Hello and welcome to Illumination, the Disney Lurkana podcast.
My name is Max.
I'm Sam.
And we are here to take you through episode two.
And this one's kind of like a foundational episode, less so like specific to any moment
in time.
I really want to try to hit some of these like core foundation special episodes that
we can kind of highlight and be like, these are ones you should go visit in the beginning
when you're new to the podcast or if you're new to Lurkana.
This episode is about card evaluation and we are right on the precipice of Into the
Inklands coming out.
I thought it'd be a good time to talk about how the heck do you see a card and be able
to make a determination if you think it's a good card or not.
So I wanted to give a quick primer about people on the internet who say cards are good or
not.
I want to just remind everybody very quickly that this is one to a small group of people
speculating and testing.
There's no way they can test out an entire 204 card set immediately upon cards being
shown.
It's going to take time for cards to be seen as playable or unplayable.
Will there certainly be a two, two for one?
I almost guarantee it, but that's the nature of also being able to serve limited in terms
of booster draft and sealed.
Just know that no one really has time to go through every single card and really give
it the time and thought it needs.
While it is a good idea to listen to people and start to hear, oh, okay, everybody's saying
this card's pretty good, so I bet you this is a good place to test.
I think it is very warranted that you proceed with caution.
And if you doubt something, again, like we kept repeating in the first episode, don't
be dismissive of anything.
Test it out.
Hey, there might be a very good reason that this exists, right?
There are cards we play that are less than great because they are very niche to the moment
in time where the meta is a great example.
This is Hercules, the six, three resist to Hercules.
No one was playing this card at the start of the set.
And now because the format has evolved in such a way where we need to be able to hit
different characters and take them out immediately and hopefully a repeatable basis, we've seen
a rise in how much Hercules is being played.
So I think it is worth mentioning that cards will become playable and unplayable as the
meta evolves and simply evaluating a card.
No one person or small group of people can do that very well.
Even entire design teams for games have admitted that they've messed up designs of cards and
didn't realize how powerful those cards truly were, resulting in things like emergency bans.
Don't be jaded by the fact that you listen to this person.
This includes Sam and I as well.
We may be like, this card may just say, pay zero ink, draw seven cards.
Maybe it's good.
It likely is.
But it may not be the best card ever.
There may be a certain deck that like somehow doesn't play that card.
So just don't put a ton of stock into any one or two people's evaluation of any particular
card or cluster of cards.
Does that make sense to you?
Does.
Okay.
So I will table that for now and we'll start talking about how you can begin to evaluate
a card, a single Lorikana card.
The first way to do it is in fact by looking at it as a single Lorikana card.
If I were to tell you that they made a one, one for one that quested for one.
Sam, do you think that would be a good card?
It would be outright terrible.
Thank you for following me and helping me.
Now on its own, terrible card.
Now what if I told you there was an awesome card that shifted for zero that could be shifted
onto that one, one for one that only quests for one.
Now it makes it a heck of a lot different of a scenario, right?
So you have to start with the card on its own.
You compare it across the board, right?
So in my little scenario there, my made up one, one for which can quest for one is not
good on its own because I can look over at Lilo.
I can look over at purple Maleficent and go, well, those are one ones for one that quest
for two.
So this card quests for half as much.
And then I can look over and go, well, and there's a whole bunch of two twos for a single
one, multiple in each color almost at this point.
I can also look and go, there are one threes for one.
What's going on here?
Why is this card so bad on its own?
It doesn't evaluate well.
That's step one.
Does it evaluate well on its own merit?
How does it evaluate a card?
I think that is very good example is a real card.
Not one I've made up is one that I think everybody saw on me.
It was like, this card's crazy.
And that is the Maleficent Dragon card.
When we saw that the stats are enormous at quest for two and it's inkable.
And when it comes in, it just banishes any character outright, obviously ward not withstanding
that card's absurd.
If it continues to be absurd, it'll probably always be pretty darn absurd.
But there's a balance there, right?
It costs nine.
Yeah.
Not every deck wants that card.
Not every red deck wants that card.
That is a card though on its own merits reads as a crazy powerful card.
And I think pretty much everybody looked at it and objectively went, this is a powerful
Lurkana card.
And I think they're right.
Very powerful card.
So then after we've evaluated on its own, we know it's not maybe not a stone cold bomb,
but now we need to try to look at how does it synergize with other cards?
I think a really cool example of this card is Ariel, spectacular singer on her own.
Maybe she finds a song for you.
It's pretty good.
Some of the songs are pretty good.
Some of them aren't so good, but she replaces herself with another card, which is powerful,
right?
Cause this is a game where you have to play the cards from your hand, not just to the
table, but you also have to ink them and turn them into resources.
So you go through cards in your hand very fast in this game.
It's not restricted by different numerical sets like in Yu-Gi-Oh, like, oh, I can play
this cause it's four or less stars or this is a land.
So I just play it as my land for turn in magic in Lurkana.
You're using cards to balance both adding to the board as threats and ways to balance
your opponents and answer your opponent's threats.
You're also using them as resources to continue your game.
So cards that replace themselves are powerful.
So you can look at Ariel on her own and go, she's pretty good.
But then you start to look at the singer five on the three costs.
So ahead of schedule, she starts to do very powerful things.
And then you see the songs that she can sing.
And now comparing it alongside of card she synergizes with, you realize Ariel is crazy
good.
And she was an example of a card that came out and she was a couple of bucks, two bucks,
three bucks when she came out.
And then there was a point where in the first chapter meta, the demand for steel song cards
got so high, she went up to close to $15 because she's that good.
Again, maybe not directly on her own.
She looks a little anemic.
She's not Maleficent.
But when you realize, oh man, look at the synergies here.
Look at the overlap.
Look at the crazy song she can sing on five.
That's when you go, okay, now we're talking about something pretty crazy.
Sets in now.
This is going to be the third set.
We're going to have to look at ink land cards, not only on their own, not only with the kind
of cards they synergize with, but also do they work with anything from the older sets?
That's really important.
Or are they just role players maybe that make an old deck a little bit better?
Is Cinderella ballroom sensation?
She costs one and she is a one, two, and she just has singer three.
Awesome card on her own.
She looks pretty powerful because we saw what something like Ariel did.
So we go, yeah, that's a strong ability.
And then on top of that, we look at cards she synergizes with, which she synergizes
with this crazy seven drop called Cinderella stout hearted that can come down and just
end the game and also synergizes with songs, which that particular Cinderella happens to
be able to sing pretty well.
Right there.
It works really well.
Small Cinderella goes in as this role player.
It fits into this old deck with some of these cards that it works pretty well with.
She doesn't work great with a lot of the older songs because there wasn't any great songs
on three to be sung.
But then all of a sudden with the newer cards alongside of her, let the storm rage on and
strength of a raging fire.
She's singing some crazy powerful songs as early as turn two for you.
Turning up on Cinderella, getting to take your next turn and being able to let the storm
rage on there two, two for one that they played feels incredible.
And the reason the meta in terms of a lot of the more controlling style decks have moved
to one, three characters to be able to survive that second turn sequence because it's just
that strong.
Cause again, storm rage on replaces itself.
So on its own, it's strong.
And then you give a character that can sing it as early as turn two, that is alarmingly
powerful.
So there's a lot of good things that that card can do.
The lubrication to make an old deck a little bit better or the little cog that fits into
the machine a little bit more perfectly.
Is it a card maybe that a whole deck could be made around where maybe there was a deck
looming in the background that was almost there, but not quite good enough.
And then all of a sudden it pops into view.
One of your favorites, the popsicles deck kind of put Tamatoa on the map.
Yeah.
Tamatoa was a fan favorite in chapter one meta.
I mean, there was a ton of people trying to like play these terrible items with like Ariel,
who's at collectors and Tamatoa is to try to win with.
And now items have just gotten so much better with the new set.
Yes.
Tons and tons better.
The items themselves have gotten better and the enablers have gotten better.
And it looks like things are just going to continue down that path for, especially in
the blue color, seeing some item, great items in purple, some great items in red as well.
But blue, especially is kind of cleaned up on a lot of items popsicle alongside Hiram
Plavisham ended up being a combination of cards that were so synergistic and so powerful
that it created a whole new archetype or a whole new way to play control, which popsicles
was the control deck coming out of the rise of the flood born meta.
It destroyed the old red purple deck.
It seemed unbeatable for the first several weeks of the format seemed unbeatable.
Like there was to the point where I knew other game designers who were just baffled with
how powerful they're like.
I cannot believe they let an engine this powerful into the game.
Here we are many weeks later and popsicles is falling off.
You know what I mean?
There's a tier two deck that not even a lot of sees a lot of play in tier two.
Don't say that.
I mean, looking at tournament reports and pixel born data, of course, but it's kind
of ebbed away because people started to realize, speaking of synergies, how powerful the Merlin
and madam Mim cards ended up being.
And I think that was one that a lot of people earmarked as very powerful out of the gate.
For sure.
And so tons of thought can go into this and there's so many ways to evaluate cards.
I don't want to scare you off of being able to try to use your intuition or your gut.
You should take some time and think about how many things need to be gone over and mold
over.
And then there may be something really cool that comes out that just doesn't fit in the
meta where it's like, this is a cool deck, but it just kind of doesn't work because the
meta answers it so easily.
I think a card that was on a lot of people's radar as a really cool card was see Sue and
see Sue suffers from what I'm going to call the madam Mim Fox problem in that I don't
know why she's a dragon and doesn't have evasive, but she doesn't.
And therefore madam Mim Fox can eat her alive and madam Mim Fox having that for power being
the kind of the Rafiki replacement for strength instead of the three strength that Rafiki
had means that not only do they have a character that lets me pick up another character, then
replay it for value, IE like a Maleficent, but it also gives me the reach to take down
these much higher end characters.
We see a lot of characters like big Gaston six drop.
That's a four four Fox will take that one down.
We see a lot of two fours that have a cool ability.
Fox will take them down.
And some of those even cost as much as six ink to be able to play.
Fox will take those down.
It's an impressive card that has held down a lot of other cards simply because it exists
lots of things to think about and lots of ways to evaluate.
Cause I wouldn't have about, I would have said see Sue will definitely be played in
a blue deck.
I was not thinking that Madam and Fox would come out and just completely wreck see Sue.
I hadn't thought about that.
And a four cost on inkable that immediately gets answered by a three drop inkable that
gives my opponent value means that I should not be playing see Sue right now, which stinks
because her ability only gives you something if you quest.
So that opens her up to be susceptible to the Fox really sucks, but that's how it goes.
And I know a lot of people thought see Sue was going to be awesome out of the gate.
Great card.
I'm fortunate that Madam and Fox just completely wrecks it.
But that's a lot of what I think people weren't thinking about because I don't think everybody's
just like, no, no, no.
Everybody's been playing these Madam M cards.
Everybody.
I thought a lot of people were like, no, these are good.
I don't think they put it as far as to this card is going to make a lot of cards unplayable
because of its existence, which it kind of ended up doing leads me into testing with
cards.
And that's two ways to do it.
It's pretty easy, right?
Like right now there's an electronic way with pixel born or tabletop simulator or whatever
your preferred method is and or printing out a piece of paper, printing out a picture
of the card, writing it down on a little sticky note and sticking it in your sleeve and playing
with what's called a proxy.
One of those two ways to test a card.
So Sam, when you're testing out things, how do you like to test?
What do you like to do?
I think for us both, typically we do the print out the proxies or write it down on a piece
of paper and play it in person.
That's my preferred way.
Right now that's not saying I won't go on pixel born and make a deck just to see if
it works, but I definitely prefer the paper route.
I like the paper route because we can talk over, like, and stop you, like don't do that
because that's not good.
Undo it and do this instead and see if that works so we can talk through ways to change
things.
You can't really do that on pixel born.
I think for us, it's very much been a step one paper step to pixel born or test it out
in a league or something to see if it holds water.
And I think that that's a nice way to do it because you can fiddle around.
This game doesn't lend itself so much to what's called gold fishing and that's where you play
the deck out against no opponent and just see what it can do completely uninterrupted.
It's possible you could gold fish, like maybe just pretend your opponent's playing a Lilo
every turn or something and just see if you can beat them.
But that's what you want to start to think about is if the deck doesn't function within
itself or the thing you want to test doesn't really work that well on its own, then you
need to step it back a little bit or maybe it isn't such a good change.
But you can always test and test and test and until you get those reps under your belt,
you're not going to know for sure.
And that's why I keep saying, don't dismiss anything.
Try it.
Try everything.
It doesn't matter if it works or doesn't work.
You're investing time.
It's a step you need to take to find the right answer.
That's okay to do it wrong.
No worries there.
Don't be afraid of it.
To wrap up our discussion and point us towards the end of the episode, I want to talk about
some of our triumphs and some of our failures.
Let's start with our failures first.
Sam, tell me a little bit about a card or two that ended up not doing anything and that
you had earmarked to be a big player in Lurkana.
Like, no, this card's what's up and people are going to find out.
And then you're like, never mind.
I found out I was wrong about that.
Specifically in chapter one was Belle.
I wanted her to work so bad.
Strange but special.
Yes.
I wanted her to work so bad and just it wasn't there.
It was too slow.
Yeah.
From a magic perspective, this is a card that ramped you and was your payoff for ramping.
Right.
I was like, well, this card's insane.
Yeah.
She was too slow.
She got removed by the time it was time to quest for five.
That being said, I do think that in The Rise of the Floodborn, I've kind of slipped two
of her into my popsicle stack and I've been really enjoying it so far.
Part of that testing that we were talking about.
I've been testing it for about a week or two now and it's working well and she's a better
payoff because I can kind of hold her until I get to right before she's going to quest
for five and it's a little harder for your opponent to remove her.
Another card that I thought would be really busted would be Beast Relentless.
The green beast.
Yes.
He seemed like he'd be crazy and we're just not even really seeing any of him.
Nope.
Saw maybe a little bit in initial people testing with like steel decks to deal incremental
little pieces of damage like with Robin Hood and things like that and then use the beast
to kind of quest a bunch of times.
Just hasn't come to fruition yet.
I totally agree with you there.
I think one card that I mentioned earlier that definitely didn't stand out to me was
Ariel.
I thought it was a cool card and I was like, there's not enough songs yet for her to be
good and then didn't realize in the first chapter meta that there were plenty.
Like I didn't even mind the probably half a dozen times total I sang Hakuna Matata.
Didn't even mind it.
Loved finding that card and being able to know I was going to ink something without
having to think about it the following turn.
There's a lot of things to like about her and I didn't realize any of them initially.
So she was one that kind of flew under my radar for sure.
And one of the cards that I thought was going to be pretty awesome that ended up not being
very good at all was the steel legendary takeoff from first chapter.
I thought it was going to be a really oppressive card.
It had great stats.
It had an ability that gains you lore and that just kind of didn't end up mattering
too much.
Is there any card that you think that you can now play like you didn't realize how ridiculous
that card was when you saw it?
Definitely flourish him.
Yeah, without a doubt.
I when we were looking at all the cards, I didn't peg that for being a good card or
I didn't think that I would ever be playing like an item deck because it just wasn't I
didn't think it was my style.
But him with popsicle is just crazy.
Yeah.
And then print Nick Wilde to be able to get the popsicle back after you get rid of it
and be able to just go ahead and quest with him and draw more cards.
And the card that you drew off the popsicle never loses you a card.
It's another card that I couldn't stand in the first chapter, but now I love having it
is one jump ahead.
Yeah, I love having it in the first few turns.
You love having it when the time is appropriate to have it correct for me.
I think a card that kind of came out of nowhere that was a bit of a sleeper or like looked
like a bit of a sleeper was Minnie Mouse surfer.
She is an absolute bomb.
Like there are very few decks that are red that are not playing four of her.
She's just so hard to answer to the tune of decks playing pretty bad three to evasive
characters to be able to make sure that they can't let their opponent just quest with Minnie
with impunity like fidget and Peter Pan and things like that to be able to just take her
off the board.
If she comes down, it's crazy how impactful she is in the meta.
Now I knew she'd be like a pretty good choice, but I think every red deck under the sun would
be playing Minnie Mouse surfer.
It's crazy how good she is and how oppressive she can be when you're stuck underneath of
her surfboard.
She's just riding that wave to victory.
So that is a lot of information to throw in to one episode, but it is, I think, a good
idea to things to ponder as you're listening to set reviews, things to ponder as you're
getting inundated with spoilers as the new sets getting, getting ready to come out, things
to think about as you approach the new set coming out, what decks do you want to play,
things like that.
So you hopefully save yourself a little bit of money and don't kind of run down the wrong
rabbit hole.
So I think this will be a topic that'll come up a few more times during the life of the
podcast without a doubt, just because it is such a deep topic.
I can talk about everything we talked about in a macro sense and a very micro sense for
an episode without a doubt.
Definitely approach anything that you hear on the internet with caution as always.
Don't be dismissive and try everything is all very important.
Sam,
Are you listening?