There is a version of Lorcana night where you walk in with a deck you have been tuning for a month, and there is a version where nobody in the room has ever played with the cards in their hands. Saturday, October 17 at Triad Wellington is the second kind, and it rewards a different skill entirely: the player who reads the format correctly tends to beat the player who is only hoping to open something rare.
Hyperia City is Lorcana's fourteenth set. Ravensburger has prerelease play opening on October 16 and the set arriving everywhere on October 23, which is the familiar shape of a Lorcana launch — local stores get the cards a full week before mass retail, and the only way to play with them during that week is to sit down at a store event. Triad is running two of those events back to back on the 17th, a Pack Rush at 7:00 PM and a Prerelease at 7:30 PM. They are not two names for the same night. They are different games with different deck sizes, different ink rules and different win conditions, and picking the wrong one is the easiest way to have a worse evening than you needed to.
Pack Rush is the small, fast one
Pack Rush is Ravensburger's beginner-facing format, and the numbers tell you why. You open two booster packs, not six. You build a 24-card deck, not a 40-card one. You are not held to the usual two-ink restriction, so whatever colours fall out of those two packs are legal together. And you are racing to 15 lore rather than the standard 20, which pulls the whole game forward by several turns.
That combination changes what a good card is. In a 24-card deck you will see a much larger share of your deck every game, so a single strong character matters more than a careful curve, and a card that only pays off on turn eight will probably never get there. Ravensburger's own format page notes that new packs are opened each round, so you are not married to one pile of cards for the night — you rebuild as you go, which is also why Pack Rush is the forgiving entry point for anyone who has watched Lorcana from across the shop and never actually sat down.
The Prerelease sealed build is the longer game
The 7:30 PM Prerelease runs the format most Lorcana players mean when they say prerelease: you open six booster packs and build a 40-card deck on the spot. Ravensburger's prerelease write-up is explicit that this build lets you use cards from all six inks and sets aside the usual four-copies-of-a-card restriction, which is a bigger deal than it sounds. In constructed Lorcana you plan around a two-ink identity for weeks. In sealed you get an hour and a pile of cards, and the correct answer is usually whatever actually casts on curve rather than whatever looks strongest in a vacuum.
The practical version of that advice: count your playable characters before you fall in love with any one card. A 40-card sealed deck that can reliably put a body on the board in the early turns beats a deck built around three expensive showpieces that sit in hand. Songs and actions matter, but characters are what quest, and questing is what wins.
What you are actually opening
Prerelease Boxes are Ravensburger's own product for these nights, and they are built for the event rather than for the shelf. Each one holds six booster packs — enough for the sealed build — along with four themed damage dice, an exclusive randomized postcard and a promo card featuring one of six Traveler characters. That promo is the part you keep. Everything else you will have shuffled, sleeved and probably spilled on by the end of round two.
If what you want from Hyperia City is the collection rather than the tournament, the Hyperia City Illumineer's Trove is the other side of the set. Ravensburger lists it as a full-art box with eight booster packs, six damage dice and more, and Triad's presale on it ships on the October 23 street date. It is a presale, so the ship date is the date you get it, not the date you order it.
How to walk in ready
A few things make the difference between a good first prerelease and a frustrating one. Make a Ravensburger Play Hub account before the night rather than at the table, because Ravensburger directs players to register in advance and it is one less thing to sort out while everyone else is opening packs. Bring sleeves you can put a freshly opened card into without thinking about it. Bring your own damage counters even though the box has dice, because tracking lore and damage on two separate things is how people lose games they had won.
And decide which seat you want before the 17th. Both events have a fixed seat count, and they run thirty minutes apart, which is deliberate — if you are new, the Pack Rush is the one to take, and if you want the full sealed experience with the Prerelease Box, that is the 7:30 event. They are not interchangeable, and the room fills from the earlier one.
Why this one matters for Wellington and Boynton Beach
Prerelease week is the only stretch of the year when a local store genuinely has something the big retailers do not, and the gap is exactly one week wide. For players at either Triad counter, that is the practical argument for driving to Wellington on the 17th rather than waiting for the 23rd: you get to find out what Hyperia City plays like while everybody online is still theorizing, and you get the promo and the dice that only come out of the event product.
Seats for both formats are open now — grab the Hyperia City Pack Rush ticket if you want the fast 24-card version at 7:00 PM, or the Hyperia City Prerelease ticket for the full six-pack sealed build at 7:30 PM, and we will have a mat waiting for you at the Wellington tournament room. Play Bold. Collect Smart. Trade with Trust.
Set dates, product contents and format rules in this article come from Ravensburger's own Disney Lorcana site: the Hyperia City product page, the Get Ready for Prerelease article and the Ways to Play format page. Event times, seating and presale shipping dates come from Triad's own store records on 4 October 2026.