What Is Format Coconut? Lorcana’s Multiplayer Beta, Explained

Written August 23, 2026. The format is in open beta and coconuts get adjusted often, so parts of this page will go stale. We date everything and update as things change.

Format Coconut is Disney Lorcana’s official multiplayer format, currently in open beta. Three or four players sit at one table and race to 25 lore. Decks are built with only one copy of each card, and everything revolves around your “coconut”: a digital ability, chosen in the official app, that stays active the whole game and lets you break the one-copy rule for a single named character.

If you’ve played Commander in Magic, the shape will feel familiar: a big deck full of one-ofs, a free-for-all table, and one card that defines your whole strategy. If you haven’t, don’t worry. The rules fit on an index card, and the interesting part isn’t the rules anyway. It’s what a full table does to a game designed for two people.

This page is the entry point for everything we publish about the format. If you’ve never heard of Format Coconut, the goal is that you leave understanding what it is, why it’s worth your time, and where to dig deeper.

The essential rules

• 3 or 4 players, free-for-all. First to 25 lore wins, not the usual 20.
• Minimum 60 cards per deck. Sixty is a floor, not a ceiling.
• One copy of each card, with one exception below.
• Up to 3 inks, and one of them has to match your coconut’s ink.
• Your coconut is a digital card in the official Lorcana app. It never enters your deck or the play area. It can’t be targeted or removed. It’s just an ability that’s yours for the whole game, and it steers how you build. There are 18 coconuts in the beta, 3 per ink.
• The exception: each coconut names a specific character card, and you can run up to 4 copies of it. Our reading is that “up to 4” includes zero, so you aren’t forced to play the named card at all, though most coconuts give you good reasons to.
• Beyond that, normal Lorcana rules apply.

A couple of details worth confirming at your table, since beta rules documents leave gaps: we play with the first player skipping their draw on turn one, which is the usual multiplayer convention, and as far as we can tell the format has its own banlist, empty as of this writing.

One more thing before we go on: “Coconut” is a codename. The final name is undecided, and the format only exists digitally for now. We’ve accepted the risk of building a site around a name that might change, because the format is interesting enough to cover early.

Why a full table changes everything

On paper, the rules above look like small tweaks to regular Lorcana. In practice they reshape deckbuilding from the ground up. Three ideas run through almost every analysis we publish here.

Burst lore is the currency

At a four-player table, nobody can police everyone. In 1v1, a slow, grinding lore advantage wins games. In multiplayer, the player who quietly sets up a single 8-to-15-lore turn wins out of nowhere while the other three are busy fighting each other. So the question we ask of every deck is not “how much lore does it average per turn” but “what does its explosive turn look like, and how do you see one coming from across the table.”

“Each opponent” effects roughly triple in value

A card that drains 1 lore from your opponent is fine in 1v1. The same card draining 1 lore from each opponent is suddenly a 3-lore swing. Effects that scale with the number of opponents get repriced dramatically upward, and there are around a hundred cards in the pool with that kind of wording. Meanwhile single-target removal gets repriced downward, because banishing one character answers a third of the table’s threats while costing you a full card and your tempo. Board wipes and pings that hit everything do the work here that spot removal does in 1v1.

One copy of each card makes drawing the number one resource

You can’t count on drawing your best card when you only run one of it. What you can count on is drawing lots of cards and packing your deck with several cards that do the same job. Consistency comes from density of effects, not from playsets. This is why our deck techs obsess over draw counts, and why we run the actual probabilities instead of eyeballing them. That math has overturned our first impressions more than once.

There’s also a softer factor that 1v1 players tend to underestimate: politics. Some coconuts help the whole table. Some paint a target on your forehead. Evaluating a coconut means guessing how three opponents will react to it, and that guess is part of the deckbuilding.

The 18 coconuts at a glance

Here’s the full roster as it stands in the beta, three per ink. For now I’ll just sketch what each one is trying to do; the tier list, where they actually get compared, is its own post.

Amber

• Ariel — Spectacular Singer: gain lore whenever a Princess of yours sings a song, equal to her lore value. A songs-and-Princesses engine.
• Pocahontas — Peacekeeper: once per turn, a chosen character (anyone’s) gets +1 lore, can’t challenge, and must quest. It works on your characters or on an opponent’s, which makes it far more flexible than it first reads.
• Stitch — Rock Star: once per turn, play a character with cost 2 or less for free; if it’s a Lilo or Stitch, a chosen character gets +1 lore that turn. Adjusted in a mid-August update.

Amethyst

• Dumbo — Ninth Wonder of the Universe: your characters can use their exert abilities the turn they’re played. This unlocks a whole class of cards that were too slow for 1v1.
• Snow White — Merry as the Morning: once per game, if you can show a Snow White plus 7+ differently named Seven Dwarfs across hand, discard, and play, all your characters get +2 lore for the rest of the game. A build-around puzzle.
• Winnie the Pooh — Hunny Wizard: pay 1 ink to draw a card whenever you play a character with no ability. Vanilla characters become a draw engine.

Emerald

• Donald Duck — Fred Honeywell: pay 1 less to play Boost characters and locations and to use Boost abilities. Buffed in a mid-August update.
• Robin Hood — Sneaky Sleuth: start the game with a free Robin’s Bow from outside your deck, and deal 1 damage whenever you play a character named Robin Hood. Reworked in early August.
• Ursula — Deceiver of All: your characters count as +1 cost for singing, +2 if named Ursula. A songs coconut with a very different angle from Ariel’s.

Ruby

• Mickey Mouse — Brave Little Tailor: every Mickey Mouse card in your hand, deck, and discard gains Shift 2. Cheap Mickeys become launching pads for expensive ones.
• Mr. Incredible — Super Strong: Super characters gain Rush the turn they’re played, and you may exert a weaker opposing character. The classification requirement effectively drafts half your deck for you.
• Sisu — Emboldened Warrior: characters with more strength than each opposing character can quest the turn they’re played. The printed text says “all characters” rather than “your characters,” and most tables we’ve seen play it as benefiting everyone. Confirm the current ruling at yours.

Sapphire

• Moana — Curious Explorer: with a Moana, Heihei, or Pua in play, you may ink an extra card each turn. Straightforward ramp.
• Mufasa — Ruler of Pride Rock: once per turn, pay 5 ink to put your top 2 cards into your inkwell. Explosive ramp.
• Nick Wilde — Wily Fox: run 4 copies of Pawpsicle, and once per turn banish 4 of your items to gain 4 lore. An items-into-lore engine.

Steel

• John Silver — Greedy Treasure Seeker: your locations gain Resist +1 per character there. A locations deck by mandate.
• Scar — Finally King: your first Ally character each turn costs 1 less. Another classification-driven build.
• Tinker Bell — Giant Fairy: whenever one of your other abilities or actions damages an opposing character, deal 1 more damage to it. A ping amplifier that gets scarier with every extra opponent at the table.

Reading down the list, you can see a tension the beta is still working out. Some coconuts are strong passives you’d happily play without ever drawing the named card. Others are mostly an excuse to run four copies of a great character. The recent adjustments seem aimed at making you actually want the named card in your deck, and how each coconut sits on that spectrum is a recurring thread in our deck techs.

This is a beta, and it moves fast

Format Coconut opened its beta in late July 2026, and the coconuts have already been through several rounds of adjustments: Robin Hood and Mufasa in early August, then Donald Duck and Stitch in mid-August. That pace is the point of a beta, and it means any analysis of the format has a shelf life measured in weeks.

For us that cuts two ways. Everything here carries a date, and an article written before an update may describe a coconut that no longer exists in that form. But the churn itself is worth covering: what each rework fixed, what it broke, and what it suggests about where the format is heading.

How we cover the format

CocoLore is a small operation with a simple method, and we’d rather show the method than claim authority.

• Math over vibes. When we say a combo fires 43% of the time by turn 7, there’s a probability calculation behind it, and we show the assumptions so you can attack them.
• Dated verdicts, openly revised. Our tier placements are hypotheses with a timestamp. When an update or a better argument invalidates one, we say so and fix it.
• Community chatter as a sample, not consensus. We read what beta players are discussing, but any one channel is a narrow window into the format. When our reading differs from what circulates, we explain why and what would change our mind.

From here, the natural next stop is the tier list, where all 18 coconuts get graded and argued. After that we’ll be rolling out deck techs one coconut at a time, a couple per week: a full deck for each, with a 4-player game plan and labeled flex slots. We’ve already built and tested all 18, so the order is up for grabs. If there’s a coconut you want covered first, say so.

We’ve been building and testing since the beta opened, but this format is weeks old and nobody has it figured out, including us. If you’ve played Format Coconut and something here doesn’t match what you’ve seen at your table, tell us. What did we miss?

Last checked against the official coconut roster and beta rules: August 23, 2026.