While it’s easy to get sidetracked by Disney Lorcana’s many characters and items, sometimes the most powerful thing you can pack in your deck is the humble action. Representing moments from iconic Disney movies, actions could easily be the difference between an embarrassing defeat and victory.
Perhaps the most iconic moments in Disney movies are, of course, their songs. Actions bring these to Lorcana too, letting you serenade the table with your rendition of Let It Go while you upset their gameplans and pull yourself ever closer to that wonderful 20 lore.
What Are Action Cards?
Actions are one of the three main types of cards in Disney Lorcana. Like all other cards, actions are played by paying ink, and come in one of six different ink colours. While you can have as many different actions as you’d like, you can only have four of the same name card in your deck.
Unlike characters and items, though, actions are unique in that they don’t remain on the table once you’ve played it. Instead, actions are one-off effects. Once you’ve played it, you must use the effect straight away, and then put the card into your discard pile.
Actions are perhaps the simplest card type in the game, as they don’t have any abilities that need manually activating like items, and can’t challenge or quest like characters. They simply come into play, do their thing, and then leave.
What Are Song Cards?
Songs are a subtype of actions. They’re identical to actions in almost every way: they’re one-off effects that you can play by paying ink.
However, songs have one major advantage: you can play them for free, provided you control the right character. Every song specifies a specific cost of character at the top of its ability text. By exerting a character of that cost or greater, you’re allowed to play the song without paying any ink.
Playing cards for free will almost always be a good move – songs let you play powerful effects, while also keeping enough ink open to play more characters, items, or even other actions.
Keep in mind that singing songs does open up that character to being challenged, though – if you have a key character you need to protect for your overall strategy, using it to sing a song might not be the best play.
Sometimes, a character may have the Singer keyword. This allows them to be exerted as if they were a higher cost for singing songs; for instance, Sebastian, Court Composer may only cost two ink, but can sing songs that would normally require a cost of four or greater.
How To Use Actions And Songs
Actions should be considered the backbone of your deck. Your characters and items will do the heavy lifting, but without actions to support them, you could find yourself facing insurmountable odds, have no cards in your hand, or even be without a decent board state to speak of.
Actions can do virtually everything. Cards like He’s Got A Sword and Control Your Temper! can buff or nerf characters to make challenging easier, while others like Friends on the Other Side and Develop Your Brain can help you maintain card advantage.
Some actions are even the exact same as the main abilities of more expensive character cards. For instance, Elsa, Snow Queen’s Freeze ability and Maleficent’s Dragon Fire abilities are also found on the Freeze and Dragon Fire action cards. If you’re running a deck with Snow Queen, you might also want to run the action version of Freeze to ensure your deck has a bit more consistency.
Lots of action cards can’t be put into your inkwell. When building your deck, make sure you’re running enough inkable cards to ensure you have a proper ink curve.
While other games sometimes allow you to play cards on your opponent’s turn, Lorcana only allows you to play them on your own turn. Compared to other games, though, Lorcana doesn’t rigidly define the steps and phases of your turn beyond the ready, set, and draw steps. This lets you do some funky things with actions and songs.
For instance, there is nothing stopping you from throwing out a Control Your Temper! to lower an opponent’s character’s Strength before you challenge it, and then throwing out a Fire The Cannons! to ensure it has enough damage to finish it off.