With Disney Lorcana’s Attack of the Vine having just launched, booster box prices for the next set, Hyperia City, are already a cause for concern among players.
Ongoing availability issues amid growing popularity and rampant scalping have left many players without sealed products to open for new sets, and this trend is expected to continue into Hyperia City when it launches on October 23, 2026.
The market value for the new set is already higher than it ever has been for Attack of the Vine, and this is despite barely any cards having been revealed so far.
Lorcana’s Market Issues Continue As Players Face Pricing Misery
At the time of writing, the market value of the Hyperia City booster box is $264.69, but, more shockingly, this is a drop from $298.67. The peak market value for Attack of the Vine booster boxes was $253.60 back on July 6.
The MSRP for new Disney Lorcana booster boxes is $143.76; this is literally taking the $5.99 individual pack price and multiplying it by 24 for the number of packs in a box.
This means that, as it stands, the Hyperia City boxes are more than $120 over MSRP two months before launch. Unless major improvements are made to availability, Disney Lorcana is heading toward a crucial flashpoint where Ravensburger will be forced to make difficult decisions to ensure players aren’t being left behind.
For any growing TCG, it might be seen as a good problem to have if you’re growing so fast that players are scrambling to get their hands on the product. However, if you can’t physically get the products into their hands, and when you try, scalpers are waiting to take advantage of them instead, it leaves a sour taste in a lot of people’s mouths.
Ravensburger needs to figure out how to improve the availability of Lorcana products without flooding the market to the point where they sit unsold on shelves.
Finding this balance is hard, and while other trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon are having issues with availability and scalpers, Lorcana is notably much younger than these games, so it’s still trying to grow and attract players to the game, which is difficult when the products are hard to find or only available well above MSRP.
Beware Of Market Manipulation
While it’s easy to take these market-value prices as gospel, I do have concerns about the Hyperia City price being set so high so early. A lot of local game stores will still be taking pre-orders for Hyperia City, so seeing prices at almost double MSRP when a product should be readily available from multiple sources stinks of market manipulation.
This is where listings are put live and “purchases” are made at massively inflated prices to manipulate market value and make it appear higher than it actually is, encouraging panic buyers to purchase at a higher cost much earlier than they expected. Another reason is that storefronts can offer products at below-market prices, which then seems like a great deal to gullible players who jump at the chance to save money, when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.
In short, take these prices with a pinch of salt. It remains true that Disney Lorcana scalping and availability are major issues in the game, but be careful when looking to buy any products this early, as prices are extremely difficult to gauge until after the preview window starts.
- Original Release Date
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September 1, 2023
- Publisher
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Ravensburger
- Designer
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Ryan Miller, Steve Warner
