Disney Lorcana Songs Explained: How Singing Works, All 121

Be Prepared costs 7 ink and banishes every character on the table. In three years I have paid full price for it exactly twice, and both times it was a mistake.

That is the whole idea behind Lorcana songs in one card. A song has an ink cost printed on it, and that number is not really a price - it is a requirement. It tells you how big a character you need standing around, ready, before the card becomes free. Ravensburger prices songs assuming you will never pay ink for them, which is why the average song costs 3.83 ink and the average non-song action costs 2.58.

So I pulled the whole pool from the Lorcast API and counted every song - 121 of them across 13 main sets, from The First Chapter through Attack of the Vine! - then lined the counts up against Comprehensive Rules 2.1.0, effective April 30, 2026. The rules text is shorter than you would expect and the failure modes are worse.

What actually makes a card a song

Rule 5.4.4.1 is the definition, and it is purely a printing question: a song is a card with both "Action" and "Song" on its classification line. There is no separate song card type. Songs are actions that got one extra paragraph of rules.

That paragraph is 5.4.4.2, and it is the entire mechanic:

"You may pay, 'exert a character with ink cost N or greater' to play this card instead of its ink cost," where N equals the ink cost of the song. This is called singing the song.

Three details in that sentence decide most games.

N equals the song's own ink cost. There is no separate "sing cost" number on the card. A 5-cost song needs a 5-cost character. The reminder text - "(A character with cost N or more can exert to sing this song for free.)" - is just that rule restated on every song ever printed.

It is an alternate cost, not a discount. Rule 1.5.5.1 puts singing in the same category as Shift. Rule 4.3.2.2 adds the limit that catches people: if multiple alternate costs could apply, you choose exactly one and ignore the rest. You cannot stack singing on top of another cost reduction.

Ink cost, not current cost. Cost reducers do not lower the bar. The character's printed ink cost is what gets compared, and rule 4.3.5 states outright that effects changing how you pay for a card do not change its ink cost. If you are used to MTG cost reducers shrinking everything on the stack, this is the opposite instinct.

If turn structure is still new, how to play Disney Lorcana covers questing, challenging and drying - all three matter below.

The census: 121 songs across 13 sets

121 songs out of 2,479 unique cards. Just under 5 percent of everything ever printed, and the distribution across the six inks is almost suspiciously flat.

Dual-ink counts land in both columns, which is why the total reads 123 - there are exactly two dual-ink songs in the game, The Family Madrigal (Amber/Amethyst, Archazia's Island) and Into the Unknown (Amethyst/Sapphire, Reign of Jafar).

Per set the print rate has been steady rather than growing: 12, 12, 10, 15, 7, 6, 5, 9, 4, 9, 11, 8, 11. The low point is Fabled with 4, the high is Ursula's Return with 15 - the set that introduced Sing Together and leaned hard into the theme.

Rarity skews high on purpose: 42 Rare, 35 Common, 34 Uncommon, 6 Super Rare, 2 Promo, and one each at Enchanted (We Don't Talk About Bruno) and Legendary (Circle of Life). Our rarities guide covers which of those tiers are mechanical and which are cosmetic.

Songs cost more on purpose

Here is the number that reframes the card type. Average ink cost of a song: 3.83. Average ink cost of a non-song action: 2.58. Songs are printed a full ink and a quarter more expensive than the actions they sit next to.

They are not worse. They are priced against a cost you are expected to route around.

The inkwell symbol tells the same story from the other side. Across the whole pool 76 percent of cards are inkable, but songs get squeezed as they get more expensive:

Cheap songs are safe to ink away when you draw them early. Expensive ones mostly are not, which means a 7-plus song in your opening hand is a dead card you are stuck holding for six turns. That is a real deckbuilding cost, and it is why the big songs are almost always one-ofs.

The supply side is the other half. 34 of the 121 songs cost 5 or more, but only 579 of the game's 1,872 characters cost 5 or more, and just 142 cost 7 or more. Be Prepared has 142 legal singers in the entire card pool before you narrow to your two inks. Plan for that or do not run the card.

The five ways a song gets stuck in your hand

Singing fails more often than the reminder text suggests, and the reasons are spread across five different rules.

Your singer is drying. Rule 5.1.1.11: a character that entered play this turn cannot quest, cannot be declared as a challenging character, and cannot exert. Singing requires exerting. A character played this turn cannot sing, full stop, and this is the single most common way a planned song turn falls apart.

Your singer is already exerted. You need a ready character. Questing with your big body and then trying to sing with it is the beginner mistake that never fully goes away, because the correct order is almost always sing first, quest second - which is impossible with one character and trivial with two.

Your singer is too small. Rule 8.11.2 is precise: Singer changes what a character counts as for singing only, and only while a card is being played. The ink cost printed on the card never moves.

Somebody turned the music off. Three cards shut singing down as an effect. Gantu - Experienced Enforcer stops all characters exerting to sing until the start of your next turn. Pete - Space Pirate stops opposing characters singing while he is exerted. Ursula - Sea Witch Queen locks other characters out of exerting to sing entirely. Three more characters simply cannot sing themselves - Ariel - On Human Legs (Voiceless), Ulf - Mime and Dopey - Drawn to Music.

An effect already handed you the song for free. Rule 6.1.7: if an ability instructs you to play a card for free, you ignore all costs and cannot choose to pay another alternate cost instead. This matters more than it sounds - a free cast does not exert anyone, so any "whenever this character sings a song" trigger never fires.

The clean exception is Shift. Rule 8.10.5 allows a shifted character to exert and sing if the character it was stacked onto was dry when the shift happened. Stack a 7-cost body onto a dry 3-cost one and you get a legal Be Prepared singer on the turn you play it.

One more that goes the other way: rule 8.7.4 confirms a Reckless character can still exert to sing. Reckless stops questing, not singing, and turning an otherwise-stuck Ruby body into a free song is often the best line available - one of several places where reading the actual rule beats reading the reminder text, as our keyword breakdown covers in more detail.

Singer is 31 cards and basically one ink

Singer N (rule 8.11.1) means the character counts as ink cost N for singing. Thirty-one cards carry it, all of them characters, and the ink split is not close: 27 Amber, 4 Ruby, counting dual-ink cards under both inks. The four Ruby exceptions are all musicians - both Powerline printings, Max Goof and King Louie - which is exactly the kind of flavour discipline I will always take.

Printed values run Singer 3 (4 cards), 4 (7), 5 (11), 6 (4), 7 (2), 8 (1) and 9 (2). What matters is not N, though, it is N minus the card's own ink cost - the gap between what you paid and what you can sing.

Cinderella - Melody Weaver is the ceiling: a 5-ink Legendary from Ursula's Return that sings anything in the game, since the most expensive song ever printed costs 10 and there are only two of those. Mickey Mouse - Amber Champion matches her gap conditionally, gaining Singer 8 only while you control two or more other Amber characters.

Three cards push the number further from outside. Atlantica - Concert Hall, a 1-ink Amber location, gives characters +2 cost to sing while they are there. Naveen's Ukulele banishes itself for +3 to one character this turn. Record Player gives your Stitch characters +1. Rule 8.11.3 confirms these stack with Singer, so a Singer 7 body standing on Atlantica sings as a 9.

The oddest card in the category is Meilin Lee - Lead Vocalist: a 1-ink Amber character with Singer 3 whose own ability says she cannot sing songs without Sing Together. Singer 3 on a 1-drop would be the best rate in the game, so it comes with a leash.

Sing Together turns the whole board into one voice

Sing Together N (rule 8.12.1) lets you exert any number of your or your teammates' ready characters whose combined ink costs meet or exceed N. Eighteen songs have it, and it arrived in bursts rather than as an evergreen: 6 in Ursula's Return, 6 in Reign of Jafar, 2 in Fabled, 4 in Attack of the Vine!, and nothing at all in the five sets in between.

Values run 5 to 10, clustering at 8 (5 songs). Every Sing Together song costs exactly its N, so The Mob Song and Second Star to the Right both sit at 10 ink - and both are trivially castable off four medium bodies you were not using this turn.

Rule 8.12.3 is the one to build around: every character that helped sing counts as having sung. Any "whenever this character sings a song" trigger on any of them fires. The rulebook's own example runs two copies of Ursula - Deceiver of All singing together and getting both triggers.

Sing Together also fixes the drying problem partially rather than fully. Each individual contributor still has to be ready and dry. What it removes is the need for one single character to be big enough, which for an Amber board of 2s and 3s is the difference between never casting a 9-cost song and casting it on turn six.

The songs that only make sense sung

Twenty-three songs draw cards, twelve banish something, and a handful reset the game entirely. These are the ones whose printed cost is a bluff.

Note how many of those are Steel and Ruby - the two inks that already own removal per our ink breakdown. A song is the only way those inks get a board wipe without spending a turn's worth of ink, which is why aggressive Ruby decks tolerate a card as awkward as Be Prepared.

The cheap end is the opposite trade. Six songs cost 1 - Reflection, It Calls Me, I Will Find My Way, A Very Merry Unbirthday, He's A Tramp and But I'm Much Faster - and every one is singable by any character in the game, including a 1-drop doing nothing else. Those quietly generate value in decks nobody would call a song deck.

The payoff cards that turn songs into an engine

Eleven cards in the game have a "whenever this character sings a song" or "whenever one of your characters sings a song" trigger, and the Encanto cast accounts for six of them.

The one that broke the category is Ursula - Deceiver of All, a 3-ink Emerald Legendary from Into the Inklands: whenever she sings a song, you may play that song again from your discard for free, then put it on the bottom of your deck. She turns every song into two songs for one exert, and at 3 ink she sings anything costing 3 or less on her own.

The rest of the roster is worth knowing by name because they change what a song turn is worth:

• Pepa Madrigal - Sensitive Sister (3 ink, Amber) - gain 1 lore whenever one or more of your characters sings
• Alma Madrigal - Accepting Grandmother (6 ink, Amber) - once a turn, ready the characters that just sang
• Isabela Madrigal - In the Moment (5 ink, Amber) - cannot be challenged until your next turn after any of your characters sings
• Dolores Madrigal - Within Earshot (1 ink, Amethyst) - chosen opponent reveals their hand
• 4*Town - Hottest Band of the Year (4 ink, Amber) - draw a card whenever it sings with Sing Together
• Cinderella - Melody Weaver (5 ink, Amber) - your other Princess characters get +1 lore this turn

Alma Madrigal is the quiet one. Readying the singers refunds the exert cost entirely, which turns Sing Together from a board-wide tap into a free spell - the whole board sings, readies, and quests on the same turn.

Recursion cards run underneath all of it. Gazelle - Ballad Singer puts a song from your discard on top of your deck when she lands, and Kristoff - Reindeer Keeper costs 1 less for each song in your discard, which on a 9-ink body is a real payoff for a deck that has been singing all game. It is the same design lever Braverse uses for its card types - print a subtype, then print cards that only care about the subtype.

Quick Action Checklist

• Count your singers before you sleeve the song. For anything costing 5 or more, know exactly how many characters in your 60 can legally sing it. Fewer than six and the song is a liability.
• Sing before you quest, every turn. The character you want to sing with is usually the one you were about to exert for lore. Doing it in the wrong order costs you the song.
• Never plan a song off a character you played this turn. Drying characters cannot exert, so they cannot sing. The only exception is a Shift character stacked onto a dry body.
• Ink your 1-3 cost songs freely, hold the big ones. Only 40 percent of songs costing 7 or more are inkable, so the expensive ones are dead weight in an opening hand either way.
• If you are in Amber, look at Singer before you look at stats. 27 of the 31 Singer cards are Amber, and the gap between a card's cost and its Singer number is the actual stat that matters.
• Remember Reckless characters can sing. Rule 8.7.4. A Ruby body that cannot quest is a free 7-cost singer sitting right there.
• Sing Together fires every trigger. Every character that helps sing counts as having sung, so stack the triggers before you tap the board.

Counts here reflect the pool through Attack of the Vine!, and every rule number reflects Comprehensive Rules 2.1.0. The card counts move with every set. The section numbers move too - Ravensburger renumbered the whole document between the February 2025 and 2.1.0 revisions - so always check the rule text, not just the digits.