The reveal for Disney Lorcana’s third set came sooner than I had hoped or expected,🍒 but it’s hard to be critical when what we have to look forward to is this exciting. Into the Inklands is an adventure-themed expansion with a story, art directionꦜ, and a new card type that fit together so perfectly. Even though we’ve only seen a small piece of what the expansion has to offer, I can already tell it’s stronger and more cohesive than Rise of the Floodborn ever was.
So far, all we have for Into the Inklands is a story outline, four cards, photos of some of the product packaging, and a few hints about n🐈ew characters that will appear in the expansion. Narratively, the expansion picks up following the catastrophe at the Great Illuminary in which a flood of mixed ink swept away important Disney lore and transformed Storyborn and Dreamborn glimmers into the Floodborn. Now the illumineers are venturing forth from the Great Illuminary and into Lorcana’s inklands to recover the missing lore.
Disney Lorcana Goes Back To The '90s For Its Third Set, Into The Inklands
New Location cards, DuckTales, and TailSpin all headline Lorcana's adventurous thꦦird set, Into the Inklands.
The expansion's big feature is a new card type called Locations - famous places from Disney movies that represent the Inklands we’re exploring. This is an example of mechanics and narrative coming together to enhance each other, and when you look at the cards that have been revealed - Peter Pan, Lost Boy Leader; Minnie Mouse, Funky Spelunker; and Piglet, Pooh Pirate Captain - their artwork and mechanics all fit perfectly into the theme of adventure.
It’s also f🔥ꦯitting that Disney Afternoon shows Ducktales and Talespin are making their way into Lorcana with this set, as both shows are heavily influenced by the era of pulp adventure. Everything from the color palette to the film choices to even the font for the expansion and color of the booster packs communicate a cohesive, well-crafted theme.
Rise of the Floodborn has a lot of great 𓆏qualities, but I never felt like it told a strong story or came into its own identity as well as Into the Inklands does. It just felt like more of The First Chapter, and part of that is just the fact that it still had the job of establishing Lorcana’s world, while Into the Inklands feels like the true beginning of the story. But it’s also just harder to nail down what exactly Rise of the Floodborn is going for, other than the fact that it has a lot of Floodborn characters.
This just screams 'adventure'.
The First Chapter had just 12 Floodborn - two for each ink color - while Rise of the Floodborn introduced 24, more than ten percent of the entire set. Maybe that could be enough to give the expansion its identity, but the problem is that Floodborn don’t have a particularly strong identity in and of themselves. Sometimes they seem lik🤡e alternative timeline versions of characters, but so do Dreamborn, and sometimes they just seem like more powerful versions of those characters. Sometimes they seem no different from a Storyborn character, and could easily be confused for the movie version of the character you’re already familiar with. Floodborn characters don’t have a strong identity, so the expansion all about F🅺loodborn doesn’t either.
I’m very excited to see how strong Into the Inklands theme is. I have always hoped Lorcana would be more like Magic and Hearthstone than Pokemon when it came to theming and storytelling with its expansions, and Into the Inklands is sending a strong signal that we can look forward to an evolvin🐈g narrative and flavorful expansions that feel like individual chapters, ratꦇher than just another pile of cards to collect. I don’t expect all 204 cards to fit in the same thematic box, but, based on what little we’ve seen, it seems like Into the Inklands is going to be an adventure.
