Fierce demand for Lorcana drop at UK Disney store shuts it down
The Curator’s Collection: Heroines Edition dropped July 17 at a handful of stores worldwide. In Britain, that meant exactly one: Disney Store Oxford Street. Fans queued from 3 a.m. Scalpers took the front. The store closed without selling a single pack.
Fans started lining up outside the Disney Store on Oxford Street the afternoon before the drop. By 5 p.m. the queue was 100 to 150 people. Some were there from 3 a.m.
Nobody got anything. The store never opened.
What happened
Disney Lorcana‘s Curator’s Collection: Heroines Edition launched July 17, with special cards for Ariel, Elsa, and Jasmine.
It was available at a very small number of stores worldwide. In the entire United Kingdom, that number was one.
“This is mad,” collector ItsMeCooper posted from the queue. “Queue goes for 4 blocks, optimistic. I don’t even understand where the queue starts.”
By morning, it was over. “Due to the uncontrollable queue situation, we have been told that the drop won’t happen today,” he wrote. Disney followed with a statement that the store is “closed until further notice,” with purchase details to come later.
Twelve hours in a queue on Oxford Street for a locked door.
Lorcanawishes on Instagram described a scene with presumed scalpers lining up across from the queue and then pushing everyone else back to get in front of the line around the time tickets were to be handed out.
The fans blame scalpers
They’re not wrong that scalpers were there.
“Queueing since 3am for this,” one fan wrote. “Everyone knew the scalpers would be there and the store should have been ready for it.”
Collector DazRollsDice was blunter: “Lorcana London Oxford St launch cancelled due to violent, aggressive behaviour with scalpers & gangs taking over the queue & pushing to the front of the Disney Store. Sad day for the hobby. Things must change.”
He tagged Ravensburger’s UK and North American accounts. Which is the right instinct, because the scalpers aren’t the ones who decided there’d be one store.
(The sets are selling for up to $700 each on eBay.)
Paris was a mess too, and it actually opened
Disneyland Paris ran its drop and it wasn’t much better.
“People camped overnight, ran & fell, people cut the line, we got pushed around and hundreds [of] scalpers attended just to make a quick buck,” one attendee posted, after getting hers.
So the two data points are: the drop that happened was chaos, and the drop that didn’t happen was worse.
One store is not a distribution plan
Here’s the part worth sitting with.
Disney and Ravensburger took a hyped collectible with a proven scalper problem and made it available at a single physical location in a country of 68 million people.
That doesn’t create exclusivity. It creates a chokepoint, and a chokepoint is exactly what a professional reseller is equipped to exploit. Scalpers are good at queues. That’s the job. Give them one door in the whole country and you’ve handed them the entire supply.
Everyone in that line knew what would happen. The fans knew. The collectors on X knew. The only party that appears to have been surprised is the one that set it up.
This is now just what collectibles are
The Lorcana thing isn’t a Lorcana thing.
Target has taken to cutting open sealed booster boxes to stop Pokemon resellers. Some stores cut packs open at checkout. Walmart capped purchases at five packs. One shop started giving customers a mandatory quiz to separate fans from flippers. The Pokemon Company has floated government ID checks.
Scalpers have stolen Target displays and kicked down a store’s security gate. McDonald’s had to crack down on people ordering Happy Meals for the cards and binning the food.
The hobby industry has spent three years trying to design its way around resellers with quizzes and ID checks and box-cutters. Meanwhile the actual lever, making enough product and putting it in enough places, keeps not getting pulled.
Somebody queued twelve hours on Oxford Street for a card with Elsa on it and went home with nothing. The scalpers will be fine. They always are.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Dexerto (July 17, 2026), the originating report, verified the Disney Lorcana Curator’s Collection: Heroines Edition releasing July 17 featuring cards for Ariel, Elsa, Jasmine and others at a very select number of stores with the Disney Store on Oxford Street being the only location in the UK, the queue reaching 100 to 150 people by 5 p.m. the previous day, collector ItsMeCooper’s posts that “this is mad, queue goes for 4 blocks” and that “due to the uncontrollable queue situation, we have been told that the drop won’t happen today,” Disney’s statement that the store is “closed until further notice” with purchase details to follow, a fan’s account of queueing since 3 a.m., DazRollsDice’s post describing the cancellation and tagging Ravensburger’s UK and North American accounts, and an attendee’s account of the Disneyland Paris drop involving overnight camping, line-cutting and hundreds of scalpers
Dexerto (2025-2026), verified the broader pattern of trading card scalping responses — Target cutting open sealed booster boxes, stores cutting open packs at checkout, Walmart’s five-pack purchase limit, a store implementing a mandatory quiz to identify genuine collectors, The Pokemon Company considering government ID checks, scalpers stealing Target displays and kicking down a store’s security gate during a Pokemon drop, and McDonald’s cracking down on scalpers ordering Happy Meals for the cards and wasting the food