Aren’t all boxes negative EV? Or at least they will average negative EV?
Would Evolutions be the only set since BW (and maybe since DP) to have ever had that discrepancy for a short amount of time? It would be unique in the sense that the holos could be considered hits and also the irrational PSA10 pricing.
Pull rates of modern boxes means that you can’t have positive EV of a box at any sense of scale.
Meh, people said Fusion Strike was printed to the ground, not going to go anywhere- yet the box price just caught up to the Gengar worth $200 raw.
Lost Origin is $150 a box and you can pull a raw Giratina worth $300 raw so it’s sure going to follow the same path once it sells out.
The arguments in here certainly don’t apply to all sets by any stretch of the imagination.
But you don’t get a Gengar or Giratina in each box. If we use TCGPlayer pull rates, Giratina is about 1 in 18 boxes, so 17 of those you will lose, thus it’s negative EV.
Gengar is worse but don’t have the data offhand.
Box prices don’t go up based off EV of the cards you can pull.
For instance, Evolving Skies had horrible EV- even when it was $300 to $400 a box. There are only a hand full of cards you could pull 1 of to make just a quarter of it back. If you didn’t you weren’t pulling any over $50 store credit.
Yet it’s balloooooooning. $700 + now
Sealed boxes go up based on what might be inside. There just needs to be a chance, because theoretically the box is staying sealed. When supply goes down and there is a chance at something great in it, that’s all the collectors need that are keeping it sealed. This is why Battle Styles and Steam Siege don’t make the cut.
Do they have to? All the sets have different content and circumstances
No, they certainly don’t have to. That’s why I find it bizarre when they are thrown around here with such conviction as gospel.
Burning and Evo are two vastly different sets, having opened both and not gotten the chase ‘value card’ I have always had a great experience with the nostalgia derived from Evo whereas BS was subjectively a worst experience. Seriously, hitting a Mega Blastoise FA compared to hitting a rainbow Tapu Fini?
You’re trying to find explanation and logic behind somethings which sometimes simply won’t have any.
Fusion strike was always a great set, Yes the stolen hits scandal was tough but the hits are still there, anyone writing off a set with such beautiful cards like Gengar, Mew, Espeon or Celebi are ridiculous. In Pokemon people often have clouded lenses because they don’t like change or modern sets, not everyone ofcourse but it’s very common. The best advice I found myself is just to buy items based on how I feel towards them and not necessarily looking for scientific reasoning or data on future potential.
So your point isn’t about the EV being related to the chase card?
Maybe it’s just that people are still ignorant (not surprising) as to how hard it actually is to pull cards in modern sets.
.
When Charizard GX suddenly goes from $2500 to $25000 overnight and the Burning Shadows box is still $400, then we can talk
Until then you are purely speculating on an apples to oranges comparison with a price ratio that’s held steady for 7 years
This thread is such an exercise in confirmation bias. 4+ years of the same stable trend for this box and instead of trying to understand why, we are told this trend is wrong. Yet it is I with the religious level of conviction for just interpreting the data as it is.
We could have had this same conversation in 2020 when the Charizord GX price stabilized over 2k and yet this would be year 4 of waiting for this ratio of yours to finally correct.
And I’m sure that when the box prices across the board eventually go up - because they will, they always do - it will be vindication that you were right all along and not just the normal dynamics of box pricing.
The AI overlords tell me it’s the EV, sales, turnover, box age, set sentiment, box availability, and box consumption velocity that determine box price.
And Steam Siege was a very profitable investment!
Do you find that certain variables become more or less relevant over a box’s lifespan?
Honestly, pre-2020 Evolutions is more comparable to Steam Siege than it is to anything else. Before the summer of 2020, these two sets were considered complete trash. They had nothing valuable within them, loose packs were stuffed into every single auxiliary product, they were overprinted to the ground, boxes hadn’t seen any price growth, etc. It was only once Evolutions Charizard rocketed in price (something like what, 12x increase? Maybe more?) that the Evolutions box itself followed.
Steam Siege is still waiting for that moment when the community collectively wakes up and decides the Gardevoir EX secret rare is actually worth 12x more than it was yesterday. If that happens, this box is soaring to the moon.
Steam Siege speculation has never been in a better place
All the variables have interactions and are somewhat correlated, so it’s hard to extract single influences cleanly over time. Plus 2020 data…yuck. But some generalities: The number of cards graded becomes more important over time vs sales. Likely because the older and more expensive items sell less frequently, are sold privately, or aren’t tracked well. Box inventory and consumption velocity are most relevant before the boxes break over $150. While for very old boxes, its impossible to track. It’s pretty murky identifying single drivers, but combining all the little pieces of information has been pretty successful in Pokemon and other tcgs.
It’s pretty murky identifying single drivers, but combining all the little pieces of information has been pretty successful in Pokemon and other tcgs.
I’ve never seen a modern box with such a high outlier that didn’t correct, because poke tubers will always take th gamble for content.
I imagine the Rainbow Chairzard from Burning Shadows has been forgotten about, or overlooked by new collectors after the 2020 boom, but once the youtube and whatnot box breakers figure they can gamble $400 for a $2500 card they will start breaking boxes for content and it will be all over. There already aren’t many boxes available on the market.
Your features make a lot of intuitive sense to me.
The anecdotal pattern I notice is that every box follows a similar lifecycle with common milestones.
The first phase after release has is usually has effectively endless supply. Assuming the printing can keep up with demand, prices are coorelated with EV.
Then a box goes out of print and there’s still this supply inertia that keeps the price low. The common fallacy here is that prices of “modern” can never go up because look how much supply is in people’s closets! This is when your variables of box inventory and sales velocity are most relevant because they mark the transition to the next phase.
When the deep supply starts to run out, the race to undercut at the lowest price weakens and sales velocity slows. Then there’s a tipping point where all the short term sellers are done selling and the box jumps up quickly and everyone is shocked.
The pressure on price flips from supply to demand. More popular sets do better because people are still buying them even when the price climbs. Population/sales/the ratio in the op are all ways to measure set popularity. After that it’s just a cycle of ever shrinking supply accelerated by the popularity of the set.
This model explains why a set like Ultra Prism that had a short initial supply but is largely unpopular shocked people when it broke past the supply price barrier but is still lagging in price to more popular sets.
Thoughts? Maybe it’s an overly simple model but I think it aligns with what you’ve identified as important
I think you are pretty spot on. The price curves for boxes have been roughly hockey sticks over the past 2 decades. The shape depends on what you were saying about population and supply of the set.
I don’t think you are over simplifying it. I think you can get an 80% solution with just age and popularity.
And I’m sure that when the box prices across the board eventually go up - because they will, they always do - it will be vindication that you were right all along and not just the normal dynamics of box pricing.
That’s an interesting take on my other thread where members belittled me for pointing out Evolutions wasn’t as bad as they thought, while the box increased 500% in 4 months right under their nose. 
Maybe Burning Shadows does nothing, maybe it follows the path of Evolutions. I was just sharing info which seems to rustle some jimmies around here more often than not.
Burning Shadows already followed the path of Evolutions in 2020. They both got a nice 500% at the same time. I was able to ride that glorious wave! Saying that its going to happen again, but just to Burning Shadows and not the other boxes is just hard to people to take in. Going from $100-$500 is not the same as $500-$2,500.
I don’t think you addressed this earlier point from pfm:
What was happening in mid-2020 to the Pokemon market? Is that environment similar to or different than the current environment?
If PSA 10 Charizard GX has been approximately the same price for 4 years, why hasn’t the box price skyrocketed if the value of the highest chase card in PSA 10 should predict the box price?
