Disney Lorcana's Attack of the Vine set breaks one of the game's most important rules

Christopher Robin appears as a Hunny Sage who is ready to break the game

One of Magic: The Gathering's foundational pillars is its color pie. Each of the game's five colors has its own identity, strengths, weaknesses, and mechanics, shaping everything from card design to deckbuilding. Over the game's 30-plus-year history, Wizards of the Coast has repeatedly found ways to bend those boundaries, allowing players to combine colors and strategies that once seemed impossible.

Disney Lorcana isn't quite there yet. But three years after launch, it's about to take its biggest step in that direction.

Since the trading card game's debut, deckbuilding has been governed by a simple rule: your deck can contain cards from one or two ink colors. That restriction helps define a deck's identity and forces players to make meaningful choices about which cards make the cut.

With the upcoming Attack of the Vine set, due out July 24, Christopher Robin from Hundred Acre Wood plans to destroy all that. During a press preview last week, Polygon got an early look at several new cards from Attack of the Vine and the upcoming Illumineer's Quest, The Great Hunny Rescue.

Christopher Robin – Hunny Sage is an amethyst-sapphire (purple-blue) card that lets you search your deck for a Hunny card and add it to your hand with “Magical Summons.” More importantly, however, his top ability “Gather the Party” allows you to have other Hunny characters in your deck, regardless of inktype. So, as long as they have “Hunny” on their type line, they can be included in a deck with Christopher even if they’re amber, emerald, ruby, or steel.

More importantly, Christopher Robin doesn't exist in a vacuum. Attack of the Vine already includes several Hunny characters spread across multiple ink colors, making Gather the Party feel less like a novelty and more like the foundation of an entirely new archetype. It’s also likely that moving forward, various reprints of characters from Hundred Acre Wood will pick up the “Hunny” subtype.

In Attack of the Vine, we get an evolved version of Pooh himself, who used to be a mere “Hunny Wizard” but now appears as Winnie the Pooh – Hunny Archmage. When you have two or more Hunny characters in play, he gets plus two Lore when he quests. He’s in amethyst and can therefore slot in a deck with Christopher Robin regardless of Gather the Party, but other Hunny characters fall into the other inktypes.

Comically enough, they also each have classic fantasy party archetypes. The theme isn't exactly subtle. Pooh is the wizard. Roo is the rogue. Tigger is the barbarian. Christopher Robin himself serves as the sage who brings the entire group together.

Roo – Hunny Rogue is an emerald card that picks up Evasive whenever you have another Hunny character in play. Then there’s the ruby Tigger – Hunny Barbarian. Whenever he challenges another character, you can ready a target Hunny character. If you do, that character cannot quest for the rest of this turn. Without Gather the Party from Christopher Robins, you wouldn’t be able to include these versions of Roo and Tigger in the deck. It's a deckbuilding exception unlike anything Lorcana has attempted before.

It's also a clever piece of game design. Rather than simply printing a handful of Winnie the Pooh cards in the same colors, Ravensburger has intentionally spread them across multiple inks and then given Christopher Robin the ability to unite them under one banner. Without Gather the Party, many of these characters would never realistically appear in the same deck. With it, players can begin mixing and matching cards from across Lorcana's six-color system. That opens the doors to all sorts of other strategies complementing Hunny typal.

Whether the strategy ultimately proves competitive remains to be seen. What isn't in doubt is that Attack of the Vine represents one of the biggest deckbuilding experiments Lorcana has attempted since launch. For the first time, a Lorcana archetype can largely ignore the game's traditional ink restrictions — all because Christopher Robin decided that friendship and love was more important than the rules of the game.