Ex boxes have gone extinct. If you have one, send it to a museum. I haven’t seen a public sale of TRR in many years now and there are 0 listings of FRLG on eBay.
Gone are the days of 2019 when there were always like 20 HL boxes on eBay sitting unsold at $2000/ea lol. There hasn’t even been a public auction of any EX box this entire year, which is kind of insane.
There are definitely a good number of boxes out there–they’re just mostly not for sale. There are at least two people I know of who each have 40-50 boxes, and then at least three people I know of who each have more than a dozen. And, of course, there are lot of people (myself included) who have a few boxes. So just from what I’m aware of, there are definitely hundreds of boxes out there. And probably plenty more I’m not aware of.
And this doesn’t include people with complete booster box collections like PokeRev, David Persin, etc.
But as far as what’s for sale? Yeah, almost nothing.
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Goldin is auctioning an emerald box soon. That’s the only public ex sale that I’m aware of in 2025. Pretty wild compared to even wotc it’s a desert
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Wow, didn’t even notice.
Weird thing in the description:
“This box comes with a LOA from Industrial Inspection & Consulting LLC. IIC reviewed this specimen for Goldin to verify authenticity and confirm it has not been tampered with.”
Looks like an x-ray company. I didn’t realize any were actually offering authentication services lol.
If boxes can be authenticated via x-ray, I’d be curious to know whether the precision is high enough to identify the exact cards in each pack (which would be very concerning, obv).
There’s a whole can of worms there and we’ve got a thread on it somewhere on e4
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Yeah, just looked into it. Apparently they detected a fake Holon Phantoms box (they posted an article about it, although the box was pretty obviously fake–didn’t really need an x-ray for that conclusion).
Which, on a separate note, lead me to discover that there was, in fact, a public EX auction this year:
A different HP box. Somehow missed the auction entirely!
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Thank you @Dyl this is helpful to have all compiled here. Even as just a historical reference
(Emerald really popped off and retraced in 23-24, I wonder how 25 will be)
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goldin is the only house afaik that sends these boxes for ct scan before auction. prolly a good thing since i wouldnt trust any boomer house with booster box authentication 
(similarly the ig bros who claim to be “experts” yet many resealed boxes changed hands between them a few times before they got caught)
here’s an lob box that sold for nothing the other day coz all they had was one crappy pic
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Didn’t really retrace imo—that $17.5k sale on HA was just an insane outlier. Was generally considered more like a $12k box at that point
It may have been the first public sale for it in a long time. Plus milotic hype was going on at the time
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I’ve always been suprised that there is not really a market for graded packs. You’d think they be the cheap alternative to a booster box
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I think a lot of people do collect packs–just not graded packs. Sealed collectors in general aren’t nearly as concerned about condition as card collectors are. I agree that it is kind of surprising just how uninterested the market is in graded packs, though. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a graded pack collector, and graded packs demand almost no premium over ungraded packs in auctions.
Hopefully with the cleaner cases this will change in the future. I think over time there will start to be some more demand that way
prolly because they are all light… but the prices seem pretty consistent and they sell pretty regularly so id still say there is a market :shrug:
for a graded pack you really need a psa 10 the other grades basically = raw price. if the raw pack is heavy it will sell for way more than the graded version, if it is true unweighed then it will likely still sell for more esp with all the gambling bros around nowadays (although i wouldnt trust “unweighed” to be anything other than light)
id say blisters, but clearly thats not a cheap alternative anymore
I also thought slabbed packs would be really cool with the new cases but the market completely disagrees. So much so I barely know anyone who collects them outside base 1st ed
blisters are def way more expensive ive sold them for like 150-200% of raws
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