Lorcana Hyperia City Prerelease Guide: How Sealed Works

A Constructed Disney Lorcana deck has to fit inside two inks. At the Hyperia City prerelease on 16 October that rule is switched off, and if you try to keep it anyway you will very likely end up short of a legal deck.

The arithmetic is short. A prerelease Sealed pool is six booster packs, 72 cards. Hyperia City prints every ink identically - 12 Commons, 9 Uncommons, 8 Rares, 3 Super Rares and 2 Legendaries each, with no dual-ink cards at all - so an average pool holds about 12 cards of each ink. Two inks is about 24 cards. The Sealed minimum is 40.

So this is the prerelease guide for a set that arrives in two weeks: what the event is under Ravensburger's own tournament rules, what the box holds, how Sealed, Draft and Pack Rush differ from the Constructed game the rest of this site covers, and what Hyperia City's full card list says you are going to open. It is a pre-release read, built from rules text, card counts and simulations rather than tournament results, because there are none yet.

Sources: Comprehensive Rules 2.2.0, effective 9 July 2026 and still the version on Ravensburger's resources page on 2 October; the Disney Lorcana Tournament Rules effective 14 July 2026; Ravensburger's Hyperia City Organized Play kit instructions for stores, published 28 September; and one pass over Lorcast's Hyperia City card list pulled 2 October 2026. That list now fills every number from 1 to 204 - 72 Commons, 54 Uncommons, 48 Rares, 18 Super Rares and 12 Legendaries, the same skeleton eleven earlier sets used - plus the two Iconics.

The prerelease, by Ravensburger's own rules

Hyperia City prereleases on 16 October 2026 in game stores and select Disney Parks and stores, and goes on sale everywhere on 23 October, per Ravensburger's press release and product page. You find and sign up for an event through the Ravensburger Play Hub.

The store kit tells hosts to run prerelease events in one of two formats, Sealed Deck or Pack Rush. Ravensburger's guide to the previous prerelease, for Attack of the Vine!, calls Sealed "the most common format at Prerelease events."

The Tournament Rules fill in the rest:

That last row reaches beyond the prerelease table. Under rule 1.6, Hyperia City cards are legal in Core Constructed from 16 October, a week before the set is on sale everywhere.

What is in the box, and what six packs are

Ravensburger's Hyperia City product page shows a Prerelease Box and describes it as "chock-full of amazing, exclusive keepsakes" without listing what is inside. Here is what can be pinned down:

• The promo is in the box. The store kit says the prerelease promo is not in the kit but included directly in the Prerelease packs stores buy, and that players may include their promos in their Sealed deck.
• The price. ICv2's report on the set gives the Prerelease Box an MSRP of $39.99.
• The last box. Ravensburger's guide to the Attack of the Vine! prerelease listed six booster packs, four damage dice, an exclusive poster and one random promo card.
• This box, per a retailer. Miniature Market's preorder listing gives 6 booster packs, 4 dice, 1 random promo card and a deck box, with the usual warning that contents are subject to change.

Six boosters is also the number the rules care about. Tournament Rules 1.3.2.2 makes six per player the minimum for any Sealed event, and the store kit calls six the recommended number for prerelease.

Each pack is 12 cards. Ravensburger's own store copy for earlier sets' boosters gives the slots as 6 Commons, 3 Uncommons, 2 cards of Rare, Super Rare or Legendary rarity, and 1 randomly selected foil, and the Hyperia City press release says booster packs contain 12 randomized cards. Six of them come to:

Then add the promo. Neither the product page nor the press release gives pull rates, and the rarities breakdown found none published for earlier sets either, so every per-card expectation in this post assumes each card of a given rarity is equally likely to turn up. On that assumption a specific Common shows up 0.5 times in an average pool, and a specific Uncommon a third of a time.

The Limited rules next to the ones you know

Comprehensive Rules 1.10.1.2 is one sentence. In Limited, a deck needs at least 35 cards for Draft or 40 for Sealed, "may contain any number of ink types, and may contain any number of cards with the same full name." The Tournament Rules build the formats around it. Here they are next to the game how to play Disney Lorcana teaches:

The copy rule is not a technicality. The Tournament Rules' own example is a Sealed player who opens six copies of Genie - The Ever Impressive and may play all six. There is no maximum deck size either, though the pool caps it.

Pack Rush is the short version. Each player shuffles two packs together (Ravensburger's quick rules suggest doing it without looking), puts the two marketing cards into their inkwell as ink and draws 5, and under rules 10.2.2.1 and 10.2.2.2 those two cards can never leave the inkwell or be chosen by an effect. For a prerelease, the store kit recommends two rounds of best-of-one and suggests everyone play their promo in game one so nobody starts with a different pool.

Draft is one of the formats - alongside Sealed and Pack Rush - that the same kit says stores may still run with regular boosters once their Prerelease Boxes are used up. Under Tournament Rules 1.3.2.4, pods should be as close to eight players as possible and have at least six, and the first pack passes left, the second right, the third left.

Why two inks almost never makes 40 cards

Here is Hyperia City's standard run, split by ink:

The six inks are identical down to the Legendary count, and there are no dual-ink cards to blur it. So the expected pool is 12 cards per ink. Two inks average about 24, three about 36. Neither reaches 40.

You do get to pick your inks after you see the pool, which helps, so I simulated it: 200,000 six-pack pools, each of the 72 cards given an ink at random in equal proportions. That models packs that are not deliberately sorted by ink, and Ravensburger has not published how it collates them.

Read the three-ink row carefully. 43 cards is the whole of those three inks, your worst cards included, so a 40-card deck from three inks plays almost everything you opened in them. Four inks is where you start to get choices.

Splitting costs you nothing at the table. Rule 4.3.2.4 pays an ink cost by exerting "a number of ready ink cards equal to the ink cost," and rule 7.5.1 says nothing on the front of an ink card affects the ink it generates. A Ruby card in your inkwell pays for a Sapphire card. I searched the rules text of all 204 Hyperia City cards for the six ink names and found none, so no card in the set cares how many inks you are in. The two-ink limit is a Constructed rule, 1.10.1.1, and the six inks explained covers what it does there. In Sealed it does not exist, and Ravensburger's Attack of the Vine! prerelease guide says it plainly: "You can use cards from all six inks."

The practical change is how you sort the pool. Sorting by ink first is a Constructed habit. In Sealed, sort by what each card does, then by cost.

The inkwell will not be your problem

Hyperia City is 81.9% inkable: 167 of its 204 standard cards carry the inkwell swirl.

That works out to roughly 60 inkable cards in an average 72-card pool. The once-per-turn inking limit still applies in Sealed, but with that many swirls to choose from it rarely bites. A second simulation: shuffle a 40-card deck with a given number of inkable cards, go first, and check whether you have one to ink on each of your first five turns, before altering your hand.

Rule 2.2.2 lets you alter your opening hand once - put any number of cards on the bottom and draw back up to 7 - which only pushes those numbers up. The ten uninkable Commons are the ones to notice as you sort: Gazelle - Pop Diva, Mamá Imelda's Blessing, Everyone Knows Juanita, Minnie Mouse - Busy Go-Getter, Donald Duck - Taxi Driver, Cruella De Vil - Dodging Traffic, Ernesto de la Cruz - Idol of Millions, Daisy Duck - Savvy Investor, Ink Explosion and Khan Transport Delivery.

Removal is scarce, so big bodies matter

Here is every Common and Uncommon in Hyperia City that removes, returns or damages a character:

The top three are the only ones that banish or deal more than 1 damage to a character of any cost or Strength without needing damage already on it, and on the equal-odds assumption above they add up to about 1.3 copies in an average pool. Everything else on the list only reaches small characters, deals 1 damage, or needs damage already in place. That leaves challenging as the main way to remove a character in Hyperia City Sealed.

Which makes three Uncommons better than they look. Captain Hook - Concerned Captain (Emerald) and Tick-Tock - Canal Croc (Steel) each cost 8 for 9 Strength, 9 Willpower and 3 lore, with no rules text at all, and Yax - Concert Goer (Amber) is 7 ink for 7 Strength, 9 Willpower and 2 lore, also with no text. The most damage any Common or Uncommon on that list can deal is 5, from Air Drop on a character that is already damaged, so of everything in the table only If She Doesn't Scare You removes a 9-Willpower character on its own. Among the Rares, Judy Hopps - Always Vigilant can too: she banishes a chosen character with 5 Strength or more, if you played another character that turn. A vanilla 8-drop is a hard sell in Constructed. In a pool where your opponent averages about one real answer, a 9/9 that quests for 3 is a plan.

Evasive matters for the same reason. Seven Common and Uncommon characters print it - four Amethyst (Lexington - Fearless Flier, Archimedes - Has Had Enough, Peter Pan's Shadow - Elusive Prankster, Dante - Strange and Endearing), two Emerald (Jock - Enjoying the Sights, Hiro Hamada - Versatile Inventor) and one Ruby (Jasper - Dodgy Boater). Three print Alert, which lets a character challenge as if it had Evasive: Napoleon - Patient Watchdog (Common, Steel), and Lafayette - All Ears and Lionheart - Cleaning Up the City (both Uncommon, Sapphire). Pirate Plane can hand a character Alert for a turn. The keywords breakdown covers why Evasive is so hard to deal with.

Ink drops in a six-pack pool

Ink drops are the set's new mechanic, and our ink drops explainer covers what they are. Since that post went up, Ravensburger has published an Ink Drop Deep Dive (29 September) by Sam Johanson, who leads game development on Hyperia City. It settles three things worth knowing at a prerelease table: each ink drop is worth 1 ink and is removed from the game once used; "you can use ink drops in the same turn you make them"; and you can spend them early or "save them up for one big play later in the game." It also says every ink combination can make them, not only Sapphire.

The full card list bears that out. 45 of the 204 standard cards mention ink drops. At Common and Uncommon, the slots that make up 54 of your 72 cards, it is 24 cards, and 20 of them make drops:

The other four care about drops without making them: Madam Mim - Bauble Chaser (Common, gains Evasive while you have an ink drop), Sir Kay - Determined to Win (Common, gains Challenger +3 while you have one), Wasabi - Future Thinker (Uncommon, a bonus if you removed a drop to play him) and Baloo - Delivery Pilot (Uncommon, can't quest or challenge unless you got an ink drop that turn).

On the equal-odds assumption, an average pool holds 8 or 9 drop-makers from its Common and Uncommon slots alone (36 x 11/72 + 18 x 9/54 = 8.5), before you count Rares and foils.

Three things are worth flagging when you sort:

• Higitus Figitus, a 6-cost Amethyst song whose whole effect is "Get 3 ink drops." None of the six Singer characters at Common or Uncommon sings that high: Gazelle - Pop Diva and Peg - Late-Night Vocalist are Singer 4, Ernesto de la Cruz - Idol of Millions, Meilin Lee - Ecstatic Fan and Max Goof - Music Lover are Singer 5, and Héctor Rivera - Street Musician is Singer 2. Short of Ancestral Guitar, an Amber Common item that gives a character Singer and +2 cost to sing for the turn, singing it for free from those slots takes one of the nine Common or Uncommon characters that cost 6 or more. The songs breakdown has the singing rules.
• Kit Cloudkicker - Irrepressible Bear and Another Tale to Spin, which give an ink drop to you and another chosen player. A two-player Sealed match has only one other player, so that second drop goes to your opponent. Molly Cunningham - Remembers to Share, an Uncommon, works the same way, and the Uncommon location Port Authority - Center Hub gives one to each player when a character moves there, once during your turn.
• Ink Explosion, pictured above, which is both removal and a drop.

One caveat. As of 2 October, Comprehensive Rules 2.2.0 is still the current document and has no ink drop entry, and Ravensburger's resources page did not yet carry Hyperia City set release notes.

Shift only works if you open both halves

In Sealed you can only shift onto a character you opened. Hyperia City has 17 Shift characters, and each one has at least one same-name character elsewhere in the set to land on:

14 of the 17 have a Common base, and none of the 17 is itself a Common, so the usual prerelease story is a Rare-or-better Shift card hunting for a Common. On the equal-odds assumption, a single named Common has about a 40% chance of being somewhere in your 36 Common slots, two named Commons (Kit Cloudkicker's case) about 64%, and a single named Uncommon about 29%. Copies are unlimited in Sealed, so a second base can go in the deck as well. Baymax - Amped Up is the odd one: its Shift cost is removing 2 ink drops rather than paying ink, which nothing in Comprehensive Rules 2.2.0 covers yet. For how a shifted character behaves once it lands, see Lorcana Shift explained.

A build order for prerelease day

This part is opinion, built on the numbers above.

1. Sort by job, not by ink. Make piles for interaction from the removal table, Evasive and Alert characters, Shift pairs, ink-drop makers, and everything else by cost.
2. Play every real answer you opened. At about 1.3 copies per average pool of the three answers with no target limit, you will not have spares.
3. Lock in Shift pairs where you hold both halves, and pull in a second base if you have one.
4. Fill to exactly 40 on a curve. Hyperia City's Commons and Uncommons run 23 one-drops, 33 two-drops, 26 threes, 18 fours, 16 fives and 10 at six or more, so the pool will hand you a low curve whether you plan one or not. There is no maximum deck size, but every card past 40 is another draw that is not one of your best.
5. Count swirls last. With 28 or more inkable cards, the simulation above has you inking every turn through turn five more than 99% of the time.
6. Play your promo if it makes the cut. The store kit allows it.
7. Write the list down if the store asks. Rule 3.8 calls deck lists "the ultimate arbiter of which cards the player intended to play."

Quick reference

• Hyperia City prereleases 16 October 2026 in game stores and select Disney Parks and stores, and goes on sale everywhere 23 October. Sign up through the Ravensburger Play Hub.
• Prerelease events run as Sealed or Pack Rush, per Ravensburger's store kit, and are Entry-level events under Tournament Rules 1.2.
• Sealed is six boosters, 72 cards, built into a deck of at least 40 with any number of inks and any number of copies (Comprehensive Rules 1.10.1.2).
• Each Hyperia City ink is 34 cards: 12 Commons, 9 Uncommons, 8 Rares, 3 Super Rares and 2 Legendaries, with no dual-ink cards. An average pool is about 12 cards per ink, so two inks almost never reach 40.
• Ink is generic, so playing four or five inks costs nothing, and no Hyperia City card names an ink type.
• The pool is about 82% inkable. Inking every turn is not the constraint.
• Removal is thin: Air Drop, Ink Explosion and If She Doesn't Scare You are the only Commons and Uncommons that banish or deal more than 1 damage to a character of any cost or Strength without needing damage already on it, about 1.3 copies per average pool.
• Pack Rush is two packs, a 24-card deck, a 5-card hand, 2 starting ink from the marketing cards, 15 lore to win, and a reshuffled discard instead of decking out.

Card counts reflect Lorcast's Hyperia City list pulled 2 October 2026, two weeks before the prerelease. Rule numbers reflect Comprehensive Rules 2.2.0, effective 9 July 2026, and the Tournament Rules effective 14 July 2026. The pool figures assume random packs and equal odds within a rarity, which Ravensburger has neither confirmed nor ruled out; the inking table assumes only a well-shuffled 40-card deck.