Into the Inkdark will be the first Disney Lorcana set to get collector booster packs and numbered cards of a new rarity, Illustrious, but Ravensburger will sell them only at selected Ravensburger Play Hub stores, in its own online store and at Disney locations. Who gets the Illustrious cards will therefore be decided first by access to collector booster packs, and only then by luck when opening them.
Key points
The prerelease, meaning prerelease tournaments in stores, will take place on February 5, 2027, and the release, meaning the start of sales, on February 12, 2027.
A collector booster pack has 12 cards, all foil, and its suggested retail price (MSRP) in Europe is €34.99.
The set will have six Illustrious cards with 23 numbered copies each, so 138 cards worldwide, available only in collector booster packs.
Collector booster packs will go only to selected Ravensburger Play Hub stores, Ravensburger's online store, and Disney parks and stores, in English only worldwide.
What's new: the first premium tier in Lorcana history
Story-wise, Into the Inkdark is a villains set. According to the publisher, Hades' glimmer is plotting something in the depths beneath the land of Lorcana, and his ambitions may bring a new threat upon it. Ravensburger has announced regular booster packs and booster boxes, prerelease boxes, and an Illumineer's Trove with eight booster packs and six damage dice. Nothing changes in this part of the lineup; the novelty is an entirely different product.
The collector booster pack is the first Lorcana booster pack designed specifically for collectors. All cards are foil, and the rarer the card, the richer the embellishments. The publisher says the chance of an Enchanted or Iconic card is much higher than in a regular booster pack, but has not published the odds. The Illustrious rarity will appear only here: a card with new art in the style of a well-known artist, with a prominently displayed artist signature and a serial number. The number 23 refers to 1923, the year the Disney studio was founded.
Illustrious cards are for collectors, not tournament players
The first two revealed Illustrious cards are Maleficent – Biding Her Time and a card the publisher calls The Evil Queen – Commanding Presence; in Rise of the Floodborn it was released as The Queen – Commanding Presence. Maleficent – Biding Her Time was the first Lorcana card shown publicly, at the D23 expo in 2022. According to the announcement, Illustrious cards will come from the game's entire history, not just the current set. They will not be legal in Core Constructed, only in Infinity.
That is good news for players. Anyone who needs these characters in a deck will buy their regular versions, and their current prices are shown in the block below. The value of an Illustrious card will come solely from its print run, art and number, not from its strength in the game.
Where to buy collector booster packs: the biggest unknown of the set
Regular Into the Inkdark booster packs will go to the same channels as previous sets. Collector booster packs have different distribution: selected Ravensburger Play Hub stores, Ravensburger's online store, and Disney parks and stores, in limited quantities and in English only worldwide. The publisher has not said which Play Hub stores in Europe will receive stock or by what criteria they will be selected.
We have been collecting offers from Czech and Slovak stores since October 13, 2026. As of October 18, no Czech or Slovak store had listed a regular booster box, a collector booster pack or a collector booster box of Into the Inkdark. The publisher's announcements include no suggested price in Czech koruna; the European collector booster pack price described below is given in euros, the currency Slovak stores sell in.
The price raises questions too. A single collector booster pack has an MSRP of €34.99 in Europe, £31.99 in the United Kingdom and $34.99 in the United States. A box of 12 packs costs $420 in the US, practically the same as 12 individual packs. Anyone buying a whole box gets no discount, and in return gets 144 foil cards and an unknown chance of an Illustrious card, probably a very small one with only 138 copies worldwide.
Booster boxes of previous sets in Czech and Slovak stores
Since we have only had Czech and Slovak offers for a few days, we do not know how prices developed after previous set releases in this market. On October 17 in Czech stores, the older the set, the more expensive its booster box: only one store offered Winterspell, and Hyperia City in preorder was the cheapest.
In Slovakia, three sellers were still running Hyperia City preorders on October 14, with a lowest price of €149.99; no store there had booster boxes of the three older sets in stock.
So far only the neighboring Polish market shows how prices developed after release. There, on October 17, Winterspell and Wilds Unknown booster boxes cost 70% and 84% more than on release day, and over that time the number of Polish stores with stock fell from 25 and 27 to six.
Concerns: what could go wrong
Allocation instead of shelves. Collector booster packs will go to selected stores in limited numbers. Commentators point out that such a model easily turns a store into a service point for scalpers rather than regular players. Players, Disney memorabilia collectors and people looking to profit from resale will all compete for the same 138 Illustrious cards.
A rarity race. Magic: The Gathering introduced collector booster packs in 2019, and the only copy of The One Ring card from the set based on The Lord of the Rings later sold for about $2 million. Part of the community fears that Lorcana, a game with a family-friendly image, is going down the same road and will become associated with cards out of reach for almost everyone.
Pressure on regular booster packs. If the biggest pulls move to collector booster packs, regular boxes may lose some of their appeal to collectors. The opposite scenario is also possible, in which the buzz around Illustrious cards increases demand for the whole set. This is a hypothesis; it will be tested by the price of the regular booster box in the first weeks after February 12, compared with Attack of the Vine and Hyperia City.
Unknown odds. Ravensburger has not said how often an Enchanted, Iconic or Illustrious card appears in a collector booster pack, and cards from the set do not yet have market prices. So the expected value (EV) of a collector booster pack cannot be reliably calculated today.
What it means for buyers
In Czech and Slovak stores, Into the Inkdark preorders have not started yet, and our data has no preorder history of its own for this market. In the neighboring Polish market, the first Hyperia City preorder offer cost 599.99 zloty on August 17, the lowest price fell at most to 579.90 zloty in mid-September, and on October 17, with 14 stores, it was about 649 zloty. If Czech and Slovak stores behave similarly, the first Into the Inkdark offers will more likely set a price floor than a starting point for reductions; this is a hypothesis that the first weeks of preorders will test. A player who simply wants to play with the new cards can skip collector booster packs, because Illustrious cards are not legal in Core Constructed.
For a collector, the first question is whether their store is part of Ravensburger Play Hub and whether it expects an allocation. A full booster box with no discount for buying the box is a purchase for those who value the foil cards themselves, not a lottery with a real chance at an Illustrious card.
Sources
Ravensburger: Into the Inkdark on the official Disney Lorcana website, prerelease and release dates, collector booster packs and Illustrious cards.
Ravensburger: Disney Lorcana announcements from the D23 expo, Illustrious card print run and collector booster pack distribution.
Lorcana Player: Into the Inkdark Collector Booster Pack and Toonado, suggested prices of collector booster packs as reported by the publisher.
Card prices in the card block are mTCG prices, the same ones we show on card pages.
Prices in Czech and Slovak stores come from mTCG monitoring, which covers more than 150 stores.
