A plant is eating the Great Illuminary, thirteen familiar faces have been replaced by leafy copies of themselves, and the best card in the set banishes into an engine and hands the pieces straight back. Here is what Attack of the Vine! actually changed at the table.
- The Vine captured thirteen glimmers and turned them into Vinelings. Every one of them is Floodborn, so they feed their own payoffs and build a deck on their own.
- Team-up cards are the headline. Shift two characters into one, and when the duo is banished you get the pieces back.
- Christopher Robin bends the two-ink rule for the first time in Lorcana's history.
- Lorcana's second rotation landed with the set. Sets 5 to 8 are out, Core is sets 9 to 13.
The Vine took thirteen characters, and it took them badly
The villain of this set is a plant, which sounds like a joke until you see what it did to Scar.
The Vine has been quietly drinking Floodborn ink since Winterspell. Its defence is to capture glimmers and grow leafy duplicates that fight for it, and thirteen well-known characters got that treatment. They all share the suffix "Created by the Vine," and they all look genuinely unsettling.
Look at the subtype line: Floodborn • Vineling. Every one of them is both, and Scar's abilities read Floodborn. So they trigger each other.
Vinelings are their own deck. They are also thirteen more Floodborn cards.
That cuts both ways. The package runs on its own, and there are another 49 Floodborn cards in Core it can reach for. But splashing two into a deck that is not otherwise Floodborn just gives you two mediocre cards. These payoffs want density.
Ursula is the one that will quietly end up in more lists. Four ink, 3 strength, 2 willpower, 2 lore, and every time a Floodborn character of yours quests, an opposing character loses a point of strength until your next turn. She scores and she blunts their board on the same exert. That is a lot for a four-drop.
The duos, and the loop that is bending the format
Fifteen cards in this set are two characters sharing one card. You Shift them onto a character you already control, which means they cost far less than they read.
Sulley & Boo is the card people are actually complaining about, and this is the sequence that explains why.
You play a Sulley. Next turn you pay four to Shift Sulley & Boo on top of him: a 6/5 with 2 lore, for four ink. Your opponent finally banishes it. And then every character card sitting underneath comes back from your discard, for free.
Removing it does not solve it. It refunds it.
Lilo & Stitch is the cleaner version of the same idea. Shift 3 onto a Lilo or a Stitch and you have a 3/5 with three lore, Resist +1 and Support. Three lore on a body that survives combat is the sort of rate that just wins games quietly.
Christopher Robin breaks a rule Lorcana has never broken
Every deck in this game runs at most two inks. That single constraint is why deckbuilding is interesting, and why you cannot have everything.
Christopher Robin - Hunny Sage says you may run other Hunny characters in your deck regardless of ink type.
Not anything you like. Hunny characters only. But it is still the first time the two-ink rule has ever budged, and it means a Winnie the Pooh deck can legally sit there playing cards from all six inks at once.
The payoffs know it. Winnie the Pooh & Piglet is printed at zero lore and gains one for each different ink type of characters you have in play. In a normal deck that is a bad card. In this deck it is the whole point.
If you want to try it, our deck builder already understands the exemption: drop Christopher Robin in and the off-ink Hunny characters stop being flagged as illegal, exactly as the card says, and nothing else does.
One more thing: the format just got smaller
Lorcana's second rotation landed the same week. The first took out The First Chapter through Ursula's Return; this one took Shimmering Skies, Azurite Sea, Archazia's Island and The Reign of Jafar.
Core Constructed is now sets 9 through 13: Fabled, Whispers in the Well, Winterspell, Wilds Unknown and Attack of the Vine!. Five sets. If you have been standing on the sidelines thinking you were too far behind to bother, that wall is the shortest it has been, and everybody else is rebuilding too.
So what should you buy?
First, the boring and correct answer: go to your local game store. Lorcana is a game you play against people, and the store is where the people are. Most run casual nights that cost nothing, and a store that knows you will teach you the game for free.
If you cannot get to one, or they are sold out:
Booster Pack
Twelve cards, no commitment. The cheapest way to find out whether opening this set is your kind of fun.
Check price at TCGplayer
Booster Box
The volume option. The right pick if you are opening with friends or want a real chunk of the set in one sitting.
Check price at TCGplayer
Illumineer's Trove
Packs plus a storage box, damage counters and lore trackers. The best single buy if you do not own the bits yet.
Check price at TCGplayer
These are affiliate links, so we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you, and that is what keeps this site free. We do not print prices, because sealed Lorcana moves fast and a number typed into an article is wrong within days. We would still rather you went to your local store.
Two more products are coming and neither is out yet, so nobody should be rushing you.
We will cover both properly when they land.
And the note that affiliate revenue gives us every reason not to write: if you want a specific deck, buy the singles. Opening packs and hoping is a slower and more expensive way to get there. Buy sealed because opening cards is fun, which is a perfectly good reason on its own.
Christopher Robin bends the two-ink rule for the first time in Lorcana's history.
Or skip the packs and buy the cards
Singles are the cheaper route to a specific deck, and most of this set is inexpensive. One copy of every card in Attack of the Vine, bought at the cheapest printing of each, comes to well under a hundred dollars. We priced the whole set, including why the same set runs into the thousands if you want every printing.
As a starting point, these are the twelve cards from the set that came up most often across community video and discussion in the three weeks to 2026-08-27:
- The Vine - Towering Stalk
- Stitch - Protector of Frogs
- Woody - Helping a Friend
- Woody - Town Sheriff
- Hades - Meticulous Schemer
- Pocahontas - Guiding the Tribe
- Maleficent - Exultant Spellcaster
- Merida - Wisp Conjurer
- Kevin - Flightless Bird
- Ursula - Created by the Vine
- Beast - Fierce Defender
- Gaston - Superior Archer
That is a snapshot of conversation, not a ranking, and most of them cost less than a dollar. Price any list as you build it in the deck builder, which reads a feed updated daily.
Where to go from here
New to Lorcana? We wrote a free course that starts from never having held a trading card. No account, no email, no paywall, and there never will be one.
Already playing? The card library has every card with its exact text and filters to what survived rotation, and the deck builder enforces the current Core list so you cannot accidentally build something you are not allowed to bring.
The format is still young and nobody has solved it yet. That is the fun part.
