Open vs Hold
The panel on every covered booster box compares two numbers: what the box is worth if you open it today, and what it's projected to be worth if you hold it sealed. Both are expected values over many boxes — directional guidance, not a prediction of what any one box you crack will pull.
Open EV
For every card that could appear in the set, we take its current raw market price and weight it by how often it shows up in a pack. Summed across all cards and multiplied by the 36 packs in a booster box, that's the expected value if you rip it.
Pull rates come from community pack-opening samples — Card Shop Live's 1,728-pack Scarlet & Violet breakdown is the main reference. The Pokemon Company does not publish official odds, so every EV tool in the hobby leans on the same empirical data.
Hold EV
We take the product's price change over the last 90 days and project it forward. A 1-year hold number is the price if the last three months' trend continued for a year; a 2-year number compounds that trend once more.
This is a directional read, not a forecast. Sealed prices zig-zag around holiday demand, reprint rumors, and set announcements — a 90-day window smooths only so much. Treat the Hold tiles as "if the last quarter's trend held," not as what your box will actually sell for.
The verdict
The badge compares the 1-year Hold value to Open EV. Hold means the sealed projection is meaningfully above ripping value. Open means the expected pulls are worth meaningfully more than the sealed projection. A ±5% window around the current price reads as Near even — when the spread is within that range, the model can't distinguish between the two on the available data, so it refuses to pick a side.
What the model does not capture
- Grading upside. Chase cards in PSA 10 are worth many multiples of their raw price. The model uses raw singles pricing only. A set with one grade-friendly Charizard could be significantly underestimated here. We plan to add graded EV once eBay sold-comp data is wired in.
- Your luck. EV is an average over many boxes. One box can pull nothing, or it can pull two special illustration rares. Don't plan a single-box decision on this number; it's built for judging prices and trend, not individual outcomes.
- Outlier pulls. Alternate arts, secret promos, and limited-print SIRs sometimes have their own special odds inside a set. The model treats every card at a given rarity as equally likely within that rarity.
- Seasonality. Sealed prices spike around Q4 demand and major anniversaries. The projection smooths through those but does not adjust for what's coming.
- Liquidity. The market price shown may be the asking price, not what you can realistically sell at in volume. A thinly-traded product at $500 may sit for weeks.
Which sets are covered
Today the model covers Scarlet & Violet, Mega Evolution, and Sword & Shield era booster boxes. Older eras — Sun & Moon, XY, classic WotC — are marked coverage pending on their product pages until the pull-rate tables for those pack structures are settled.
Prices for the singles that feed the calculator are refreshed on a rolling basis. If a set's numbers look a few days stale, they'll be picked up in the next refresh.