Is Brilliant Stars worth opening? EV, Charizard V and Trainer Gallery

Verdict

Only for the fun of it. In mid-September 2026 a Brilliant Stars booster box costs about $582 and the cards inside average about $139 at market, about 24 cents per dollar. A typical booster box on our board returns roughly 30 to 35 cents, and the gap is the collector premium that an out-of-print sealed box carries. The card most people open it for, the alternate-art Charizard V #154, is about $294 as a single, half the price of a box that comes nowhere near promising one. What the set does offer is a busy opening: a Trainer Gallery card turns up about every eight or nine packs. For any specific card, buy the single.

What Brilliant Stars is

Brilliant Stars (set code BRS) came out on February 25, 2022 as part of the Sword & Shield series. Its main checklist runs to 186 cards: 172 in the printed count plus 14 secret cards numbered beyond it. It introduced VSTAR cards, led here by Charizard VSTAR and Arceus VSTAR, and it was the first set with a Trainer Gallery.

The Trainer Gallery is a 30-card companion subset whose cards come out of the same packs. On this site it has its own set page, Brilliant Stars Trainer Gallery, but the sealed EV of Brilliant Stars counts its cards.

The main set has 20 Rare Holo V, 4 Rare Holo VSTAR, 3 Rare Holo VMAX, 21 Rare Ultra (full arts, alternate-art V cards included), 8 Rare Rainbow and 6 gold Rare Secret cards.

Sealed products on the site include the booster box (36 packs), two Elite Trainer Boxes (nine and 11 packs), a Build & Battle Box (four), loose and sleeved packs and blisters. The set is out of print, so each price includes a premium for the sealed product itself.

The numbers

Here are the headline figures from the Brilliant Stars set page. They cover the main set's 186 cards only; the Trainer Gallery has its own page.

Half of the main set's cards are worth 29 cents or less. Eighteen are worth $10 or more, only three reach $50, and buying one of each at market would cost about $807. The 35 Rare Ultra, Rare Rainbow and Rare Secret cards hold about $701 of that, about 87 percent, and Charizard V #154 alone is about 36 percent.

The Trainer Gallery changes the picture. Its 12 most valuable cards cost about $605 together, and six of them clear $50, twice as many as in the main set.

Sealed EV by product

Sealed EV asks what a product's contents are worth on average at today's TCGplayer market prices; the formula is in the methodology. A Brilliant Stars pack holds about $3.86 of expected cards whichever product it comes from, Trainer Gallery included.

At about $582 the booster box costs about $16 per pack, an EV ratio of about 0.24. After a 15 percent marketplace fee and $1 of shipping on every card worth $1 or more, its net EV is about $95.

The spread between the main products is narrow. The art bundle of four loose packs (about $60) has the best ratio, about 0.26. The box is about 0.24, a loose booster pack at about $17 about 0.23, and the Elite Trainer Box (about $161 for nine packs) about 0.22. The weakest of them is the Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Box, about $228 for 11 packs and about 0.19; only two single-pack blisters rank lower.

The source publishes one rate for any Trainer Gallery card, about 1 in 8.5 packs, with no split between the character rares and the scarcer V, VMAX and gold cards. A plain mean of all 30 prices would be dragged up by six V and VMAX cards at $73 to $106, the ones you are least likely to pull. So the site values the bucket at the median card, which sits below the subset's 12th most valuable card, Zekrom TG05 at about $15. That keeps the $3.86 conservative, and it means the real chance of a particular expensive Trainer Gallery card is much longer than 1 in 8.5.

In the main set the weight sits in Rare Ultra. At 1 in 19 packs and a mean of about $23.90, the group adds about $1.26 to every pack, roughly a third of the total, and about 74 cents of that is Charizard V #154 alone. Chase share is only about 13 percent because the Rare Rainbow and Rare Secret tiers are cheap.

Chase cards

The next block ranks Brilliant Stars and its Trainer Gallery as one list and shows the top eight.

From the main set's list: Charizard V #154, the alternate art illustrated by Ryota Murayama, is about $294. The rainbow Charizard VSTAR #174 is about $72, Arceus V #166 about $60 and the other Rare Ultra Charizard V, #153, about $35. Nothing else in the main set reaches $27.

From the Trainer Gallery's list: Umbreon VMAX TG23 is about $106, Mimikyu V TG16 about $88, Mimikyu VMAX TG17 about $76, and Sylveon V TG14, Umbreon V TG22 and Sylveon VMAX TG15 between about $73 and $74. Those six fill six of the eight places in the block, so the second tier of this set lives in the subset.

Group averages hide how uneven this is. Charizard V #153 and #154 share a rarity and a published rate, yet one costs about $35 and the other about $294. Without #154 the other 20 Rare Ultra cards average about $10.

Pull rates

Brilliant Stars has its own measured pull rates, so nothing below is an era average. The rates are midpoints of published pack-opening counts collected in September 2026; the source list is in the methodology.

Over 36 packs that works out to nearly five Rare Holo V cards, about four Trainer Gallery cards and nearly two Rare Ultras. A regular VSTAR (1 in 53 packs), a Rare Secret (1 in 67) and a Rare Rainbow (1 in 78) each appear less than once per box, and on those rates about one box in seven has no Rare Ultra.

The published rates for this era sort cards by printed rarity, so an alternate art has no rate of its own. Charizard V #154 is counted as one of 21 Rare Ultra cards, so its true odds are much longer than the headline 1 in 19. The EV treats it as exactly as likely as the other 20, and on that assumption it is about 1 in 399 packs: about 11 booster boxes, roughly $6,400 of sealed product, for a card that costs about $294. If alternate arts are the scarcer cards, the real odds are worse.

The Trainer Gallery works the same way: across 30 cards, 1 in 8.5 packs puts a particular card at about 1 in 255 on an equal split, and the valuable V and VMAX cards are rarer than that.

Who should open it and who should buy singles

Anyone after Charizard V #154 should buy it outright. A box costs twice what the card does, and even on the generous assumption it has roughly a 9 percent chance of containing one.

Building the set is a singles job as well. The $807 that buys every main-set card buys about 50 packs at box pricing: on average two or three Rare Ultras of 21 and less than one Rare Rainbow of 8. Trainer Gallery collectors face the same math: about four subset cards per box, weighted toward the cheaper character rares.

Players have no reason to open packs either, with the average Rare Holo V at about $1.67.

If the opening itself is what you are after, this set delivers: a Trainer Gallery card or a V arrives every few packs, and each pack holds about $3.86 of expected cards. Opening a box you already own swaps a $582 collectible for about $139 of expected cards.

How to buy it cheaper

On the site, each Brilliant Stars card and sealed product has a page showing its TCGplayer market price, the price history, the figure that is 12 percent below market, and two eBay buttons. Button one runs eBay's own search for Buy It Now listings from US sellers, leaves out proxies, lots, code cards and look-alike products, sorts by price plus shipping and caps the item price at 12 percent under market. Button two drops the cap. They are affiliate links. The block below has those capped eBay searches ready for the set's main sealed products, each under its own below-market price.

The cap ignores shipping, so work out the delivered total yourself. The landed price, item plus shipping, has to be at least 12 percent under market: about $512 for the booster box. Pay no attention to a seller's "was $X" figure. An empty result from the capped button means nothing is listed below market at that moment; the second button then shows every price, and eBay's own "Save this search" gets eBay to email new matches.

Singles on the site are priced raw and Near Mint. The Deal Score method in the methodology counts Lightly Played at 85 percent, so Charizard V #154 qualifies at about $220 landed Lightly Played and about $259 Near Mint. eBay's Authenticity Guarantee covers trading cards sold for $200 or more in the US, and at market price Charizard V #154 is the only card in the set or its Trainer Gallery that clears it. For the rest, read how to spot fake Pokémon cards, and before paying box money read how to spot resealed booster boxes and packs.

Bottom line

Brilliant Stars is a likeable set to open and a poor one for value: a pack costs $15 to $17 and holds about $3.86 of expected cards, and a box at about $582 holds about $139. One alternate art carries the main set, six Trainer Gallery V and VMAX cards carry the rest, and none has a published rate of its own. To buy the cards instead, go to the Brilliant Stars set page or the Trainer Gallery page, pick a card and try its capped eBay button first.