Disney Lorcana TCG has officially crossed 2.8 billion cards sold since launching in 2023, and co-founder Ryan Miller used D23 to lay out what might be the game's most ambitious stretch yet — new sets, new rarities, a digital version, and a card that Figment fans have been waiting on for a very long time.

Why the new Hyperia City set is a bigger deal than it sounds: The game's latest set isn't just a new wave of cards — it's the first time the team has built an entirely original urban world within Lorcana's lore. Hyperia City takes its name from Hyperion Studio, Walt Disney's original home from 1926 to 1940 and the birthplace of Mickey Mouse. The set introduces Coco's Land of the Dead, Big Hero 6's Honey Lemon, and a Mickey Mouse card whose text is a direct callback to the first words Mickey ever spoke on screen. The team also added a new mechanic called Ink Drops, which introduces another layer of resource management to competitive play.

The rarest cards in Lorcana history are coming — and the numbers are not a coincidence: Starting with the 2027 Into the Inkdark set, Disney Lorcana will introduce Collector Boosters — 12-card packs filled entirely with premium foil cards, available only at Ravensburger Play Hub stores, the Ravensburger Online Store, and select Disney locations. A new rarity tier called Illustrious will live exclusively in these packs, limited to just six cards per set, with only 23 copies of each printed. Miller confirmed the number 23 is a deliberate nod to 1923, the founding year of The Walt Disney Company. He also made clear this won't affect regular booster packs or how competitive players currently engage with the game.

The pipeline beyond that is genuinely wild: A Cosmic Quest set arrives later in 2027 and will mark the first-ever appearance of Wall-E and EVE in Disney Lorcana. A Beauty and the Beast Curator's Collection — featuring stained-glass-inspired artwork tied to the film's 35th anniversary — lands in October 2026. A digital version of the game is in development, designed specifically for players who can't make it to weekly events or want to learn without the social pressure of sitting across from someone. And EPCOT's International Festival of the Arts will feature the first-ever Figment card, following a collection quest at the last festival that drew over 170,000 participants.

Big picture: Miller closed his D23 conversation by describing a special education teacher who watched a disengaged kid walk into a local game store, learn to play Lorcana, and completely come out of his shell — and if 2.8 billion cards in three years is the foundation, whatever gets built on top of it is starting to look like something that outlasts all of them.

You know the struggle: you want to rep the mouse every single day, but your workplace has a "no Minnie ears at the quarterly review" policy (rude, honestly). The solution isn't to suppress your Disney identity — it's to get sneaky about it.

Enter the BaubleBar Disney's Mickey Mouse Outline 18K Gold-Plated Sterling Silver Ring. It's a clean, minimal Mickey silhouette rendered in 18K gold-plated sterling silver — the kind of piece that reads as "chic jewelry" to the uninitiated and "absolute Disney devotee" to everyone who matters.

Why it earns bag space: Sterling silver base with 18K gold plating means this isn't a carnival-prize situation. It's a real jewelry moment that happens to have Mickey on it.

The Disney-life test: Subtle enough for a work meeting, meaningful enough to make you smile every time you catch it glinting on your hand while waiting in the Haunted Mansion queue.

One thing to check: It's listed starting at size 5, so confirm your size options on the product page before ordering — ring sizing is not the place for wishful thinking.

Big picture: This is the kind of everyday piece that quietly says I have my priorities sorted without requiring a single explanation. Wear it everywhere. Let people ask.

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Rumors have been swirling that Walt Disney World plans to install facial recognition entrances — similar to what Disneyland rolled out earlier this year — and replace hotel room key readers with digital wallet support, all of which has some fans convinced the MagicBand is finally on its deathbed. Theme park analyst Bill Zanetti even posted on social media that MagicBands "will be discontinued in the near future," with sales potentially ending by October 2027 and full support gone by 2030. That's a spicy claim. Disney Tourist Blog thinks it's also probably wrong.

Why the Disneyland comparison doesn't hold up: Disneyland's facial recognition rollout has been genuinely smooth — for now. But that's largely because Disneyland's crowd skews heavily toward locals and Annual Passholders who already know the system. Walt Disney World is a different animal entirely. Its guest mix includes first-timers from around the globe, infrequent tourists, DVC members, and everyone in between. That diversity is exactly why WDW currently supports digital wallets, Key to the World cards, and MagicBands all at once. Adding facial recognition wouldn't replace that patchwork — it would just add another layer to it.

The installed base that makes "just drop MagicBands" a hard sell: Disney gave away MagicBands to on-site guests for the better part of a decade. The active MagicBand user base likely numbers in the millions — Disney Tourist Blog's words, not ours. Dropping support for millions of guests using a low-friction device they already know how to use — while simultaneously investing in new infrastructure that, as Disneyland proved, can support both systems anyway — doesn't make a lot of business sense. Disney Tourist Blog points to Pal Mickey as a telling precedent: that plush flopped two decades ago and still works today. The MagicBand's user base dwarfs Pal Mickey's by orders of magnitude.

What actually is changing: The hotel room key situation is real. Walt Disney World announced upgrades tied to Apple's enhanced keys feature in iOS 27, which would allow guests to unlock resort rooms via iPhone or Apple Watch — but only after re-keying roughly 30,000 hotel rooms to support NFC technology. That's a significant infrastructure lift, and it's reportedly in motion. Sales of new MagicBand models will likely wind down at some point. Future features, mini-games, and entertainment enhancements for the wearable? Probably not coming. But your existing band tapping into Lightning Lane at a new attraction deep in the 2030s? That's the more likely scenario.

Big picture: The MagicBand isn't being killed — it's being quietly grandfathered into a future where it coexists with facial recognition entrances and digital room keys, because Walt Disney World has always been too big, too diverse, and too full of first-timers to bet everything on one system working for everyone.

Disney quietly raised the price of its ad-free Disney+ and Hulu plans by $2.50, pushing the Disney+ ad-free tier to $21.49 a month. That's not a rounding error — that's a real number that adds up over a year, and it's landing right in the middle of a much bigger shakeup at the company.

What's actually going on behind the price hike: The increase is part of a broader restructuring push under CEO Josh D'Amaro. Disney is reportedly consolidating major TV divisions — ABC Entertainment, 20th Television, Hulu Originals, and Freeform — around streaming customers and franchises rather than legacy cable brands. Hundreds of jobs could be affected. The company also completed a third round of layoffs this year, this time mostly in HR and technology. Disney is betting that leaner operations and higher subscription prices will push streaming margins up. In Q3, streaming operating income more than doubled to $712 million, so the strategy is showing early results.

Why the price hike is a calculated risk: More revenue per subscriber sounds great until subscribers start canceling. Disney is essentially asking fans to absorb a higher monthly bill while the company is simultaneously cutting staff and restructuring the very content divisions that produce the shows people are paying for. Netflix's operating margin reached 33.4% in Q2, while Disney's streaming margin sat at 13% in Q3. There's a real gap to close, and price increases are one of the faster ways to close it — but only if subscribers stick around, which is far from guaranteed.

The angle hiding in the earnings report: Here's the part that doesn't get enough attention: while the streaming business is still finding its footing, Disney's parks and cruise unit posted roughly 30% operating margins through the first nine months of the fiscal year, including record Q3 revenue and operating income. Comcast's Universal parks reported declining attendance in the same period. Disney's characters kept guests showing up even as travel costs climbed. No streaming service on earth can do that.

Big picture: A $2.50 monthly increase is easy to dismiss, but it's really a signal — Disney is done subsidizing your subscription, and it's betting that Moana, the Mandalorian, and whatever Marvel drops next are worth $21.49 a month to enough people that the math works out in their favor.