Open vs Hold
The panel on every covered Pokemon 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 an English booster box, that's the gross expected value of the pulls.
The rest of a pack isn't empty. Past the hit, every pack holds commons, uncommons, a reverse holo, and a base rare. That filler is valued from the set's own commons, uncommons, and rares at their current prices, not a flat placeholder. It's a small number per pack, but it adds up across 36.
That figure is an average over many boxes, not a promise for one. A few packs carry almost all the value, so most boxes land below the average and a few hot ones land well above it. Alongside the number, the same rates and prices run over thousands of simulated boxes to show the realistic spread (5th to 95th percentile) and how often opening beats selling the box sealed. A single box can and will swing.
Selling isn't free on either path. Marketplace and payment fees take roughly 15% off the singles from a ripped box, so the Open EV shown is net of that — what you'd pocket, not the sticker value of the pulls. The tile shows the gross figure alongside it. A sealed sale pays fees too: about 13.6% on a typical listing, dropping to 2.35% on the part of a sale above $7,500, and the verdict nets both sides. A hold edge that only exists before fees doesn't count.
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 that trend continued for a year. The 2-year number compounds it once more.
One box's price can lurch on a handful of sales. To keep the projection from chasing that noise, the trend is blended with the box's index over the same window. Each box sits in an index of its release era, and that basket moves on dozens of products at once, so it's far steadier. The blend leans half on the box and half on its index. A genuine move still shows through. A jumpy week of thin sales gets pulled back toward the market.
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 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.