Disney Lorcana - How To Play Illumineer's Quest: Deep Trouble (2024)

Most of the time, Disney Lorcana has you facing off against another player and racing to 20 lore. It’s a cutthroat world full of grabbing your sword and being prepared, and only one player will come out of it victorious. Unless, that is, you’re playing the Illumineer’s Quest.

Illimineer’s Quest is Lorcana’s cooperative format, allowing you and up to three other friends to take on a stronger, automated enemy. It first debuted with Deep Trouble, and had you take down Ursula in one of the toughest ways to play Lorcana yet.

How To Set Up Illumineer’s Quest: Deep Trouble

In the Illumineer’s Quest: Deep Trouble box, you’ll find everything you need to play straight away, including:

• A paper playmat to track Ursula’s actions.
• Two preconstructed decks.
• A preconstructed Scenario deck.
• Damage and lore tracker counters.
• Two jumbo-sized Battlegrounds cards.
• One jumbo-sized Ursula card.
• A victor’s pack containing an exclusive confetti foil prize card.

To set out the game, place the paper playmat in the middle of the table, placing the Ursula card in the space in the middle.

Out of the three included decks, one has a different card back that is gold instead of the usual purple. This is the Scenario Deck, which your opponent uses throughout Illumineer’s quest.

Before shuffling this deck, search through it for the card Ursula’s Stolen Trident and put it to one side. Then, shuffle the rest of the deck and put it face-down on the Scenario Deck section of the playmat.

Put Ursula’s Stolen Trident on the far left of the large box at the bottom of the mat. This is the play area where cards Ursula plays will go, and she begins the game with the Stolen Trident already out.

Next, choose your Battlegrounds. There are four Battlegrounds of varying difficulties, and each offer both you and Ursula different abilities or drawbacks to make it harder or easier:

The Battlegrounds card should be on the table for all to see, but it doesn’t have a set place on the mat like other cards.

Finally, you’re ready to set up your own decks. Each play shuffles their deck and draws seven cards and decides upon their mulligans as you would in a normal game of Lorcana. Ursula doesn’t have the ability to mulligan, as she plays her cards in a slightly different way to you.

While the box includes two prebuilt decks, you can play with any legal Lorcana deck in Illumineer’s Quest. Keep in mind, though, that decks you build for the competitive meta might not be as strong in this format, and vice-versa.

Starting The First Turn

Ursula always starts first. Her turns work in a regimented way each time, meaning her deck plays itself, and all you need to do is resolve the effects in the correct order.

Ready

Ready all of Ursula’s exerted cards. This is the exact same as in any other game of Lorcana.

Set

If any of her cards have effects that trigger at the start of the turn, they all happen now. If multiple of these effects trigger at the same time, you can choose the order of how they resolve, but you must sort them all before moving on to the next part of the turn.

Resolve The Row

Unlike a normal turn where you’d draw a card after the Set phase, Ursula works down the row of her cards and resolves them one by one, left to right. Depending on the card type and its abilities, how that looks will differ:

• Characters will quest for lore unless they have Reckless. If they do, you collectively choose which of your team’s character it will challenge, and it challenges like normal. If there are no legal target for a challenge, or if a character without Reckless can’t quest for any reason, they will not do anything.
• If an item needs to exert for its ability, it will do so.
• Ursula doesn’t need to pay ink to do anything, she just needs to have the ink in her inkwell.

Draw

Next, Ursula draws her cards. The amount she draws depends on the difficulty of the Battlegrounds, how many players there are, and how much lore Ursula has collected:

To draw these cards, take them face-down from the Scenario Deck one at a time, and place them face-down on the Hand space of the playmat.

Reveal

The final phase of Ursula’s turn is the most devastating, as it’s when she starts to play cards and build up her inkwell. To do this, flip the top card of the hand pile and check the ink cost.

If the ink cost is higher than the number of cards in Ursula’s inkwell, it is placed face-down into Ursula’s inkwell. Unlike you, Ursula can ink as many cards per turn as she needs to.

If the ink cost is lower than the number of cards in the inkwell, it's played for free. Ursula does not exert ink to pay for cards – she simply checks how much ink she has. If there are three cards in her inkwell, she can play any card revealed that costs up to three ink.

Characters and Items both go into the play space in the furtherst-left free space available. As you have already resolved the row, they don’t quest or exert this turn. If it’s an action card, you resolve it right away, and then put it into the discard pile on the playmat.

This means that, every turn, Ursula could be playing lots of things for free or making a large inkwell. This is what makes her so dangerous, as she’ll vastly outpace you in just a few turns.

Once you’ve revealed and either inked or resolved every card in Ursula’s hand, her turn ends and it moves over to your team’s.

Your Turn

On your turn, everybody on your team takes their actions simultaneously. Other than that, it is identical to a regular game of Lorcana.

Each player has their own deck, hand, discard pile, and inkwell. Like normal, you can only ink one card per turn, and only if that card is inkable. Unlike Ursula, you also must exert your ink to pay costs.

Each turn, any player can pay lore to activate the abilities listed on the Encounter card. However, each ability can only be activated once per turn, regardless of who did it the first time.

Winning The Game

The goal of the Illumineer’s Quest is to prevent Ursula from generating a total of 40 lore. This is done by having every player collect 20 lore each. Players who reach 20 lore remain in the game, but they can’t collect lore for their teammates – everybody must individually get their own lore.

It is still worth ‘cleared’ players generating lore, though. Each Battlefield has its own abilities that allow you or Ursula to pay lore for bonuses, and having players who are past that 20 lore limit work on buffing the remaining players with those abilities can be a good way to pull it back in a pinch.

Ursula also wins if any player runs out of cards in their deck. If they go to draw and find they can’t, the entire team loses. This isn’t true for Ursula; if she runs out of cards in her deck, you shuffle the discard pile and make a new deck from it.

Prize Card

When you’ve beaten Ursula for the first time, you’re allowed to open up the included promo prize pack. This card is legal in regular games of Lorcana and the Illumineer’s Quest, and comes in a rare confetti foil treatment.

If you’re playing alongside a team, unfortunately, you’ll need to work out who gets the card. This could be whoever generated the most lore in the game, or perhaps you could play a regular game of Lorcana to decide.