How we compute sealed EV (and why most boxes are negative EV)

Expected value for a sealed product is the answer to one question: at today's raw market prices, what are the cards inside worth on average? For nearly every modern booster box the answer is less than the box. Pitch Black, the example we use below, comes out at about 0.44×: a box selling for roughly $198 contains cards worth about $87 on average, and about $54 once you account for selling them. That is not a criticism of the set. Opening packs is entertainment with some resale value, and EV tells you the size of the "some". This guide walks through exactly how the number is built so you can judge it, argue with it, or recompute it yourself.

The formula

For each rarity tier that has a published pull rate, we take the probability of pulling one in a pack, which is one divided by packs-per-hit, and multiply it by the mean market price of all cards of that rarity in the set. Add those up across tiers, add a baseline for the slots every pack guarantees, and you have EV per pack. Multiply by the pack count of the product and you have EV for the product.

EV(pack) = Σ (1 ÷ packs-per-hit) × mean market price of that rarity, plus the non-hit baseline

EV(product) = packs × EV(pack)

EV ratio = EV(product) ÷ market price of the sealed product

Prices are TCGplayer market prices via TCGCSV, refreshed daily. Pull rates come from published pack-opening datasets, mainly TCGplayer's authentication-center counts of a thousand to several thousand packs per set plus community counts, using the midpoint when a source gives a range. The Pitch Black set page shows the exact rates in use.

The worked example: a Pitch Black booster box

Pitch Black has published rates of roughly 1 Illustration Rare per 10 packs, 1 Ultra Rare per 12, 1 Special Illustration Rare per about 102, 1 Mega Hyper Rare per 1,315, and 1 Double Rare per 5. The current live table for the set is here.

Now the prices. The six Special Illustration Rares average about $71, though that average is doing a lot of work: it runs from the Gladion's Final Battle at about $28 up to Mega Darkrai ex at about $195. The single Mega Hyper Rare, the gold Mega Darkrai ex, is about $152. The 18 Ultra Rares average about $5, the 11 Illustration Rares about $3.20, and the 10 Double Rares about $0.73.

Multiply each by its probability and you get the per-pack contribution of each tier, using the set's rarity averages:

• Special Illustration Rare: 1/102.5 × $71 ≈ $0.70
• Mega Hyper Rare: 1/1315 × $152 ≈ $0.12
• Ultra Rare: 1/12 × $5.07 ≈ $0.42
• Illustration Rare: 1/10 × $3.21 ≈ $0.32
• Double Rare: 1/5 × $0.73 ≈ $0.15

That is about $1.70 per pack from the hit slots. The live model prices every card individually by its preferred printing rather than by tier average and adds the baseline described below, which brings it to $2.43 per pack. Thirty-six packs in a box gives a gross EV of about $87. The box's market price is about $198, so the ratio is 87 ÷ 198, or roughly 0.44×. The break-even price, the price at which the cards would equal the cost, is the gross EV itself: about $87.

Two more numbers come out of the same inputs. The chance that a single pack contains at least one Illustration Rare or better is about 18%, roughly 1 pack in 5.4; across 36 packs it is about 99.9%, so a box with nothing above an Ultra Rare is a genuine outlier. The chance of at least one Special Illustration Rare in a box, at 1 in about 102 packs, is only about 30%.

Here are the live figures for every priced Pitch Black product, which will drift from the numbers above as prices move.

The baseline for non-hit slots

A pack is roughly four commons, three uncommons, one rare-or-better, one reverse holo and an energy. Most of those cards are worth cents, but they are not worth zero, and a model that ignored them would undervalue every pack by the same small amount. So we add a baseline: the rare slot at the set's mean Rare price for the share of packs where that slot is not already a hit, the reverse holo at about 1.5 times the mean common, and the remaining commons and uncommons at half the mean common. In Pitch Black the mean Rare is about $0.28 and the mean common about $0.21, so the guaranteed slots add on the order of a dollar per pack. It is a small term, and it is the reason a pack can never be modelled as worthless.

Mean versus median, and why chase share matters

EV is a mean. The median outcome is much worse. The median card in Pitch Black is worth about $0.25; only 8 of its 120 cards are worth $10 or more, and only 4 are worth $50 or more. The mean is pulled up by a handful of cards that most boxes will not contain.

Chase share makes this visible. It is the fraction of hit EV that comes from the top tiers, Special Illustration Rares and Mega Hyper Rares in this era. For Pitch Black it is about 48%: nearly half of the value you are "expected" to pull sits in tiers you have roughly a 30% chance of seeing at all in a box, and the largest single piece sits in a card that appears about once in 1,300 packs. A high chase share means most boxes will come in well under the EV and a few will come in far over it. When you read an EV ratio, read the chase share next to it; a 0.44× box with a 48% chase share is a very different experience from a 0.44× box where the value is spread across Ultra Rares you pull every dozen packs.

The haircut to net EV

Gross EV values cards at TCGplayer market, which is what a buyer pays, not what you receive. Net EV subtracts a 15% marketplace fee and $1 of shipping per card worth $1 or more, and treats cards under $1 as bulk at about two cents each. For the Pitch Black box that takes the gross of about $87 down to a net of about $54, roughly 0.27× the box price. If you open boxes and sell the hits, net describes your outcome; if you keep the cards, gross is the fairer measure of what you hold.

The era-default caveat

New sets do not have published pull rates for their first few weeks. Until they do, we use conservative era-default midpoints and the live tables say so. Pitch Black uses published rates, but even published rates disagree: TCGplayer's count of more than 4,000 packs gives Special Illustration Rares at about 1 in 102, while other trackers report closer to 1 in 80. At 1 in 80 the SIR term would be about $0.89 per pack instead of $0.70, adding roughly $7 to the box's gross EV and lifting the ratio to about 0.48×. That is the size of the uncertainty: real, but not enough to move a 0.44× box anywhere near 1.0×.

What 0.44× means in plain terms

For every $100 you spend on Pitch Black booster boxes at market, you get, on average, about $44 of cards at raw market value, and about $27 after selling them. You would need to buy the box at about $87, less than half the current price, for the cards to break even. Modern boxes on this site run about 0.3× to 0.55×; anything above 1.0× is the exception and usually means a mispriced listing or an older set whose singles have outgrown the box. If you are deciding whether to open Pitch Black specifically, that guide works through the set's chase cards and products.

The board below ranks the current booster boxes we track by EV ratio, updated daily, and the full list with every product type is at Sealed EV.

Bottom line

Sealed EV is pull rate times mean card price, summed across rarities, plus a small baseline for the guaranteed slots, multiplied by pack count. On Pitch Black that gives about $2.43 a pack, about $87 for a 36-pack box, and a ratio of roughly 0.44× against a $198 box, with about 48% of the hit value locked in cards you have a minority chance of pulling. Net of fees it is closer to 0.27×. Most modern boxes land in the same range, which is why we say opening sealed is a hobby with partial resale value, not a way to acquire cards cheaply. If you want the cards, buy the singles; if you want to open packs, know the number going in.