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 across many boxes. Directional guidance, not a prediction of what one box you crack will pull.
Open EV
For every card that could appear in the set, the current raw market price gets weighted 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 gross expected value of the pulls.
Selling those cards isn't free. Marketplace and payment fees take roughly 15% off the top, so the Open EV shown is net of that. It reflects what you'd pocket, not the sticker value of the pulls. The tile shows the gross figure alongside 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 doesn't publish official odds, so every EV tool in the hobby leans on the same data.
Hold EV
Take the product's 90-day price change and project it forward. The 1-year hold number is the price if the last three months' trend continued for a year. The 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 only smooths so much. Read the Hold tiles as "if the last quarter's trend held," not as what your box will actually sell for.
To keep that honest, the projected annual rate is capped. A single strong or weak quarter can't imply a sustained move beyond 50% a year, which is more than any sealed product holds for long. When the cap applies, the Hold tile says so.
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. Inside a ±5% band around the current price, the model can't tell the two apart and reads as Near even, refusing to pick a side.
Reprint risk
Next to the verdict sits a supply-side read: how much more printing a sealed product still faces. It blends where a set sits in its print run with how the market is pricing its supply right now. A set well past its print window that is quietly climbing reads as low risk. A fresh, heavily-printed set still filling shelves reads as high.
Low reprint risk is a tailwind for anyone holding sealed. Less new supply is coming to cap the price. Read it as a directional signal, not a guarantee. Anniversary reprints and surprise restocks still happen.
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 can read low here. Graded EV is on the roadmap once eBay sold-comp data is in.
- Your luck. EV is an average across many boxes. One box can pull nothing. The next 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 doesn't 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) read as coverage pending on their product pages until pull rates for those pack structures are settled.
Prices for the singles that feed the calculator refresh on a rolling basis. If a set's numbers look a few days stale, they'll catch up in the next refresh.