UK Release Dates Explained: Prerelease, Street Date and When Shops Actually Get Stock

Ask when a set comes out and you’ll get three answers, all of them true.

There’s the day a handful of shops run prerelease events. There’s the official street date, when the product is allowed to go on general sale. And there’s the day your particular shop actually has boxes on the shelf, which can be later than both.

Most release-date pages pick one of the three, print it as fact, and leave you to find out the hard way which one they meant. Here’s what each date actually is, and how to read the one you’re looking at.

The three dates

Prerelease

A limited event, usually run in shops that hold organised play, a week or so before general sale. You play with the new set, you take home some product, and you get cards before anyone else. Not every game runs one, and not every shop is eligible to.

If you only want sealed product to keep, a prerelease is largely irrelevant to you. If you play, it’s the earliest legitimate access there is.

The street date

The official day the set goes on general sale. It’s set by the publisher and it’s the date almost everyone means by “release date”. Retailers are contractually not supposed to sell before it.

This is the date our calendar leads with.

Wider availability

The day shops outside any early-allocation programme get their stock. Where that differs from the street date, we show it as a separate line — because for a lot of buyers it’s the date that actually governs when they can buy the thing.

Why a shop can be a week behind the street date

Some publishers distribute in waves. Stores in their organised-play or premium-partner programmes — Disney Lorcana’s TCG+ tier is the clearest example — get allocated first. Independents that don’t run events get theirs on a later drop.

The gap is real and it’s routine. A worked example from our own data: Disney Lorcana’s Hyperia City has an official UK street date of 16/10/2026. Loaded Dice, which isn’t a TCG+ store, is allocated stock on 23/10/2026 — a week later.

Publishing 23/10 as “the UK release date” would be wrong for everyone not buying from Loaded Dice. Publishing 16/10 and saying nothing else would be misleading for everyone who is. So the calendar shows the street date as the release date, and the later date as in most shops, and you can see the gap for yourself.

Why every date carries a confidence badge

Dates move. A set announced in June for October gets pushed to November, and a page that stated the October date as fact is now quietly lying to everybody who reads it.

Rather than pretend, every row on the calendar says how sure we are:

An announced date isn’t a bad date. It’s just a date that hasn’t survived contact with a UK distributor yet, and you should plan accordingly if you’re booking time off to queue.

The American date is not your date

US release dates circulate far more widely than UK ones, and they’re frequently a different day. Sometimes it’s a matter of hours and time zones; sometimes it’s a genuinely different week, because product ships to Europe separately.

Anything on this site is a UK date. Where we don’t have a verified UK date, the row says so rather than borrowing the American one and hoping.

Using the calendar

• The full UK calendar covers all eight games, grouped by month.
• Each game has its own page — Pokémon, One Piece, Lorcana and the rest — if you only care about one.
• Sets we hold card data for link straight through to prices in pounds.

If you spot a date we’ve got wrong, we’d genuinely like to know. A calendar that’s confidently wrong is worse than no calendar at all.