No Disney movie is complete without a macguffin. Something for the heroes and villains to fight over, or something that kicks off the whole story. Disney is full of items, and so it only makes sense that Disney Lorcana gives pride of place to these doohickeys.
Item cards are an integral part of Lorcana, with entire decks underpinned by their power. Whether you’re making a whole item deck, or just want a few to shore up your other plans, here is everything you need to know about item cards.
What Are Item Cards?
Items are one of the three main card types found in Disney Lorcana, along with characters and actions.
Items are cards that remain on the table one played, and have a variety of effects. Some of these you can manually activate on your turn. The cost of these effects varies, from simply exerting like Eye of the Fates’ +1 to a character’s lore value, to more extravagant ones like paying ink into a Shield of Virtue to ready a character, or banish a Magic Golden Flower to heal damage from a character.
Other items have passive effects that are always in effect and don’t need activating. For instance, Coconut Basket lets you heal damage whenever you play a character, or Musketeer Tabard drawing cards whenever a Bodyguard is banished.
Unlike characters, items cannot be challenged. To get rid of them, you’ll need to find cards that specifically allow you to banish or return the card back to its owner’s hand.
How To Use Item Cards
Like characters and actions, playing an item card requires you pay the ink cost specified in the top left corner of the card. Once you’ve paid the cost, the item will remain on the table until either you or your opponent banish it.
Cards have the lowest average ink cost of any card type, with the most expensive being only four ink. This means making decks focused on playing as many of them as possible are very viable, especially in sapphire, the most item-focused ink colour in the game.
You can only activate items on your turn.
Keep an eye out for cards that synergise with items. One of the most powerful is Ariel, Whoseit Collector, who could be questing multiple times a turn just by playing lots of cheap items. You could also run a Belle, Inventive Engineer to reduce the cost of the items you play, or using Maurice, World-Famous Inventor to replenish your hand whenever you play an item.
You don’t need to build a deck entirely around items for it to be effective, though. Outside of the sapphire ink cards, items can bolster other strategies. Dropping a Dinglehopper in a deck full of heavy-hitters you want to smash with can keep them in play for longer, Poisoned Apple can control the board and even take out Princesses complete.
Removing Items
Items are much, much harder for your opponent to banish than characters. As mentioned, you can’t challenge items, which takes away the primary way of interaction with your opponent.
Instead, you’ll need removal cards that specifically deal with items. Even this is limited, as there are only two cards that allow you to banish items in The First Chapter, and they’re both steel cards: Break, and Beast, Hardheaded.
With so little removal, and highly synergistic cards, items are likely going to remain one of the most powerful deck archetypes for quite a long time in Lorcana. Be prepared to play around them, as your chances of breaking through it is very, very slim.