Card Advantage and Tempo in Disney Lorcana

You already count lore and turns. Strong players count two more things: cards and tempo. They are the hidden currencies of Lorcana, and most long games are won by the player who spent them better.

Card advantage

Card advantage means having more useful cards than your opponent, in hand and in play. You gain it when one of your cards deals with two of theirs, or when an effect draws you extra cards. You lose it when you spend two cards to deal with one of theirs.

Some common sources:

• Card draw. Any effect that draws you an extra card is a card ahead.
• Clean kills. A challenge where your character survives costs you nothing and removes one of their cards.
• Two-for-one effects. An action that banishes two characters, or one that banishes a shifted character and sends its whole stack to the discard pile.
• Characters with value when played. A character whose ability draws a card or removes something gives you a card’s worth of value and still stays in play.

Every card is two things

Lorcana has a twist other card games do not. Almost every card can become ink. That means a card in hand is worth something even when you cannot play it well: it can be your ink for the turn.

This makes card advantage stronger than it looks. Extra cards mean better choices about what to ink. A player with eight cards in hand inks the weakest one and keeps the rest. A player with two cards may have to ink a card they need.

Tempo

Tempo means making the most of your turns and your ink. You gain tempo when you use all your ink every turn, when a cheap card answers an expensive one, and when your characters quest while theirs are still drying.

Some common sources:

• Using all your ink. Ink left unspent at the end of a turn is tempo lost forever.
• Cheap answers. A 2-cost action that removes a 5-cost character wins a big tempo swing.
• Shift. Playing a stronger version of a character on top of a dry one lets it act at once. You skip the drying turn. The cost: two cards in one stack, both lost if it is banished.
• Songs. Singing a song with a character you already have costs no ink. The cost is that character’s quest or challenge this turn.

Trading one for the other

The two resources pull against each other. Drawing a card usually costs ink and time. Spending an extra card to remove a threat right now gains tempo but costs card advantage.

Which to favor depends on the clock from the previous lesson:

• When the race is close and short, favor tempo. Getting there first is all that matters, and a card in hand that never gets played is worth nothing.
• When the game is long and the board keeps trading, favor cards. The player who runs out of things to do first usually loses.
• When you are far behind on the clock, you may need to spend cards freely to slow your opponent down, then rebuild.

Shift: value or risk?

Shift deserves its own look, because it is both. A shifted character arrives with the drying turn skipped, usually with better stats and abilities, for a lower cost than playing it outright. That is strong tempo.

But it stacks your cards. If your opponent banishes the shifted character, every card in the stack goes to the discard pile. You lose two cards to one of theirs. Before shifting into an exposed position, ask what can banish the result next turn.

Spot the swing

The biggest moments in a game are swings in one of these resources. A few to watch:

• An opponent who spends a whole turn’s ink on one big character added nothing else to the board that turn. If you can answer that one card cheaply, the swing is yours.
• A player who must challenge with two characters to remove one is falling behind on cards.
• A hand that keeps growing while the board stays small usually means a big turn is coming.

The habit

At the end of each game, ask: did I lose on cards, on tempo, or on lore? Each answer points to a different fix. Losing on cards suggests more draw or more efficient trades. Losing on tempo suggests a lower curve or cheaper answers. Losing on lore with plenty of both suggests you were not questing enough.