Disney Lorcana’s online sales event canceled after alleged DDoS attack

The launch of the second set of cards for Disney Lorcana ended on Monday after an alleged DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack on publisher Ravensburger’s website. On Monday, Disney Lorcana’s official Facebook account announced the DDoS attack. No plans for additional direct-to-consumer online sales have been shared.

“While we are not able to offer more specific details at this time, we want to apologize to consumers who had a negative experience during our launch today,” Ravensburger said in its posts on X and Facebook. “We truly appreciate your support and are committed to improving your experience of future launches.”

Disney Lorcana is a new collectible trading card game (TCG) competing with two of the biggest names in the industry — Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon Trading Card Game. It does so by pairing similar gameplay mechanics with Disney’s beloved stable of animated characters. But while the game has reviewed well, including here at Polygon, actually getting cards to play with has been difficult for your average consumer.

To get more product into the marketplace, Ravensburger announced a full reprint of the game’s first set of cards, titled The First Chapter, to coincide with the launch of Rise of the Floodborn. And yet, even with two sets available more or less at once, it still seems that market prices remain high and availability of cards is still an issue.

In hopes of mitigating these pricing issues even further, Ravensburger elected to try and sell cards directly through its own website for a limited time. But the alleged DDoS attack foiled those plans, locking consumers inside malfunctioning queues for hours at a time.

“Our team has worked extremely hard to solve this problem over the course of the day, but unfortunately that has not been possible,” Ravensburger said in its posts on X and Facebook. “As of now we are officially ending our website sales of Disney Lorcana: Rise of the Floodborn.”

Polygon has reached out to Ravensburger for additional comment and details on the company’s next steps.

At issue in these early sales is the very concept of a “manufacturer’s suggested retail price,” which many in the trading card industry seem to ignore. Take, for instance, a box of 24 booster packs — by far the most economical way to get a bunch of cards at one time for building decks. These boxes have a suggested retail price of $144, and Ravensburger is sending them to local game stores first before fulfilling orders to big box retailers or online giants like Disney and Amazon. Theoretically, that gives consumers a chance to support local retailers, and it gives local retailers the opportunity to build up repeat business — and a healthy local community of competitive players.

But with some rare cards fetching five-digit prices at online marketplaces, speculators have moved in to snatch up as many unopened packs as they can find. That’s driving the so-called “market price” — which is privately tracked by eBay subsidiary TCGPlayer and other secondary marketplaces — closer to $250 or more per box of cards. That price inflation is causing some independent retailers to choose to raise their own prices at the register, lest they loose an opportunity to flip unopened boxes themselves online at the inflated price. Still others are holding firm.

Meanwhile, Rise of the Floodborn itself is an excellent set of cards. It expands the available mechanics in the game, filling in gaps in the design goals and increasing the complexity of the overarching metagame. But the metagame just isn’t much fun when finding cards is so challenging.