First look at Attack of the Vine! Pre-release Kits: open the door to the new set and jump right into your next adventure!
Pre-release kits: the best way to enjoy Attack of the Vine! pre-release events!
The newest set of Disney Lorcana, Attack of the Vine!, finally released on the 17th of July and as usual the weekend has been filled with amazing pre-release events. These events are the best way to meet new Players, make new friends and experience the new cards before everyone start deck building their decks for the more competitive events later in the season.
However, these events can be a little scary, a bit overwhelming, and super exciting at the same time. Considering the format for these events is not constructed, all the cards from the set can end up among the ones you pull from your booster packs in sealed, drafted or pack rush format. A bit like the immense number of doors in Monster&Co, you have no idea which one will end up on your station and even left what will lie behind them.
In Attack of the Vine! you can actually end-up finding a Monster, a Toy or a funny giant Red Panda together with tons of friendly faces seen in other sets. Most important these events are now using a dedicate product, the Pre-release Kit, to make the experience even more playful and enjoyable. Ravensburger sent me a kit to try just a week ahead of the release and I couldn't resist the need to open more by attending a few events. If you are interested, I would be very happy to show you what I pulled and how good are those kits.
Your Door to your next set: Pre-release Kit contents
The Pre-release kit is a relatively new product that was introduced for set 12. Specifically designed to be used at pre-release events, it features almost everything you need to play including six Booster Packs, few dice and some collectibles. The quantity of these packs is perfectly suitable to play any of the most common Disney Lorcana formats being this a Sealed or a Draft tournament. Moreover, the six packs can also be used to play Pack Rush.
In addition to the packs, the new kit includes a collectible Promo card and a sort of a movie Poster. Attack of the Vine! Kits feature six promo cards and they are all stamped with the name of the set. All the promos included in this kit share the same artwork of a related card from the set but they all have a special Rainbow foil finish and a promo golden frame making them very collectible.
The other collectible items included is very specific to the set the kit comes from. In Wilds Unknown, for example, these kits included a postcards showing the three main Domains introduced in the set as the set was centred around exploration and discovery. Attack of the Vine! Kit features instead three movie poster to link straight into the “Cinemahyem” artwork style of the Enchanted of the set. My first kit included a poster from the movie “UP!” with a quote saying “Earning that Botany Badge just got Prickly”. The second poster you can pull is from the movie Encanto (“The Vine is strong, This family is Stronger”) while the last one shows Mickey and Minnie (“The unexpected Creeps in Attack of the Vine!”).
I found the posters to be really fun and a very nice touch. However, the collector in me now has to find a good way to store them in the binder together with the cards and promos from the set. I have a few ideas on how to sort this out and I will show some pictures of a couple of different approaches once I finish collecting and adding all of them to the binder.
Last but not least, the Pre-release Kit comes with four damage counter dice similar to the ones you have in the Illumineer's trove and a paper Deck box. As seen previously, the paper box is larger than boxes you may have found in other Lorcana products but they are quite handy to store your deck for the events or cards from the set later.
Pre-release Kit: more powerful than screams!
One of the most important aspects I like about the Pre-release kits is that these are specifically designed to be used during the set pre-release events. In the past, the six packs players received during a sealed events came from standard Booster boxes meaning the four Players will essentially share the content of a box with no way to balance the pulls each Player can get. Ravensburger does not like to talk about Pulls and statistics but I am sure they have thought how advantageous can be to balance these kits to make the sealed games more enjoyable for everyone.
On this topic, I took a look at the cards I pulled from the four kits I used during this weekend. Although the kits I opened are not very significant from a statistical point of view, you can see from the picture below that the pulls can vary a bit from kit to kit. Pulling one or two Legendary from a kit is not bad at all and it feels very aligned to the overall numbers we see from Booster boxes. The amount of Super Rare seems to vary a bit more although I feel pulling the Epic Winnie the Pooh that balanced a bit getting only two Super Rare cards. All in all, not too bad considering that we saw many Enchanted being pulled from these kits too.
I was not lucky this time when I played my first sealed at my locals on Saturday. However, I am very happy about how that event turned out as there were a few new players and we had a great time. I also did well but in part this is due to the suggestion on how to improve my deck one of our friends gave me. Together with being really good in Constructed format, our local “King of Sealed” is also an amazingly nice guy that always takes some time to help players improving their decks during the event itself. I really appreciate when you can exchange ideas and suggestions freely even during a competitive event as it shows that having fun and enjoy Disney Lorcana is more important that beating your opponent or securing the prize. Next task would be to start pepping for Set Champs and I am really interested to see which Decks and Mechanics will become more dominant in this new meta!
