That’s roughly what’s happened to Disney Lorcana over the past several weeks, ever since Wilds Unknown, the game’s twelfth set, brought Toy Story, The Incredibles, and Brave into the mix for the first time. Pixar had never been part of Lorcana before. Now it’s arguably the reason the whole market is moving.
The timing wasn’t an accident. Toy Story 5 hit theaters in June, and Ravensburger, the company behind Lorcana, released Wilds Unknown just weeks ahead of it, with prereleases starting May 8 and a wide release the following week. Pairing a new card set with a major theatrical release is an old trick in collectibles, but it’s still working. Woody, Buzz, and Jessie showing up on cardboard right as Toy Story dominates multiplexes again seems to have done exactly what it was designed to do.
The numbers are the part that’s hard to look away from. Booster boxes for Wilds Unknown were pushing close to $250 by mid-June, more than double what they cost just a month earlier. Singles have moved even faster. Older, unrelated cards that had nothing to do with Toy Story started climbing too, almost as if the attention spilled over into the rest of the game’s catalog. One collector posted on Facebook about pulling a rare Buzz card and deciding to sit on it, only to watch raw sales hit $4,500 within a day. She admitted she was torn on whether to sell or hold, and honestly, it’s hard to blame her either way.
It’s worth asking whether this is a bubble or just a hobby finally getting its moment. Probably some of both. Trading card markets have a habit of overheating right after a hot release, then settling once supply catches up and the initial panic buying cools off. Pokémon went through this. Magic: The Gathering has seen it more than once. Lorcana is young enough that nobody really knows its rhythm yet, which makes predicting where this settles genuinely difficult.
What’s notable is how this growth isn’t confined to online marketplaces. Local game stores, the kind of places that have quietly become a substitute for the corner bar or the barbershop in some towns, are reporting real foot traffic tied to Lorcana releases. People are showing up in person to crack packs together, trade across the table, and argue about pull rates. That communal piece matters, even if the price charts get all the attention.
Some of the enchanted-rarity cards have appreciated by over 100 percent in under a month, with sellers listing only a handful of copies and the cheapest ones still running well into the thousands. That kind of scarcity tends to feed on itself. Whether prices like that are sustainable once the Toy Story 5 box office buzz fades is the open question hanging over the whole hobby right now. There’s a sense among longtime collectors that the smart move is figuring out what’s genuinely undervalued before everyone else does, rather than chasing whatever’s already spiked. For now, though, Lorcana is having its moment, and it’s hard not to notice how quickly a card game built on Disney nostalgia turned into one of the more interesting financial stories in collectibles this year.
