Hello and welcome back to Illumination, the Disney Lurkana podcast.
You got Max here this week.
Sam is here.
She's sitting across from me producing, but she is under the weather and has a bit of
a sinus infection.
So we're going to spare you the guttural sounds of mucus for this episode.
The good news is you don't have to deal with that.
The bad news is you are stuck with me.
Just want to take a minute before I get into the episode to really thank everybody who
has been supporting the podcast through the first three episodes and our first ever set
review.
Really can't thank everyone enough.
The feedback, the encouragement, the support means everything to us over here at Illumination
and it is awesome and really heartening to see.
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We really, really appreciate it.
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podcast, of course, and we are happy to interact with you there if you are social and we're
working on expanding our social network.
So let's start talking about the topic this week.
The topic is passive lore generation.
What the heck does that mean?
So to get it started, passive lore is pretty straightforward.
What's passive lore generation?
Well, it's generally lore you get for not having to do anything.
You get to be passive, you gain lore anyway.
You're doing something the deck's already doing and you're getting lore by doing it.
Pretty straightforward, right?
The opposite of this would be, you guessed it, active lore generation.
Again, pretty straightforward.
You are actively generating lore.
You are actively working to move toward the end game and close out a game of Lurkana.
Some examples of active lore generation, I feel like this is the easier of the two to
help really hammer the point home.
The most obvious and probably the one you're already like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, is
questing.
That is the most obvious way to actively generate lore in Disney Lurkana.
Pretty straightforward.
Everybody quests for a certain amount.
Some don't, though.
You got your mawis in there, but others quest for many and that can help you close out a
game faster.
So when you're building a deck, when you're designing your game plan, following your play
patterns, you generally will win maybe with a few big characters that quest for a lot.
Maybe you win with a lot of small characters that can also quest ahead of schedule, like
your lelos and your maleficents.
There are a lot of ways to actively gain lore in this game.
Spellbook, another very popular example coming out of the Rise of the Floodborne meta.
Other examples would include the extra lore you may get from someone like Arthur or the
lore you get if you somehow ready, or Christopher Robin.
There's exhaust to gain abilities, right?
Like you can exhaust or challenge with your Robin Hood to actively gain lore by banishing
a character.
You can do the same thing with good old Big Aladdin and you'll be able to banish a character,
have them lose two, you gain two.
So there's all different sorts of ways that you can actively gain lore.
The green queen from Rise of the Floodborne, discard a character from your hand to gain
lore.
All of these things are active ways to gain lore.
What about passive ways to gain lore?
I think the most obvious one at this point, you've probably like, all right, all right,
you've pushed it long enough.
We understand you're trying to talk about locations.
And in a way I am.
But I also want to talk about passive lore generation because I feel like we started
to see popular strategies with it during Rise of the Floodborne.
So some examples of this would be something like Sleepy's Flute.
The new Grammatala.
The new Jafar.
Merlin Goat, everybody's favorite.
And the new Baloo.
So the reason these are passive is because they gain you lore simply by doing some other
game action or simply by taking your turn in the case of locations as long as they're
there.
Well, you pay one time, you get to play the location.
It may provide an additional benefit.
It also just passively gains you lore during your set step of your turn, right?
The ready, set, draw.
So that's when you would gain your lore with the locations.
The same thing goes with Grammatala, the new Grammatala.
Ocean Spirit, something like that.
What she does is whenever you ink a card, you get to gain a lore.
Again, passively gaining by taking a game action that you would normally already take.
The new Jafar Striking Illusionist.
If he's exhausted, whenever you would draw a card, you get to gain a lore as well.
So we've seen a lot of people rushing to get him to sing A Whole New World, right?
So you can gain your lore while he's exhausted or exerted is more accurate.
I think that these are pretty valid strategies and they've already reared their head in the
game by way of cards like Sleepy's Flute, Merlin Goat.
We've seen this a lot, right?
This isn't new school by any fashion, but the locations kind of typify it because it's
literally the least we've had to do to gain lore.
So that is kind of the difference when it comes to active versus passive lore generation.
One, you're working to achieve the lore, whether it's by questing, whether it's by challenging
and gaining lore as a result, versus your passive lore generation, which is you're taking
a game action and the card that you have is gaining you lore as a result of that.
One of the new cards we've seen with this kind of seemingly, and the term that we use
in the trading card game community is kind of stapled onto the card, is the Boss is on
a Roll, which lets you look at the top five, put any number on top or bottom in any order
you so choose, and then gain one lore.
So this is a passive effect, right?
Like you're actually playing the card, but if you're interested in the Boss is on a Roll,
you're most likely interested in looking at the top five cards, trying to find an important
card or trying to arrange your draws in a specific way.
The game one lore is just icing on the cake, so it's a very passive way to gain lore.
We've seen Merlin Goat leverage tremendously effectively in the red purple decks, being
able to just come in and then get picked up a little later by the Madam Mim package and
gain you some lore.
It can definitely go from like 15 to wins the game very quickly, uncomfortably quickly
if you're playing against it.
So there are a lot of ways that passive lore has already impacted the game.
And I remember early in chapter one meta, Big Aladdin was very scary.
I mean, we were playing White Rabbit's Pocket Watch to be able to give that card rush in
the early Ruby and Amethyst control decks, right?
That was a very, very valid and very scary line that you could take.
Once your opponent was on 8 ink, it was like, yeah, they could just play Aladdin without
shifting it and then use the Pocket Watch to give it rush and just completely blow up
my character.
And that felt like a game ending effect back then.
Now that doesn't seem so bad.
Big Aladdin is played very rarely anymore because he's fine, but he's not great.
So it shows you how the game has shifted quite a bit since the first chapter meta as a result
of more impact like these passive lore generators.
So it's pretty neat to see even a deck like Steel Song has gone pretty massive changes
from first chapter into Rise of the Floodborne by way of Sleepy's Flute.
We're already doing a whole bunch of songs.
Why not just gain a lore every turn that we have a song?
It's pretty neat.
It ended up being pretty darn effective in terms of results.
The Flute deck was kind of the definitively more well performing version of the Amber
Steel Song decks.
So it was really neat and really encouraging to see that these passive lore cards had such
an impact on the game.
Everybody who was playing Steel started playing Benja so they could answer the Flute faster.
You also could answer the Spellbooks too, right?
There was some flexibility there, but we also saw Judy Hopps coming down because even though
you give your opponent a card, they're not gaining lore every turn of the game.
Just about.
It felt that way, certainly.
And if, goodness forbid, if you got two or three flutes out, the game ended really quickly
in a lot of cases.
So you can see how these passive lore generators impacted the game.
And now we have a whole collective group.
Every single ink got their own location cards.
They all got three of them and they're all pretty different.
I wanted each rarity and they all do different things.
This is very early into the Inklands meta.
So the predominance of what we're seeing are the ones that everybody just on the spot
were like, well, this is completely insane.
Or the ones that cost one and can come out immediately on term one.
So those are the ones I kind of want to talk about a little bit more.
The reason being those strip out all the other reasons locations are good, right?
We're not dealing with a very complex location like RLS Legacy.
I'm talking about something as simple as Devil Manor.
These are just a willpower, a movement cost, and some number of lore that you would gain
each term.
We've seen this on Neverland with the Mermaid Lagoon.
That's been a very popular early in the meta.
We've also seen Bayou being played for a number of reasons.
Chief among them, I think, is some of the early lore generation.
One of the big roles it can play is that.
We've also got, of course, the Forbidden Mountain, which is one of the least played because purple
doesn't seem to be quite as interested in this effect as some of the other colors.
But my goodness, we've seen a whole bunch of them.
The reason is very simple and it's because if I play this on my first turn, especially
if I'm on the play, I pass to my opponent, what in the heck are you going to play on
your first turn that's going to stop my 1-4 location that's going to gain me a lure?
Probably nothing.
I'm almost guaranteed to gain it.
That gives me a big jump start to the game passively gaining lore.
It also requires your opponent to be able to answer several different things.
So if I then follow up my first turn to Devil Manor with a Flynn Rider, now I'm threatening
to go up three lore.
And that is a very big concern if I'm playing against that, that the lore gain is going
to get out of control.
So now I'm going to start to try to manage either Flynn Rider or the location.
Well, what the heck is going to do that for me?
So we started seeing a transformation and adaptation of the meta game.
So we go back to Rise of the Floodborn.
We barely played 2-2s unless they were very important shift targets on one.
Like the queen is a standout example.
Stitch new dog has been game long staple of the 2-2 for one that can shift into something
very oppressive.
Instead of that, we didn't see a lot because the card teeth and ambitions started to kind
of come to the forefront.
Madam Mim Snake started to come to the forefront.
So now all of a sudden 1-3 stat lines became really, really important.
Those were kind of the key stats to have on your one drops in the Rise of the Floodborn
meta because you could survive the two damage and you could try to do something with them
a little later in the game.
Something like Flynn Rider shifting into the Flynn Rider is own biggest fan is a great
example of this.
We started to see the game shift and now it's shifting back.
Cards like Captain Hook, we're seeing Captain Hook again because you need to be able to
respond to these locations out of the gate both for that reason and because something
like Captain Hook can hit DeVille Manor, hit Flynn Rider, go back in and hit DeVille Manor
again if you want to.
So you can get your full value out of Captain Hook and you couldn't in the Rise of the
Floodborn meta.
You would play Captain Hook and go, okay, I'm going to challenge your 1-3 and they go,
oh, that's a funny story about that, I'm going to turn it into a 3-3 or I'm going to teeth
and ambitions your Captain Hook and not lose any character quest and then on the following
turn I'm going to pick it up with a Madden Mim Snake or Fox and then be able to turn
it into ink or subsequently replay it on a later turn which just generated a ton of value.
So now this passive lore game has gotten to the point where you have to respect it so
you do have to have an early game that is not completely anemic.
In the Red Purple Mirrors towards the end of the Floodborn meta, we were seeing no teeth
and ambitions in Lists.
That was not uncommon because you're just like, you know what, nobody's on aggro anymore.
I'm just going to get greedy and try to next level the field and go, you know what, if
it's all Red Purple control decks, I'm going to build the Red Purple control deck that
leverages the best advantage against the Red Purple control decks.
And that is a pretty valid strategy.
So it did a really good job of being able to fight but now it's just way too slow because
you can't just sit for 3-4 turns and not be able to handle an oncoming location from the
opponent.
It's just not something that's going to realistically win you a game, seemingly at least at this
point into the Inklands meta.
There are a lot of things that are really interesting about how these have been warping
the game, ways that you can take to leverage an advantage against these locations.
So playing them early is effective.
Playing a character that has early game stats is also quite effective at dealing with these
particular locations have given rise to cards that have to specifically deal with locations,
things like, and along came Zeus.
I've even seen a few lists tinkering with Rise of the Titans to be able to banish a
location because it requires a lot and even just the location surviving one time can be
the difference between winning and losing a game.
So it is really pivotal that you have to not sit on it and I think one of the decks that
came out early in the meta, I don't know if it's going to continue to be a deck, but one
of the decks we got to see immediately come out of the gate with a strong swing is the
red steel pirates list that leveraged pretty much every location in those two different
ink colors.
They really did a strong job of using pirates plus the Jolly Roger to give them rush to
defend the location.
Like, hey, you can, yeah, you can challenge my location if you want, but my three pirates
are going to absolutely have their way with your character as soon as you do.
So it's a really scary thing.
You're like, I can't just walk into that meat grinder without thinking this through a little
bit more carefully.
So that is totally valid.
Another strategy we've seen spring up is the blue red decks, which were like the popsicle
style control decks have started leveraging these early to mid game locations, playing
them a little late.
Well, for blue, a little late, right?
They are ramping ahead of time, but they're playing them a quote unquote on time and still
having the ability because of their ramp to get down the sweeping removal effects of something
like a be prepared or the classic blue answer to one particular threat being Hades.
They can answer just the same way popsicles did while sitting back and gaining between
two and four lore every turn just for taking another turn, which was exactly the problem
that deck had in the rise of the flood born meta was closing out a game.
It could answer things wonderfully, but eventually you'd run out of gas and you wouldn't be able
to push your way through because you were missing eight ish lore.
Well, boy, oh boy, Agrabah and McDuck Manor certainly change that by just letting you
sit there.
If it's a term where you just go, I'm not going to do anything.
I'm just going to pass to you.
That's a hugely powerful turn because as soon as you are able to set up a board that can
answer those locations, the red blue deck can just go and you don't have any more characters
out.
So it's very, very disheartening to play watching them gain lore and you can't stop it.
So we've seen a lot of this kind of passive lore be able to really leverage some of these
strategies out of the gate and start to take advantage and other colors are even playing
with them to see what can they do?
How can they spread things out?
It was already difficult in Lorcanna sometimes to just go back and forth character to character.
Well, now there's a whole nother card type that makes you spread your resources even
thinner.
That's so rough.
It has the same effect as the planeswalker cards tend to in magic where I really need
to take care of this or else it's going to take over the game.
A great example of a location like this is the Queen's Castle where it can draw them
a ton of cards.
It gains them lore.
It draws them cards.
It can almost single-handedly win them the game.
So we've seen this evolution of the actual game itself, not even in deck building, just
we're talking about the card and this is a great example of this.
Lady Tremaine, the red shift Lady Tremaine, the big one that lets you opponent banish
a character of their choice.
That card's not good anymore because I have to have early game characters to answer locations.
So as we move from the early game into the mid game, what happens is I probably have
one or two of these little chuckle heads left over.
Lady Tremaine is getting captain hooks and like small little two cost characters, Razzles
and Mr. Smeez.
These characters don't amount to really much at all.
An unshifted tutu, worthless characters to be trading six ink for.
So we've seen the rise of a card like Madame Medusa because while some of the other stronger
cards, well, they only have three strength so we can take out the beast.
We can take out cards like that because we have the opportunity to do so.
We can trade with their Hades.
We can do all of those things because Madame Medusa lets you pick the character of your
choice, which Lady Tremaine doesn't give you that value.
So we've even seen the game evolve in such a way that the play patterns have become impacted
in a small way because of this passive lure.
So you need to be able to get this character on the ground.
Madame Medusa also importantly trading one Lurian for one strength, which makes her a
little bit better at challenging these locations and taking them off the board.
Let me tell you about a card that stocks has never been higher and that's Maui.
This card is phenomenal being able to crack in for six.
They just have a location sitting around.
You can get their location, maybe one or two characters turning Maui, which was typically
a two for one into a three for one in some cases, maybe even more if he's left uncontested.
It's really been surprising to see.
We've seen Challenger go up in stock.
I know people have been monkeying around with support to try to handle dealing with these
locations because they simply come down and go, well, we can both sit here and do nothing,
but now I have a way to win the game doing it.
And that makes it much more powerful than people who are actively trying to gain the
lure because we're already ready and equipped to deal with that.
But we're not so equipped to deal with the fact that on top of that, they also are just
gaining lore at the start of every single turn.
I just want you to think about passive and active lure as you're considering your strategies.
There's a million things now that the average Lurkana deck has to answer.
A million different archetypes of deck and now location just as a card type has completely
blown the lid off of things.
Thought it'd be a great opportunity to talk over different ways to generate a resource
we really didn't talk about in our card advantage episode, and that is a lure.
So that will do it for this episode.
Thank you all so much for hanging out with me.
Really appreciate you all being here again.
Feel free, give us any feedback you'd like.
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Until next time, as Sam would say if she were here in a state where she didn't keep questing.