How to Get Your Local Lorcana Community Started

A lot of early signs point to the fact that the first few months of Disney Lorcana might be a bit rough. I’m primarily using this post from a retailer attending GAMA on the Lorcana subreddit as a basis for this assertion. Unfortunately, those first few months are often some of the most important if you’re looking to get a community up and running, whether you’re looking to do that small-scale at a local gaming store or worldwide at a macro level.

As I’m hovering around the Lorcana content creator ecosystem, a lot of discussion seems to be:

1. Game is released and people are hungry for it.
2. ???
3. Thriving local Lorcana community!

I’ve seen relatively little practical information about how players can hit the ground running and start taking action to get their local community established, especially in an environment where product will be hard to find. Arguably, this is THE MOST important content that proponents of the game could be pushing at this stage.

Why will the first few months be rough for Lorcana?

A few reasons.

• It seems as if friendly local gaming stores will face heavy allocation for their initial orders of product. For the most part, stores order their inventory from distributors. There are some FLGSes that only order from a single distributor (most of these tend to be combination comic/tabletop gaming stores). Most FLGSes order from multiple different distributors. When a hotly anticipated product is released, stores often face allocation, which essentially means that they receive significantly less products from their distributor than they intended to order. Although everyone tends to get hit by allocation in these cases, it usually more heavily affects small and medium sized stores. In terms of prioritizing which stores get more product, distributors tend to favor stores that do larger volumes of sales. On some occasions, smaller stores with good relationships with their sales rep can mitigate some of the bias toward larger stores. They can also mitigate some of this by having accounts with multiple distributors.
• Two weeks after the game’s release at hobby stores on August 18th, the hunt will then begin at broader big box retail stores (places like Target, Wal-Mart, etc.). The buzz is likely high enough that scalpers will be on the lookout and scooping up product to resell online at inflated prices. It also doesn’t help that the big box release date seems likely to coincide with Labor Day, when scalpers will presumably have an easier time hitting multiple stores due to the holiday (at least in the US).
• After those first few weeks, you’re at the whims of when your local FLGSes and big box retailers start to get trickles of restocks. Hopefully, your FLGS will put in place some sort of limitation on how many packs a single customer can buy so that as many as folks as possible get access to product, but that will all depend on how much your FLGS is tuned into helping to build a broad local group of players.
• There will be a lot of people who can’t get their hands on product, which means there’s going to be a lot of people talking and posting negatively about the game.

So, We’re screwed, right?

Well, sort of, yes. Still, there’s a lot you can do to mitigate the damage and make the most of limited resources.

1. CREATE AN ONLINE COMMUNITY FOR YOUR LOCAL AREA

You’re going to need a space for local players to come together and to share when stores are holding game nights, demos, or events. You’ll also want an area to trade cards locally, and if supply is as dire as some folks are predicting, you’ll want to be able to share stock updates with people who will actually play in your area (as opposed to buying up product to sell online). Ideally, you’ll want both a Facebook group and a Discord server. You’ll want them to SOLELY be dedicated to Lorcana, rather than adding Lorcana to an existing local game community. As an example, don’t just add some Lorcana channels to your existing local Flesh and Blood Discord server.

PROTIP: Especially on Facebook, ensure that the name of your group is easily searchable and found by people looking for players that are considering getting into the game. One of the first yes/no decisions folks make about picking up a new game is based on whether or not they’ll have people to play with.

SECOND PROTIP: Make sure you’re sharing a permanent link to your local Discord, not one that expires after a period of time.

THIRD PROTIP: Always post pictures from your weekly events or meetup nights. It’s a quick visual way to show that potential players will have people to play against.

2. Try to get your local players/stores to spread the love

A lot of the early adopters for the game are probably HYPED about it. They’re the folks that will buy multiple cases if possible and spend a weekend scouring Targets within an hour radius of their home to get as much as they can as quickly as they can.

If supply for a game is scarce, this is bad for your burgeoning local community. As soon as you start to network with fellow players, try to get folks on board with throttling back their initial purchases to allow more local players an entry point into the game.

If you have a good relationship with your FLGS, float the idea of asking them to limit the number of packs that a single person can buy per day. As an example of this, in the early weeks of Destiny, my FLGS limited folks to something like 3-4 packs per day. This allows casual players to build up their collection a bit and give them some variety in deckbuilding, and the ability to create multiple decks so as to introduce it to their friends and family, who will hopefully translate into more players at your local events.

3. Buy/Trade/Sell Locally (especially trade)

Online sales prices on the secondary market for Lorcana are likely to be nuts for a while. Resist the temptation to sell for large profits on eBay or TCGplayer and instead trade locally.

4. Try to have multiple decks available so that players who don’t have cards can still play

In the early months of the game, you might have players showing up who are interested in playing but either haven’t decided to take the plunge or haven’t been able to find starters/packs to be able to start playing. In other cases, existing players might bring their friends or significant others to play, but may not have enough to be able to supply them with a deck. Try to encourage your players with larger collections to bring multiple decks so that they can be used by newer folks.

Even better, if starters end up being scarce and you have players with really extensive collections who can create makeshift “starter decks” out of common cards, it’s really helpful to have starter decks to hand out so that players can take them home so they can take them and try to evangelize the games to players you’d otherwise be unable to reach.

5. At casual weekly events, play jank during the event; go H.a.m. in practice games before or after

This is a practice that most of the WnR crew began to adopt at our local Transformers TCG weekly game nights. Before the event started and after it ended, we’d practice our more “competitive” decks against each other, but we’d tend to play experimental or janky decks in the actual event. We did this primarily because we had a lot of weekly players who enjoyed playing, but found a lot of the stronger decks in the meta to be a negative play experience.

Especially early on, you want to offer new players a space where they can experiment with the game, but not get absolutely crushed. In an ideal world, this would involve a lot of sealed and draft play in the first few months of the game, but that may not be a realistic possibility if supplies of product are low.

6. Set a consistent weekly game night and make sure you show up

Consistency is key early on with building a community. Talk to your FLGS, set a day to be the weekly Lorcana event, and make sure you have at least a few people willing to show up on a consistent basis. Potential players like to know that events are occurring with regularity. As an additional benefit, it’s helpful to have players who are really good at onboarding new players with effective demos. Ideally, you want to be able to help walk someone through as basic of a game as possible. A technique I’ve seen Joe use really well is to play the game with both players having their hand of cards face up, and offering options for what the new player could do when it’s their turn.

If you have multiple stores looking to run Lorcana, you’d ideally want them running Lorcana on different days of the week. Especially early on in a game’s lifespan, you want to avoid stores cannibalizing a growing playerbase.

7. Try to find other people who are also willing to help organize

It’s easy to get burnt out while taking the lead on getting a new gaming community up and running. I was thankful to always have great folks who were willing to step up and help take the reins. In particular, I’d like to show some love to Kevin who has been a consistent and reliable leader in just about every local community we’ve ever built. He’s great at teaching the game, and helping to ease newer players through the initial hurdle of getting the rules to click to being comfortable with exploring the deeper levels of the game.

Don’t tell Joe this, but it was also nice to have someone who was just as bossy as I was while we were running Destiny and Transformers at local stores. In all honesty, it was a great arrangement, as I’d usually handle the PR aspect of promoting the game and the meetups, while Joe was more adept at being able to answer rules questions and keep the logistics of the actual event running smoothly.

8. Always be Recruiting

Chances are that there will be a surge of players interested in Lorcana in the first few months of its release. It’s a vital time to try to recruit players, as this will be when it’ll be easiest to get butts in FLGS seats.

That surge will eventually slow to a trickle. Hopefully, by that point, you’ll have a solid base of players, but you don’t want to get complacent. You’ll lose players due to a number of factors (losing interest in the game, life changes, moving to other areas), so you want to always be on the lookout for new players. If you see people hovering nearby watching games, approach them, welcome them, and see if they’re interested in trying it out. Have an elevator sales pitch ready for why they should get into the game.

9. Get a bit unconventional with recruiting

With Lorcana being available in big box retail stores and being based on one of the most beloved brands in the world, there’s the potential to pull in folks who have never set foot in a gaming store. Don’t be afraid to do some guerilla marketing.

Make little posters (maybe aim for about 3″x5″) with a link to your local community (and a QR code link if possible) and try to subtly put them near Lorcana boxes in stores like Target or Walmart. There’s a decent chance that they’ll go unnoticed, but you’re increasing your potential to bring in new players.

10. Use your Resources wisely

In the early months of a new game, you want to use your available resources as wisely as you can. One of those most important resources is time/space at your FLGS. Another is the time that potential players are taking out of their lives to show up to a store to play. Available stock of Lorcana will be the last of your major resources.

Your goal should be to use those resources to get as many people interested and invested in the game as possible. That means that at a local level, you don’t want to run top heavy events where all the prizes go to the top. You’ll run into a situation where the rich get richer and you’ll have folks discouraged and not wanting to come back. If your store has enough Lorcana product to use as prize support, consider opening the packs being used as prizes and dividing the cards by rarity and putting them on display. Allow top finishers to get first pick of what’s available and then let everyone come up and take something in order according to event placing (cycling through a few times as the prize pool dwindles).

This way, everyone gets something and newer players still walk away with something to add to their pool of cards.

Hopefully, you’ll be able to use some of those ideas as you start building your local community. I know a few other members of our usual crew (RJ, Joe, and Tom) are looking forward to playing Lorcana, at one level or another. I’ll probably dip my toe in a little bit. If we start making videos after the game has been released, you’ll find them here!