Last week's question was whether Winterspell would change things. This week's answer is: not yet. The format has had a full week to absorb 204 new cards, and the verdict is that its foundations didn't move. Cheshire Cat appears in every competitive deck. Genie and Elsa remain universal. The structural constraints that defined play before Winterspell arrived still define it now.
What makes this week's state revealing is where community energy has gone. The most discussed question right now isn't which Winterspell card to run. It's whether Elsa is too powerful. Players are interrogating existing cards, not discovering new ones. When a new set lands and the sharpest competitive conversation circles back to a card from a previous release, the format is communicating something about how deeply its current constraints run.
Meta Pressure Read
The pressure this week comes from durability, not from any single card gaining ground. Winterspell offered the format an opportunity to recalibrate. Players tested, evaluated, and largely concluded that the new set supplements what they're already doing rather than replacing it. That's not a failure of the set. It's a signal about how locked in the current core has become.
Zero deckbuilding conversation this week. No new archetypes surfacing, no urgent questions about how to build around Winterspell's mechanics. Players who were actively tinkering before launch have settled into refinement mode. The format is in stagnation, and Winterspell's arrival didn't shake it loose.
This matters for how you think about competitive play right now. The constraints are known. Amethyst's inevitability is intact. The question facing every deckbuilder isn't whether to engage with Cat, Genie, and Elsa. It's which of the shifting middle-tier cards deserve the remaining slots.
Cards That Mattered This Week
Angel - Experiment 624
Of the Winterspell cards seeing genuine competitive adoption, Angel has established the clearest foothold. She isn't reshaping how games are played, but her presence in lists reflects something worth noting. It's positive to see her finding homes in competitive builds this week. She earns her slot by fitting into strategies players already trust rather than demanding they rebuild around her.
That's the pattern for Winterspell adoption right now: individual cards integrating into existing shells. Angel represents the set's best current argument for inclusion. The question going forward is whether that quiet integration deepens, or whether it represents the ceiling.
Elsa - The Fifth Spirit
The community's "Let it go too good?" debate landed as one of this week's most-engaged discussions, and it's worth taking seriously. Elsa appears in nearly every competitive deck. The conversation isn't whether she's good. It's whether she's too dominant to allow meaningful variety. That's a different question, and it's one players are starting to ask out loud.
What makes this significant is timing. Winterspell just arrived. If the community's competitive focus remains on the power level of an existing card rather than on integrating the new set, that tells you something about how players are currently experiencing the format. Elsa isn't new pressure. She's pressure the format has absorbed so completely that players are now questioning whether absorption was the right response.
Tipo - Growing Son
Tipo has been gaining ground steadily this week, rising to become one of the more broadly adopted cards in the format. He isn't a Winterspell card. That's the point. While the new set finds its footing at the margins, established cards from earlier sets are continuing to strengthen their positions in the middle tier.
Tipo's trajectory reflects where the interesting movement is right now. The top of the format is stable. The bottom hasn't changed. But between those two fixed points, players are recalibrating which tools they trust, and Tipo is one of several established cards answering that question with consistency.
Practical Implications
If you're building competitively right now, Winterspell's current state suggests a specific approach: evaluate new cards individually against your existing game plan rather than as a set to build around. The cards earning slots this week are earning them by improving what you're already doing. That's the correct frame for integration at this stage.
The more consequential deckbuilding decisions this week are in the middle tier. Which established cards deserve the slots that Winterspell candidates are competing for? Cards like Tipo gaining ground while others are retreating suggests the format is quietly pruning its toolkit. Paying attention to what's falling, not just what's rising, often reveals more about where the format is heading.
The one constraint worth sitting with: if the community is right that Elsa creates too much structural pressure, that's a deckbuilding problem before it becomes a meta problem. Building around her, accounting for her, or accepting the disadvantage of not running Amethyst — those are the choices shaping play this week, same as they were last week.
Creative Space
Winterspell's unexplored space is still genuine. One week of competitive testing doesn't exhaust a 204-card set. The archetypes that define a new set's competitive legacy typically emerge in weeks two through four, as players move from "what does this card do?" to "what does this card enable?"
It's worth watching the interaction rules conversation this week. Community focus on how Winterspell's mechanics interact with the existing card pool often precedes the more interesting deckbuilding discoveries. Understanding how the new cards work is a prerequisite for understanding how to break them. That groundwork is being laid right now, even if the results aren't visible yet.
The format's current stagnation also creates a specific kind of creative window. When the competitive consensus is settled, unusual builds face less pressure to immediately justify themselves. Players willing to accept short-term inconsistency for the sake of exploring Winterspell's deeper applications are operating in space the format hasn't foreclosed.
What's Coming
This week suggests stabilisation at a modest level, with Angel and a handful of others finding consistent homes. Whether that represents a ceiling or an early position before archetype-level discoveries emerge is what the next two weeks will clarify.
Tournament results will be the cleaner signal. Casual and competitive testing both matter, but competitive pressure surfaces applications that casual play doesn't. If Winterspell has combinations that genuinely threaten the current structure, they will tend to appear in competitive contexts first. Watching which new cards survive the transition from testing to top-table play is the most useful thing to track going forward.
The format has held through a new set's arrival. That's notable. Whether it continues to hold, or whether Winterspell's integration gradually loosens the constraints players currently navigate, is the most interesting open question in Lorcana right now.
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