Ok, thank you guys! Found it. Can I just say to any Disney IT people........your program for this stinks. For what
DVC charges for contracts AND annual dues, the very least they could do is give us the card back.
It's not about cost, it's about fraud and people loaning their cards out, or using the cards after they have sold their contracts.
To put it in perspective, the old Blue Cards with no magnetic stripe cost about ten to fifteen cents to produce, and about fifty cents to mail out. They didn't expire (until the end), so they only had to send them out once to each member (or at worst, every few years). Cards with magnetic stripes are around twenty-five to thirty cents each, so hardly a cost barrier to sending those out. The hotels go through tens of thousands of room cards with magnetic stripes and/or RFID chips every year and don't think twice about it. As an FYI, even an embossed credit card with both a magnetic stripe
and an EMV chip runs about $2.00 per card.
By comparison, DVC sends out the Disney Files magazine 4 times a year. Each one of those costs between $2.00 and $3.00 to produce (high quality printing, heavy weight oversized paper), plus another $1.50 or so to mail (each magazine being wrapped in the heavy cardboard mailer makes it even more expensive to mail out than a regular periodical). If Disney was trying to pinch pennies by not issuing a new $.15 Blue Card every few years, they'd definitely not be spending 20 or 30 times that sending out a magazine to the very same people, every year, year after year.
Now sure, the magazine is obviously a marketing tool whereas the Blue Card wasn't, but the cost of those cards is so de minimis and DVC could very easily (and possibly very arguably) send out a much cheaper magazine, using standardized paper size and quality and bulk magazine mailing rates and get the same marketing message out for a fraction of the cost of the current Disney Files, so it really can't be logically argued that the elimination of the Blue Cards is a cost cutting measure.
Eventually, the QR code on that digital card will be scanned for all discounts and member benefits, and it will access a real-time database indicating whether the card holder is, in fact, eligible for benefits. They're already using it at Moonlight Magic events and the Member Lounges.