Worth opening?
updated Sep 20, 2026
Compare sealed prices with typical pull value, average returns and the price where opening breaks even.
- Typical
- the middle opening, half do better and half do worse
- Average
- the mean of every run, dragged up by the rare big hit
- Best case
- the luckiest one opening in a hundred
- Worth it under
- pay less than this and opening pays, after selling fees
- Return
- the average as a share of what it costs sealed
How to read these results
Buy a sealed box and you can keep it or rip it. This page works out what the ripping is worth. Every product here is opened 2,000,000 times over: each pack draws its rare slot and its hit slot against the published pull rates for that set, whatever card comes out is priced at what that card sells for, and the spread of those results is what you would actually end up holding.
The short version is that opening loses. Not one of these 213 products returns what it costs. The best, Temporal Forces Booster Box, gives back 63%, and the middle of the list gives back 32%. That gap is the shop's margin, the distributor's, and the fact that most of what comes out of a pack is a common worth eleven cents.
Typical is the middle of the 2,000,000 runs and Average is their mean, and the two are not close. Ascended Heroes Elite Trainer Box averages $55.46£41.56€48.39 while the middle one gives $24.78£18.57€21.62, because one card carries 10% of that average and most boxes do not contain it. Any single number for a box is the average of thousands you will not buy, so the typical column leads and Best case shows the luckiest opening in a hundred.
Worth it under is the price at which opening starts to pay. Not the average, which is what every box EV figure quotes and what nobody actually receives: it takes out the bulk commons, then takes 13.4% and $0.40£0.30€0.35 off what is left for what eBay charges to sell it. Across all 213 products you would have to pay a median of 81% less than the going price for opening to break even.
What the numbers say
A pack is nearly all lottery. A box is only mostly one
Both bars are the same measurement. The solid one is the typical opening and the pale one behind it is the average, so the gap between them is how much of the answer rides on an outcome you usually do not get. A booster box returns 38% typically and 45% on average, a gap of 7 points. A single pack returns 18% and 44%, a gap of 26. Almost the same average, and one of them pays out most of the time. The more packs a product holds, the more the luck averages out and the closer the typical opening sits to the mean. That is the only sense in which a bigger box is a better buy: it is not a better deal, it is a less volatile one.
Which set you open barely matters
Across 17 sets the average return runs from 24% to 43%, and none of them is close to whole. It does not track age either. Sealed prices climb alongside the singles they contain, so waiting does not make a set cheaper to open, it just makes both numbers bigger.
Keeping it sealed beat opening it, in every era
The other half of the question, and the half that is recorded rather than modelled. This is what the sealed products themselves did over the last 365 days: same window for every product, both ends required, priced above five dollars a year ago. 94% of 1,205 sealed products went up, with the median between 44% and 68% depending on the era. Opening the same products returns 24% to 45% of what they cost.
That is a backtest and not a forecast. It covers one year, and a year in which the whole market ran; a year that went the other way would put the same table in the red and the opening figures would not move, because they are priced off the same singles.
One card carries the box
On the average product, a single card is 11% of the whole expected value, and on 23 of 213 it is more than a quarter. At the top of the range Phantasmal Flames Single Pack Blister [Whimsicott] puts 40% of its average into Mega Charizard X ex. This is why the typical column exists. A product whose expected value is one card is not an investment with an average, it is a raffle ticket with a price.
How this is worked out
Three inputs, and only one of them is not ours. The cards in each set, their rarities and what each finish sells for are our own price data, so a reverse holo slot pays the reverse price rather than that card's ordinary one. How many packs a product holds is read off the descriptions the shops themselves publish, which is why an Elite Trainer Box here is 9 packs, a Pokemon Center one is 11 and Crown Zenith's was 10, rather than a single number applied to all of them.
The odds are the input we cannot derive. The Pokemon Company publishes no pull rates for English product, so these are TCGplayer per-set pack openings, read on Aug 30, 2026 and covering 17 sets on this page. They are per set and not per era: a Special Illustration Rare turns up in 3.01% of Scarlet & Violet base packs and 1.15% of Surging Sparks packs. A set with no published rate is left off rather than given a borrowed one.
2,000,000 openings is past the point where more changes the answer. The same product run under different random seeds lands within a few cents at this count, while the odds themselves are measured to about a fifth of a percentage point, so the sampling stopped being the uncertainty a long way back.
About 27% of every average here is commons and uncommons at a few cents each. Those prices are real in the sense that the market quotes them and unreachable in the sense that nobody sells 144 commons one at a time, which is what the Sellable column takes out. In the other direction, only what comes out of the packs is counted: a promo card the product ships alongside them is not, so anything built around its promo reads low here. A checklane blister is one pack and a guaranteed promo, and the promo is the reason to buy it. A booster box ships no promo and is unaffected.
Everything here is Scarlet & Violet. Earlier sets file every V as a single rarity while the odds for them are published separately for normal, full art and alt art, and spreading one probability evenly across that mixture would hand an alt art the same chance as a normal V. That would not widen the answer, it would raise it, so those sets are left out. Prismatic Evolutions and White Flare are out for a different reason: a third of their packs turn on Poke Ball and Master Ball foil patterns, which we hold no separate price for.