Why Sealed Pokémon Products Win (vs Singles)

Sealed product will always become more valuable than the top chase cards from its set.

Case in point: sealed Team Up booster boxes.

Now trading with a market price of $4,150 on TCG Player (and higher on eBay), the top chase cards from this set, the stunning Latias & Latios Tag Team GX alt art card, has a market value of only $1,737.

This outcome is inevitable:

1. At release, the supply of sealed product is at all-time highs: literally all of the product produced is still sealed.

2. Similarly, the supply of the top chase cards is at all-time lows: with none of the product opened, no chase cards can be pulled.

3. Over time, more sealed product is opened (sealed supply goes down), which leads to more copies of the chase card being pulled (supply goes up).

4. Eventually, the sealed product for the set becomes rarer than the hardest-to-pull chase chard you can pull from it.

We see this play out quickly for sets with bad chase cards.

Just look at the Emerging Powers booster box from the Black & White era: a $3,000 booster box with a top chase card, the full art Thundurus, with a market price of… wait for it:

$11.44… 🤯

There’s also a full art Tornadus worth $9.62, and it goes down from there.

How do you justify a $3,000 booster box when the best card you can pull from it is barely worth $10?

It’s simply that the booster box is now rare, and because there are sealed collectors who want one of every Black & White era set booster box, that sealed product is far more desirable to the market than the chase cards within it.

I expect to see this dynamic continue to play out with modern sets that have yet to realize it: Evolving Skies stands out, with its booster boxes at a market price of $1,347.59 on TCG Player, vs the Moonbreon sitting at $1,731.78.

But, There’s A Twist…

In my opening example of Team Up, with it’s Latias & Latios Tag Team GX alt art card price of $1,737 versus a more than $4,000 booster box…

The price of the card is the raw, ungraded price.

Grading plays a role here…

Because that same card, in a PSA 10, sells for more than $5,000 as seen on Pokedata.io, exceeding the $4,000 booster box price.

And, this high price for the Latias & Latios GX alt art no doubt has helped lift the price of the sealed booster box product as well. This effect is particularly important the more scarce the PSA 10 examples are, for example, the 570 PSA 10 examples of the holo Charizard from XY Evolutions. This otherwise $50 raw card is currently priced at $1,800 for a PSA 10 (which has previously seen prices more than $6,400 during the 2020 boom 👀).

The Moonbreon and the Modern Era

This price behaviour from past sets sets a standard that may not be followed by the Moonbreon, and other chase cards from more recent eras. The problem is: the supply of these cards is too damn high.

See: I’ve already mentioned the mere 570 PSA 10 examples of the Evolutions Charizard holo. The Latias & Latios GX alt art, meanwhile, has a few more with 1,797 PSA 10 copies listed as I write this.

But the Moonbreon is infamous for its 16,453 copies, which make up about 73% of the total population: nearly 3 in every 4 Moonbreon cards submitted to PSA earns the coveted PSA 10 grade.

With that kind of supply, how long can it continue to fetch prices above the booster box, as sealed booster boxes get rarer and rarer over time?

This is why I like investing in sealed product for the long term, and I’m sure why so many other collectors and investors are increasingly drawn to sealed products.

What do you think?

As usual, thanks so much for reading the TCG Buyers Club newsletter. My name’s Grey, I buy cardboard, and I’m on a mission to make collecting and investing in Pokémon simple.

Cheers 🍻