Hello and welcome back to Illumination, the Disney Lorcanah podcast.
My name is Max.
And I'm Sam.
And we are here to talk to you today about multiplayer formats.
That's right, Core Constructeds just getting revved up coming up to the Atlanta Challenger
event at time of recording and the brand new Ursula's Return sets just getting fired up
for Core Constructeds so people are testing things out.
So we're going to take a little reprieve to talk over a little bit more casual fare than
you usually hear on the podcast because we like all things Lorcanah around these parts.
So we're talking multiplayer formats.
And Sam and I got to explore the Illumineers quest Deep Trouble.
So we want to talk about that of course as a co-op format.
We want to talk about your team versus team style formats.
And we want to talk about chaos formats, which is a pod of people all vying for victory independently.
So let's start off with Illumineers quest here right out of the gate since that is something
Sam you and I have done directly recently.
So what did you think without any spoilers, what did you think about Illumineers quest
Deep Trouble?
I really liked it.
I kind of expected it to be just an easy addition, just something that beginners could pick up
and play.
But I think it was really elegant in the design.
Ursula's deck plays herself.
You and your teammates have to battle against her.
It was actually quite difficult and it took a lot of different thought, different than
what you would think in your constructed decks.
You had to play with your teammate.
So I think things like support was a lot better and different cards that you wouldn't use
are a lot better in a multiplayer format.
Yeah, I totally agree.
The game operates independently, Ursula takes a turn and then the cooperative group who
are battling Ursula take a turn, which is pretty neat.
I think that it was more elegant than I thought.
It definitely plays out in a very specific way.
Once you played it, you kind of know what's coming.
However, the game does support multiple different difficulty levels to make it more challenging
once you feel like you're comfortable taking on one particular difficulty, like, okay,
we've got this handled pretty good.
And I like the fact that the product encourages you to, for the harder difficulties, build
your own decks because it gets so difficult to win once you get to the highest levels
of difficulty that likely you're not going to be able to win with the included decks
that come with the product.
Overall, I think that it was a lot of fun.
I had a good time.
I look forward to doing it again.
I'm excited to try to build a deck to play specifically in the format and see what cards
are really interesting.
And that's part of the value of a product like this is I get to go back through the
binder and reread cards.
I know what they do approximately, but if they're not good in core constructed, I've
probably looked them over so many times I'm missing out on words that would make them
valuable in a cooperative format like this one.
I really hope that going forward, we get to see more of this.
I like that it's a Lumineers quest, deep trouble, which means that hopefully every set of four
different sets or every grouping of four sets that tell an independent story will give us
a new cooperative product that maybe you can combine together with the past products and
kind of make a collective deck or even a stronger deck to fight against and keep the co-op game
going.
Cause I like the idea of not having to battle head to head all the time instead being able
to go, Hey, let's work as a team and try to play this game.
And if you've played cooperative games, you've seen this mechanic before where the game requires
you to take a moment to operate the game.
But like Sam said, it is very elegant.
It's not too cumbersome in terms of time it takes.
It takes probably about 30 to 45 seconds to operate Ursula's turn.
If you're doing well, less, if you're not doing as well, perhaps a little bit more, but it's
not super difficult to grok.
I think at all indeed a well-designed product doesn't feel like a cash grab, which is always
my fear with these kinds of products.
And I hope that they continue to look at the idea of a Lumineers quest and these co-op
formats moving forward.
What do you think?
Yeah, I definitely hope to see it again.
I really like that.
It made us play the game differently than we're used to.
Absolutely.
So different strategies and different, like you said, different cards that we overlooked
could be valuable in a multiplayer format, especially one where we're trying to beat
a deck that's kind of designed to beat us.
As we talk about these different formats, different cards get emphasized.
Like in this particular format, I think support really stands out as an ability that's quite
powerful because you can support your teammates character, which is really, really fun.
And I won't go too much into spoilers.
There are other ways to support each other as well.
I just want everybody to experience it like we did with fresh eyes and ears and hopefully
take away something more fun from a Lumineers quest.
You get to open your special card in the end.
You get to open the special card.
Next up is the team versus team style format.
So this would be either a 2v2 or even a 3v3 style tournament.
This is pretty neat because it more closely represents what core construct it is, but
you get to sit beside your friends through the entirety of the tournament.
It's a lot of fun magic.
I've done this multiple times in magic.
They call the two person team, two headed giant, and I think that we're seeing that
start to come to fruition in Lorikana looking over the side event roster for Atlanta, the
very first challenger event.
There is a 3v3 team event, which is really neat.
And one of the things that I think is very cool about Lorikana is, and they're enforcing
it for this particular 3v3 tournament that they're holding as a side event, is that the
ink colors cannot be duplicated on your team.
So you have to be playing what is most likely six, each of the six factions across the team.
I guess you could play a mono colored deck that doesn't seem like the greatest idea in
the world, but it's pretty neat because a lot of times you'll want to play two good
decks that overlap a color.
I want to play blue steel.
I want to play emerald steel.
We both can't do that.
So I guess I'll play blue red and I'll play green steel.
And that leaves one player left playing amethyst amber hyper aggro deck or something.
It's really neat to see how you can break the colors up with that restriction because
you can't just build everybody gets the best deck.
Sometimes we'll see, I'm sure we'll see formats supported where there's not that ink identity
that's required across the team.
But I do like that deck building restriction and forcing at least one player on the team
to get a little creative because it's not just rinse, repeat the same decks over and
over again.
Did I sit in the right seat?
Did I not?
Darn.
I think that's really cool too, because you kind of need to know your teammates and know
their strengths and what deck that they would play the best.
Right.
And what's also fun is at least in magic, I can't say the same directly for Lorikana,
but I can't imagine it changing is typically you are allowed to ask your teammate for a
little bit of help because they are in the game.
They're a player in the game.
They're on the same level.
It's not like if you have a buddy standing who's watching your game, giving you advice,
that's a little different, right?
Like you can't do that in core constructed or any of the other supported formats.
But in this format, you can ask your buddy who's on your team specifically, maybe not
your buddy who's watching from behind the team, but one of the buddies on your team
can be consulted for play decisions, thoughts, concerns, things like that.
So that's also very cool.
This will be the first time we're seeing this event with Lorikana?
Held by Ravensburger, yes.
I've seen other local shops do it in our area, which was pretty neat to say like, oh, that's
a fun idea.
But this is the first time that we're seeing it supported at least on an official level,
which is pretty neat to say.
I think that's exciting that Ravensburger is exploring space and they've talked about
how many different ways they've tried to make it so you can ingest Lorikana.
It doesn't have to just be core constructed, but obviously that being the big flagship
for any TCG, that main constructed format, they have to put the most focus on that out
of the gate.
And remember, we're still talking out of the gate.
This is under one year this game's been out.
So as we see more support, we're going to see the evolution and support of more variance
of how to play this game, which makes every card a little bit more exciting.
And we're not just stuck seeing the same homogenized group of probably about, I don't know, three
quarters of a set worth of size that get played.
So it's pretty exciting to see how things evolve.
In addition to team versus team, there's also, I think what is the most instantly thought
of when we talk about a multiplayer format and that is the notion of a chaos game.
So this is some number of players above two, three, four, five.
Oh, I get scared when we're talking about numbers higher than that.
How long is that game going to take?
All get together at one pod or one table or whatever.
And they go ahead and play a game where they are each an individual player in the game
trying to win on their own amongst the other players who are trying to do the very same
thing.
This was supported at a bunch of the conventions.
It was early on referred to as the willpower league.
We both got to play in that at PAX, which was neat.
I liked that they in this format, they decided to emphasize not just doing well and winning
your pod, but also trying to accomplish a wacky goal.
So there was an award for having a character who ended the whole willpower event of like
three hour event time, whoever had the character that was noted with the highest strength.
Yeah.
The most princesses in play.
I know they did the most of a certain character.
So it was really neat to see them do all of these things.
Most cards in the ink well, things like that, where it was like this fun way to support
the game and also put an emphasis on fun.
The most lore in one turn, I think was one of them.
Yeah.
It was a really neat concept that through the idea of rewarding fun patterns of play
and off the wall strategies, you get rewarded for that just as much as you get rewarded
for winning the event.
I think was really a smart notion on their part.
I think that part's really fun.
Seeing it now, we're starting to see it referred to under the name of multiplayer challenge
event.
So usually this is going to be more of a focus table of four players.
It seems like their emphasis on the side of an end of things is to prize out.
So it's probably going to be focused on just winner of the pod.
Most likely.
It's not always casual as, hey, the prize for this is prize wall tickets.
So we're going to put dump in X prize wall tickets, divide them up how you so choose.
That is typically how magic handles commander games at events is they go, hey, your entry
buys you X number of tickets combined in a pod.
That's this.
You guys can go winner take all top two, take something.
You go, everybody gets the, what they paid in and the games just for fun.
It doesn't matter, but that's, you know, you're taking your actual currency and converting
it essentially into prize wall tickets, which is beneficial for in this case Ravensburger.
So I'm not a hundred percent sure how they're going to support the multiplayer challenge
events, but it gives you a chance to actually engage with a group of people.
And each of them are trying to do that coveted race to the 20 total lore they need.
It's not like a team format where it's a combined lore total instead of like, Oh, our team has
to reach 60.
So it doesn't matter if on our team of three, Sam covered 50 of the lore and we just protected
her resources.
It didn't matter because it's a collective lore total in these multiplayer one of the
one formats.
And she just, you on your own out there trying to get to 20 lore.
I do think if you're going to this challenger event with the intent of participating in
one of these multiplayer multiplayer challenge, multiplayer challenge event, you probably
want to bring a second deck because I'm sure you can construct it a lot better for multiplayer.
There's so many cards that are each opponent and it could be better than if you're just
playing one versus one.
Oh, you're saying not to necessarily just take your core constructed, walk over to the
multiplayer side of it.
In my opinion.
Oh no, absolutely not.
I think you would get stomped because there are people who are very much focused on building
good multiplayer decks and that deck looks, things that are normally throw away and core
constructed get way better in this particular format.
When we played it at pack, we kind of just had our constructed decks that we had at the
time.
Yes.
We didn't realize the willpower league was multiplayer.
Yeah, no, we had no idea.
It's really neat to see.
So we talked about earlier with the Illumineers quest and ability like support getting more
emphasis, where in this chaos style format, the support kind of loses its luster, but
the cards that come up with each opponent all of a sudden gain a lot of cred where in
the Ursula's quest, the each opponent is exactly the same as it would be in one V one where
we have one opponent, it's Ursula.
So those don't really jump up.
But now all of a sudden hypnotize making your opponents each discard one and you get to
draw three is a lot different of a card for three ink than your opponent discards one
and you draw one.
So you start to combine that with other pieces we've seen in the past, like Prince John,
greediest of all.
Now all of a sudden you're drawing six cards for three ink.
That's a huge advantage, especially if you can maybe play like a green blue discard deck
and you're like leveraging by like offloading a bunch of the extra resources into your ink.
Well, really good stuff you can be doing that normally would not pan out.
People like to go to multiplayer for are the longer game strategies, things that there's
just not enough time in one V one because you are the center.
If I am playing you, you are my central focus.
I'm trying to get to 20 before you are.
I'm trying to stop you from getting to 20 at all costs in multiplayer.
I'm going to focus on you when you become a problem.
And then I'm going to shift my focus to the next player when they become a problem or
I'm going to double down and focus on trying to shake all three of my opponents while I
get to the 20 lure first.
So this means that longer, bigger strategy and get paid off.
This is where I think you're what we call magic tribal decks, your theme decks, your
princess decks look a lot better.
Like your new legendary Cinderella looks great in a multiplayer game, right?
Because now you're buffing all your princesses.
And guess what?
I have like five princesses out.
So now all of a sudden I can quest for a whole lot.
Normally it's like the time it's going to take for you to get princesses in play.
And a lot of them are underpowered is going to be more trouble than it ends up being worth.
But in multiplayer, because now everything I have to do is cut into each of my opponents'
princesses.
Now probably about 33% of my focus.
Now I can only give them the benefit of more time where it's like, okay, cool.
They played a couple princesses.
They're not that good.
They're not questing for much.
That's fine.
Then all of a sudden you jam big Cinderella, sing a song and it's like, uh-oh.
Now all of a sudden they've just kind of exploded out of nowhere and are doing something totally
different.
It also gives you a chance to take that step from starter deck to you built your own deck
now.
And I think a lot of players who are new to TCGs tend to build for fun and they want to
play the cards that they like, especially in a Disney game.
Everybody wants to play the cards from the movies they like.
And a lot of times it's disappointing when you go, well, my all Lion King deck got completely
stomped.
I mean, it's going to happen because you're restricting yourself beyond the restriction
of the game.
You're putting an extra restriction on yourself.
But in multiplayer, you perhaps can play your Lion King theme deck because you just have
more time and you get the ability to play more of the characters you enjoy.
So that makes it more exciting and a good step up from the starter decks where we see
something like right now, the current starter deck is a Madrigal theme deck.
Right.
You might have more time to get these synergies for the cards that are supposed to work together.
Absolutely.
The slower, more grindy, more grandiose things tend to happen in multiplayer formats.
So it's a good place for a casual setting for a newer player to start where things aren't
as competitive.
They're not as nervous.
It's not like a tournament setting per se.
Also you get to make new friends when you're sitting down with three people you've never
played with before.
That's really neat.
It's a lot of fun.
You have a more social experience in multiplayer than you do in a constructed format where
some people play very reserved and quiet because they're focused on what they're doing.
Some people are quiet and reserved because they want to maybe intimidate their opponent
a little bit.
Sometimes you have to do things like call a judge over because you feel like your opponent
made a misplay or your opponent did something and tries to do the old takesies, backsies
and you're not allowed to do that in core constructed.
So they're breaking a rule.
So you have to be kind of the bad guy and that can be a negative social experience.
Also a lot of people find the tournament concept a bit overwhelming where now with these side
events and these casual events being supported with prizes, you get something for doing it
so you don't feel like you're just going and paying for a badge and just kind of finding
games as they appear.
You're actually being rewarded for playing the game with like-minded people and you get
to have fun, have laughs, not worry about being the bad guy.
Takesies, backsies are a little less frowned on.
There tends to be levels of rules enforcement that happen at different size categories and
different scale of events.
You get to be able to go, Oh, you know what?
I don't want to necessarily do that because I didn't realize I could do that.
Most of the time in a casual setting, people go, Oh no, go ahead.
Do your cool thing is a lot of really fun way to enjoy the game.
And we've talked about it through each of these little categories, but let's you dust
off those binder cards that you forgot were kind of languishing in the bottom of your
bag way back there.
And the recesses of the pages where it's not, Oh wait, this is actually really good.
This lets me do that for each player, each opponent.
What?
I'll have somebody bring out a card every once in a while.
I'll be like, what does that card do?
Because it's just not usually played in the constructed decks that we are used to.
Absolutely.
In the metagame, you have to memorize so many cards, usually like between half and like
three quarters of a set worth of cards need to be in your brain.
And there's just too many cards now, a four full sets over 800 cards.
We have to try to keep in our brain.
No one can reasonably do that.
A few gifted people certainly can, but the average player is not going to be able to
part of the way you can catch people off guard is playing something that people aren't seeing
very often.
Cause you're not familiar with how the card works as consistently and mechanically as
you are cards that are played constantly.
So it's pretty exciting.
I think multiplayer is a ton of fun.
Really happy to report that a luminaire's quest was indeed a good time.
We are not sponsored by Ravensburger though.
We'll take a sponsorship for real.
We enjoyed it.
It was a good time.
I hope that everybody gets a chance to experience it and have fun fighting against Ursula.
I hope you take some time to look into some of these cool team side events.
There's some neat ways to utilize abilities, cards, concepts, thoughts that you've never
got to.
I'm definitely interested in trying like the 3v3.
There's different levels from that core constructed all the way back, but no matter what the format,
no matter what you're supposed to do, there's one thing that probably ties them all together.
You need to keep questioning.