I don’t have the kind of deep pockets to really get into trading card games—but I do like watching the meta fluctuate from afar. Disney’s CCG has been of particular interest, because weird strategies keep emerging around obscure characters like Hiram Flaversham. Or in this case, anti-strategies that you have no good reason to use.
As spotted by Dicebreaker, Lorcana’s rolled out a new batch of previews for its second expansion ‘Into the Inklands’. Included in this latest bundle a litter of puppies from 101 Dalmatians, and while there aren’t 101 bespoke cards (there are five variations for collectors) you can still have 101 of them if you’re some kind of freak who likes to lose.
The Dalmatian Puppy (Tail Wagger) isn’t really anything special—two cost, two strength, three willpower. It has a special trait, though: you can have up to 99 copies of it in your deck. Normally, you can only have four copies of any card in Lorcana.
While this does synergise with the 100th dalmatian Pongo (who can spend a resource named ink to draw character cards into his hand), there’s no real reason why you’d want to do that. Perdita hasn’t been revealed yet to round out that number to a nice 101, but she’ll be included in the full expansion, so maybe it’ll all make sense then.
Granted, from what I can find Lorcana doesn’t have an action limit or anything. If you have 12 of these suckers in your hand, you could play them—ink, however, is limited by the amount of cards in your “Inkwell”, and you can only put one card in there every turn. So unless there’s some synergies, either existing or to-be-revealed, I have no idea how you’d make this work.
Still, it’s not like you have to have all 99 puppies crammed into your deck like your own bespoke fur coat. I’m sure strategies will emerge in due time—alternatively, this’ll stay a cute little reference rather than an actual scourge on the meta. Which is probably for the best, I don’t want to imagine Elsa cleaving her way through a swarm of adorable puppies.
Then again a character from the great mouse detective became the Flaversham-of-the-month, so I have faith someone’ll crack the code to the infinite dalmatians horde strat and summon a tide of excitable puppies like they’re playing the zerg in Starcraft. Cruella de Vil better watch out.
