With that though, I hope you all have a great day and great week ahead!