What happened to Bucky in Disney Lorcana?

Disney Lorcana fans may have heard the phrase "Ban Bucky" online over the last few months, which was the community's reaction to one specific card causing some difficulty in play. Often in tournaments, publishers will choose to remove a card from the competitive scene when it proves to cause an imbalance. Ravensburger certainly heard the cries but made the unusual decision to errata (retrospectively change the card) rather than ban it. We asked Ross Gilbert, our TCG expert to explain what happened:

Bucky's Errata

The errata was no small matter, it’s going to change the entire competitive landscape of Disney Lorcana. Bucky – Squeak tutor received not one but three changes to its original text. For those unfamiliar with the ways of TCGs and erratas, it means that although the card has been printed and is in hands around the world, we read the card as its new, altered version, not as it was originally printed.

Disney Lorcana newcomers need to know that Bucky is not some fringe card being played by a few people but instead one of the very best cards in the entire game. Bucky decks saw at least two entries in top 8 at the Disney Lorcana Challenges in Chicago, Bochum and Fort Worth. It makes your opponent discard a card from their hand whenever you play a Floodborn character and along with a few other tricks will completely wreck your opponent’s hand early and often.

Related article: Why anyone who plays Disney Lorcana should go to competitions

What changed with Bucky?

Firstly, the cost increased from 2 to 3 ink. Given that the majority of decks play a single ink per turn this effectively turns it from a turn 2 play into a turn 3 play, giving players an extra turn before Bucky comes in and starts coming after your hand of cards. That can be the difference in a tight game. It didn’t stop there though.

Bucky was a card printed with the keyword skill “Ward”. This means that your opponent cannot choose the card with any of their character skills, action cards etc. This is huge because the only other way to remove character in Disney Lorcana is by challenging them, but you can only challenge exerted characters and as Bucky’s skill doesn’t require exerting you had this immensely powerful discard skill on a character that couldn’t be challenged OR chosen with other skills! There were still ways to remove it, for instance: cards that targeted all characters and hence didn’t involve choosing, but it made it much more difficult to get Bucky off the board. The errata will remove Ward from Bucky, opening up dozens of new options to remove the 1 willpower character.

This however, was also not enough. The skill has now been changed so that instead of activating whenever a Floodborn character is played, it will now only activate when you use Shift to play a Floodborn character. This is huge because there are plenty of excellent Floodborn characters such as Beast – Tragic Hero that wouldn’t be played with shift (paying less ink to play on top of an existing Beast character) as the cost of playing it normally was easily justified with the power of the character.

Is this the end for Bucky?

These changes won’t mean Bucky can’t be played, but it means Bucky decks will have to be built completely differently. Having to use Shift, needing to wait an extra turn to play it and losing the in-built protection changes the card into something almost unrecognisable. It’s still a great skill that can remove a lot of cards from your opponent’s hand but things are going to have to change now. It’s probably fair to say this squirrel has gone from potential best card in the game, to a fun little tech in some decks.