For decades, the American trading card game market has been dominated by two titles: Magic: The Gathering and the Pokémon Trading Card Game. Outside of North America, other games like Yu-Gi-Oh! have taken hold, but in the US and Canada, the only two games fans can be certain to find in any given game store are Magic and Pokémon. There have been numerous attempts to dethrone the two kings of card battling, but few have ever come close to taking them down. If anyone can do it, though, it's Disney, with its upcoming TCG Lorcana. The House of Mouse has a decent shot at worming its way into the upper echelons of the TCG world, but it will have to play its hand with a great deal of patience and perseverance.

Lorcana was announced in August as the latest collaboration between Disney and tabletop gaming company Ravensburger. Disney and Ravensburger previously worked together on the modular board game series Disney Villainous, which has been a success story for both parties. TCGs are not board games, though, and both Disney and Ravensburger will need to change their approach with Lorcana. They'll need to be willing to fail for a very long time.

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A bushy-browed elf holding up a magic light to better read a scrap of paper

Trading card games ask a lot of their players. The investment demanded by TCGs comes not only from the high financial cost of keeping up with new sets but also from the mental energy necessary to stay on top of an ever-evolving meta featuring mechanics that frequently cycle in and out of play. That means most players will only play one or two TCGs total, and newcomers will default to the games with the largest communities. This makes it profoundly difficult for new TCGs to take hold.

In 2018, Valve released Artifact, an online card battler. The response at the time was overwhelmingly negative, in part because Artifact cost $20 at launch (compared to other online card games, which generally adopted a free-to-play model with microtransactions). The negative response was also because it was Valve's first full-fledged game in more than five years. The gameplay of Artifact was actually pretty good, having been designed in part by Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield. Unfortunately, nobody bought into it. MTG Arena, an online version of Magic, was released around the same time and followed a more conventional free-to-play model, boasting gameplay that TCG fans were already familiar with. While Arena remains incredibly successful to this day, updates to Artifact ceased within three years.

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Some of the rarest Pokemon cards

The story of Artifact is not exactly a unique one. Nearly every TCG over the last three decades has fizzled into obscurity within a few years of its launch. It doesn't have to be that way, though -- Lorcana does not have to go the way of Artifact. What Disney and Ravensburger need to recognize is that when Lorcana arrives in 2023, it will not be as successful as Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon. In fact, it probably won't be that successful within five years of its release. Pulling the plug on the title during that time frame would be the absolute worst thing Disney and Ravensburger could do for the game.

What Lorcana (and any new TCG) needs is patience and a lot of it. The game needs to be able to underperform for a very long time, and a lot of money needs to go into marketing while this happens. The only way for Lorcana to succeed where other games have failed is to build an audience over a long period -- one that starts small and passionate and eventually becomes massive. The game needs time to squash the contrivances it will inevitably release with, and it needs time for its players to learn the ropes and determine what actually distinguishes it from other titles. In time, Lorcana will have a genuine chance at success, but patience is an absolute necessity.