Lorcana: The Next Pokémon?

Every new card game gets called "the next Pokémon" for about a week. Disney Lorcana got called it for three years. Some of that it earned. The game is real, the players are real, and the lines outside game stores in 2023 were very real.

But the version of the story where sealed boxes make you rich? Ravensburger, the company that prints the game, set out to kill that story on purpose. In January 2026 they said the quiet part out loud: the investors have already left. Here's the money trail.

The First Chapter Gift Set — the face of the August 2023 launch. Product photo via PriceCharting.

The launch: lines, sellouts, and a $403 box

Disney Lorcana is a trading card game made by Ravensburger, the German publisher, using Disney characters under license. Set one, The First Chapter, hit game stores on August 18, 2023 and big-box retail on September 1. The price tags were normal enough: booster packs at $5.99, a 24-pack booster box at $143.99, starter decks at $16.99, and the Illumineer's Trove storage box at $49.99.

Booster pack ($5.99 MSRP), Illumineer's Trove ($49.99), starter deck ($16.99). Photos via PriceCharting.

What wasn't normal was the demand. Stores got a fraction of what they ordered, shelves emptied in hours, and the secondary market did what it does. By fall 2023 a First Chapter booster box peaked at about $402.63 on TCGplayer — nearly triple its retail price, for a box of cardboard that had been on sale for a few weeks. The chase cards, the full-art Enchanted rarity, pulled at roughly one per 96 packs, and the best of them were changing hands around $1,000.

A First Chapter booster box: $143.99 at retail in August 2023, about $403 at the fall 2023 peak. Photo via PriceCharting.

The reprint did exactly what it was supposed to do

Here's where Lorcana's story splits from the usual one. On August 31, 2023 — two weeks after launch — Ravensburger announced more booster product for October and a full reprint of The First Chapter for early 2024. The stated goal was plain: fans should be able to buy the game at the suggested retail price.

And it worked. By December 2023 the same booster box that peaked at $402.63 was trading at about $157.83 on TCGplayer. Anyone who bought the top in the fall and sold into the reprint ate a loss of roughly 60%. The scarcity hadn't been a law of nature. It was a print run, and the printer voted against it.

One sealed box, four prices. 2023 points are TCGplayer market prices (fall peak; December 2023 after the reprint). October 2026 is PriceCharting's eBay sold average for the generic box across all print waves. Chart: BogusAPY.

The twist: the box came back — read the fine print

Now the part the highlight reels skip. In October 2026, that same First Chapter box averaged $458.50 in eBay sales — above its 2023 peak. Case closed, investors win? Not quite. Read the fine print:

Volume is thin — about one sale a day. And there are really two boxes. Lorcana has no "1st edition" stamp; print waves are identified by codes printed on the box (CM1, CM2, and so on). A box a seller can prove is from the first wave averages $882.93 on PriceCharting's separate Wave One index, with verified 2026 sales up to $1,249.99. Two sealed boxes that look identical, and one is worth double the other because of a code most buyers can't read.

Why did the price come back at all? Because the set went out of print. Scarcity arrived only when the printing stopped — and Ravensburger, not the market, controls that switch. Watch the same machine run today: Hyperia City, set 14, released October 23, 2026. Its booster box presold at a $299.69 market price back in July. By October 30 it sat at $138.32 — below its $143.76 retail price, one week after release.

Hyperia City, the newest set: presold at $299.69 in July 2026, trading under retail a week after launch. Product photo via TCGplayer.

The chase: real cards, thin ice

The face of the 2023 chase was Elsa – Spirit of Winter, the Enchanted from The First Chapter. Raw copies trade around $850–$953 today, depending on the marketplace — roughly where the hype said they were in 2023. The graded story is where it gets interesting. PSA 9 copies sold on eBay for $875–$1,000 in August–October 2026. That's about the same money as a raw card. The premium lives only at PSA 10, which averages about $3,000 — and PSA has already graded 2,528 PSA 10 copies of this one card, plus 1,325 PSA 9s. That's not a tiny population for a "grail."

Elsa – Spirit of Winter, Enchanted #207 in a PSA 10 slab (cert 85434145, verified via PSA's cert lookup) — the only grade where the premium actually lives. Slab photo via eBay listing image, editorial use.

Elsa – Spirit of Winter, Enchanted #207 — the card that launched a thousand grading submissions. Card image via PriceCharting.

Every major grader takes Lorcana now — PSA, CGC, and TAG copies of this same Elsa are all listed on eBay as of this writing. The graders get paid either way. The seller only gets paid at the top grade.

Ravensburger has also been building new floors on the scarcity ladder. Above Enchanted now sits a tier called Iconic: an Iconic Buzz Lightyear is the most valuable standard card in the game at $3,613.09 (TCGplayer market, October 29, 2026), and Hyperia City's Iconic Mickey Mouse opened at $2,400.98 on release day. The most valuable Enchanted overall is Winnie the Pooh – Hunny Wizard at $1,410.97 — from Fabled, the reprint set. Hold that thought.

Mickey Mouse – Best in Town, Iconic #241 — the tier above Enchanted, and the new ceiling of the chase. Card image via TCGplayer.

Ariel – Collector of Oddities (Enchanted, Hyperia City): a $1,200 presale ask that settled at $399.98 ten days after release. Card image via TCGplayer.

Because underneath the four-figure headlines, the median Lorcana card is worth $0.13 (InkSight's October 15, 2026 snapshot of 3,321 priced cards). Of Hyperia City's 244 tracked products, 188 sit under a dollar. And the play value drains on schedule: since September 2025, sets rotate out of the main Core Constructed format — sets 1–4 are out, sets 5–8 followed in 2026 — so a First Chapter card's price now rests on collectors alone. Fabled, the set that started the rotation, was itself about 170 reprints out of 204 cards, including fresh Enchanted versions of earlier hits. Even the chase cards get reprinted.

The scale test

This is the part of "the next Pokémon" that math answers fastest.

Cards printed: The Pokémon Company reports more than 85 billion Pokémon cards produced as of March 31, 2026 — about 10.2 billion in the last fiscal year alone, printed at maximum capacity. Lorcana passed one billion cards sold by early 2025. A billion is a real number. It's also about 1% of Pokémon's.

Money: Ravensburger's entire company — puzzles, games, everything — did a record €790 million in 2024 with Lorcana as the driver, then fell 5.9% to €744 million (about $887 million) in 2025 as Lorcana sales declined and, in the company's word, "normalized." Pokémon, meanwhile, was the number-one toy property in the United States in 2025 at $2.5 billion in US sales, up 87% (Circana). Pokémon's American toy sales alone are roughly triple Ravensburger's worldwide everything.

Organized play: Lorcana's is genuinely strong for a young game. The first Disney Lorcana Challenges in May 2024 drew 1,992 players in Atlanta and 2,048 in Lille; tickets for the original 512-player cap vanished in under a minute with about 40,000 people in the queue. Season one ran 10 Challenges with roughly 17,000 players and 150,000 games. The first World Championship was held at Walt Disney World in June 2025, and the 2026 edition runs December 4–6 at Aulani in Hawaii. It's a real circuit. Pokémon's has a decades-long head start and a far bigger base — but Lorcana's players keep showing up, and Ravensburger says player counts are still growing even after the investors left.

The pipeline isn't slowing down either: 14 sets in a little over three years, roughly four a year, with sets planned through 2029 and a digital version in development. And starting with Into the Inkdark in February 2027, Ravensburger adds Collector Boosters and serialized "Illustrious" cards limited to 23 copies each — scarcity, but manufactured in labeled, limited products instead of happening by accident. They learned the lesson. They're just applying it on their terms, not the flippers'.

Who's behind it

Ravensburger is a privately held German publisher, and Lorcana is the most successful launch in its history. But here's the structural fact Pokémon doesn't have: Ravensburger doesn't own these characters. Disney does. Lorcana exists under a license, and the license's terms and expiry date are not public — no reporting puts a number on it. The Pokémon Company owns Pokémon outright. If Lorcana's license were ever not renewed, the game — and the story backing every sealed box — would change overnight. There's no sign of that happening. It's still a risk that sits under every long-term "investment" in this game.

The game's origins already survived one fight: Upper Deck sued in 2023, claiming co-designer Ryan Miller had taken its game design. In October 2025 a federal judge dismissed every claim against Ravensburger. The design question is settled. The license question never goes away.

So who actually captured the money? Ravensburger, with a record year in 2024. Disney, collecting on the license. The grading companies, slabbing thousands of Elsas at every grade. And holders of provable first-wave sealed product. Who got left holding the bag: fall-2023 peak buyers who sold into the reprint, 2026 presale flippers (one Hyperia City Enchanted went from a $1,400 ask to $91.84 in ten days), and anyone who paid a PSA 9 premium that the market doesn't actually charge.

The score

Is Lorcana the next Pokémon? Two different questions are hiding in that one.

As a game and a franchise: it's the real thing. Three years, 14 sets, a world championship, growing player counts, and Disney's catalog behind it. This is a durable major card game.

As an investment — the "next Pokémon" people mean when they're buying sealed boxes to resell: no. Three structural reasons. One, scale: a billion cards against 85 billion, and a whole company smaller than Pokémon's US toy sales. Two, policy: the publisher prints to kill scarcity, reprinted the first set, reprinted the chase cards themselves, and rotates old sets out of competitive play. Three, the license: the IP is rented, and the rent terms are secret.

The one thing that did appreciate — out-of-print First Chapter — did it after the printing stopped, in a market trading about one box a day, where the real premium belongs to a print code. That's not an investment thesis. That's a trivia answer.

Ravensburger told you the score themselves, in their own January 2026 results: "Those joining the brand with a primary interest in investment have since withdrawn." The game is healthy. The get-rich story was the bogus part. Buy packs to play.

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Check it yourself: links and sources

Official site and organized play: Disney Lorcana Challenge page (disneylorcana.com) · First World Champion crowned (official). Sealed prices and eBay sold data: PriceCharting — First Chapter booster box · PriceCharting — Wave One box · PriceCharting — First Chapter index (Elsa raw/graded averages). TCGplayer market data: InkSight top cards (TCGplayer market, Oct 29, 2026) · InkSight market snapshot (median card price) · InkSight — Hyperia City release weekend · Hoard — Hyperia City sealed prices (Oct 30, 2026). Graded listings: eBay — Enchanted Elsa listings (PSA, CGC, TAG). Retail: Target — Hyperia City booster box ($143.99, Oct 23, 2026 street date). Company figures: Ravensburger annual results reported by BoardGameWire (Jan 28, 2026) and ICv2 (Jan 30, 2026); 2023–24 prices and MSRPs from WDWNT's December 2023 TCGplayer tracking and ICv2's December 2023 chart; Pokémon card totals from The Pokémon Company's published production figures (May 2026 reporting); US toy property ranking from Circana (2025). Prices checked October 30, 2026 unless dated otherwise.

Not financial advice.