The Vine Finally Fights Back: Lorcana's Attack of the Vine Closes a Year-Long Story and Rotates the Format

By entgrove · July 17, 2026

Ravensburger's next Disney Lorcana set, Attack of the Vine!, caps a year-long storyline and introduces glimmers from Pixar's Up, Monsters, Inc., and Turning Red. It prereleases July 17 in game stores and select Disney Parks locations before a wide release on July 24. The set also triggers the first Core Constructed rotation, cutting several sets from the competitive format.

The Vine has been creeping through Disney Lorcana's story for a year, and Ravensburger's next set is where it finally takes over. Attack of the Vine! prereleases July 17 in game stores and select Disney Parks and stores, then goes wide on July 24. It brings Pixar's Up, Monsters, Inc., and Turning Red into the game, adds a new Team mechanic, and rotates the competitive format for the first time.

A year of buildup, and 100% organic panic

Ravensburger announced the set from Seattle on June 23, pitching it as the culmination of a storyline that has run across earlier sets rather than a standalone theme. The Vine has been growing in the background, and the ink flood that Illumineers lived through in previous sets turned out to be the thing feeding it.

Nicole Smith, Senior Narrative Designer at Ravensburger, laid out the setup: "Adventure awaits in Lorcana as the realm grapples with the implacable threat of the Vine that's grown completely out of control. Now that the Vine has soaked up all of the magical ink from the flood Illumineers experienced in earlier sets, it's an extremely powerful adversary that will take a lot of teamwork to thwart."

That is a neat piece of design work. The flood was a mechanic and a story beat in its own right, and rather than moving on from it, Ravensburger made it the cause of the next crisis. The consequence carries forward instead of resetting.

Summer blockbuster art and two Iconics built on teamwork

The art direction leans on cinematic summer blockbuster posters, and the Enchanted cards are where that reads most clearly. The two rarest cards in the set, the Iconics, carry extra foil treatments and movie-poster-style art.

Both Iconics are duos, which is not an accident: Lilo & Stitch, Fun-Loving Friends and Belle & Beast, Certain as the Sun. In a set whose entire premise is that no single glimmer can beat the Vine alone, putting two pairs at the top of the rarity chart is the theme showing up in the chase cards.

The Team keyword changes how Shift works

The mechanical expression of that theme is a new Team classification. Steve Warner, co-creator of the game and Game Design Director at Ravensburger, explained it: "Glimmers will have to team up to defeat the vine, and we wanted to show that mechanically with the new ways to Shift using the Team classification. Team allows any character with the same name as one of the characters in the team to act as the shift base. This opens up a lot of options in the Infinity format, as well as providing a lot more options of what to shift on in Core Constructed."

For anyone newer to Lorcana: Shift lets you play a more expensive version of a character on top of a cheaper one you already have in play, paying a reduced cost. Normally the name has to match. Team cards loosen that, since either character named on the team card can serve as the base. That means a Lilo & Stitch team card can shift onto a Lilo you already have out, or a Stitch, which roughly doubles the number of boards where the card is live. In Infinity Constructed, where the whole card pool is legal, that opens up a lot of old cards as shift targets.

The first rotation lands on July 17

The bigger news for competitive players is the rotation. Starting July 17, 2026, the Core Constructed format used at Disney Lorcana Challenge events and other official events will only allow cards from Fabled, Whispers in the Well, Winterspell, Wilds Unknown, and Attack of the Vine!. Everything else rotates out.

That is a real reset. Sets going back to The First Chapter come off the table for Core Constructed, and decks built around them need rebuilding before the prerelease weekend. Rotation is standard practice for long-running trading card games, since it keeps the entry cost sane and stops the format calcifying, but it is still the first time Lorcana players are living through it.

The escape hatch is Infinity Constructed, where every Lorcana card remains legal with one exception. That is the format used at the recent Disney Lorcana Challenge events in Dortmund and Indianapolis, so a rotated-out favorite still has somewhere to be played.

Gen Con, D23, and what comes after

Ravensburger has events and announcements planned for Gen Con 2026 from July 30 to August 2, and for D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event starting August 14, 2026. The roadmap past Attack of the Vine! is already partly public:

• Hyperia City, a music-driven set set in a bustling metropolis, marking the debut of glimmers from Pixar's Coco. Prereleases October 16, 2026 at Ravensburger Play Hub stores, with Prerelease Boxes returning, and releases wide October 23.
• Into the Inkdark, arriving in Q1 2027, built around the villains.
• An unnamed Q2 2027 set taking Illumineers into the cosmos for a galactic adventure among the story stars.

Coco making its Lorcana debut in a music-themed set is about as on-the-nose as Ravensburger could get, and given how much of that film's emotional weight rides on a single song, the set has a high bar to clear.

Why fans are buzzing

Two things are landing at once. Attack of the Vine! is the payoff to a year of story, with new franchises and an Iconic pair chase, which is the fun part. The rotation on the same date is the part that costs players something, since decks that were legal on July 16 will not be on July 17.

The prerelease on July 17 at game stores and select Disney Parks locations is the first chance to play with the set, and preorders are already open ahead of the July 24 wide release. Anyone playing Core Constructed should audit their decks against the five legal sets before then. Anyone who just wants to keep playing their old cards has Infinity Constructed, and Gen Con at the end of the month to see what Ravensburger says next.