Is Chilling Reign worth opening? Box EV, pull rates and chase cards

Verdict

On value, no. In mid-September 2026 a Chilling Reign booster box is about $482, and the average pulls from its 36 packs are worth about $82 at TCGplayer market prices, before any selling fees. The EV ratio is about 0.17, or roughly 17 cents of raw card value for each dollar of sealed price. Typical booster boxes on the Sealed EV board show roughly 30 to 35 cents. The set is out of print, so the sealed price includes a collector premium for sealed product itself. The top card, Blaziken VMAX #201, is an alternate art at about $383, and the published rate for the set's three alternate-art VMAX cards works out to about 1 in 1,365 packs for that one card.

What Chilling Reign is

Chilling Reign, set code CRE, belongs to the Sword & Shield series and was released on June 18, 2021. Its single checklist has 233 cards: a printed count of 198 plus 35 with higher numbers, the same count as its 23 Rare Rainbow and 12 Rare Secret cards combined. The other hits by printed rarity are 15 Rare Holo V, 8 Rare Holo VMAX and 39 Rare Ultra cards.

Products with a pack count on the site include the 36-pack booster box, eight-pack Elite Trainer Boxes for Ice Rider Calyrex and Shadow Rider Calyrex (10 packs in the Pokémon Center versions), the four-pack Build & Battle Box, loose and sleeved packs and blisters. The V Boxes, the Fun Pack and the Build & Battle display have no pack count on the site, so no EV.

The numbers

The block below is drawn from the Chilling Reign set page and covers all 233 cards.

The median card is worth 37 cents, 35 cards are worth $10 or more and nine are worth $50 or more. One copy of every card at market comes to about $2,056. Those nine cards make up about $1,262 of it, about 61 percent, which leaves about $794 for the remaining 224. Blaziken VMAX #201 alone is about 19 percent of the set, and Galarian Moltres V #177 at about $235 brings two cards to about 30 percent. Five more Rare Ultra cards sit between about $66 and $115.

Sealed EV by product

Sealed EV is what a product's packs hold on average, with each card counted at its current TCGplayer market price. The formula is in the methodology. Every Chilling Reign pack works out at about $2.27 of expected cards.

The EV ratio is gross EV divided by the sealed market price: about $82 over about $482 for the booster box, or 0.17. Net EV, after a 15 percent marketplace fee and $1 of shipping per card worth $1 or more, is about $55.

A typical Elite Trainer Box on the board holds about 15 to 20 cents per dollar. Chilling Reign's ratio is low because the sealed price is high: about $13.40 a pack against $2.27 of expected cards is the collector premium on an out-of-print box, not a flaw in the cards.

A loose booster pack is about $12, less than the box's price per pack and the best ratio in the table at about 0.19. The Elite Trainer Boxes, about $144 and $152 for eight packs, are at about 0.13 and 0.12, and the 10-pack Pokémon Center versions at about 0.12 and 0.11. The lowest row, the Blaziken Premium Checklane Blister, is about $34 for one pack: about 0.07. EV counts packs only, so anything else in a blister or an Elite Trainer Box adds nothing.

The ten alternate-art V cards, at 1 in 147 packs and a mean of about $79.92, add about 54 cents of the $2.27, and the three alternate-art VMAX cards, at 1 in 455 and about $163, add about 36 cents. The 29 regular full arts, at 1 in 27 and about $8.62, add about 32 cents, the 20 rainbow cards, at 1 in 122 and about $10.73, about 9 cents, and Rare Holo VMAX, at 1 in 30 and about $2.44, about 8 cents. The rest, a little under 90 cents, is the baseline for common, uncommon and rare slots. Chase share, the part of hit EV from the rarest tiers, is about 71 percent, because both alternate-art tiers count towards it.

One gap: the site's rate data for this set has no figure for Rare Secret, so its 12 cards, Snorlax #224 at about $139 among them, add nothing to the $2.27. On that point the figure is conservative.

Chase cards

Here are the set's eight highest-priced cards.

Blaziken VMAX #201, listed as Rare Rainbow, leads at about $383. Galarian Moltres V #177 (Rare Ultra) follows at about $235, then Snorlax #224 (Rare Secret) at about $139 and Galarian Slowking V #179 (Rare Ultra) at about $115. The other four, led by Zeraora V #166 at about $93, run down to about $66.

The group means hide how uneven each rarity is. Rare Ultra averages about $26.90 over 39 cards, roughly $1,049 in total, but nine cards account for about $775 of that and the other 30 average about $9. Take Blaziken VMAX #201 out of Rare Rainbow and the other 22 average about $15. One of them is a second Blaziken VMAX, #200, with the same printed rarity, at about $31: it is a rainbow card, not an alternate art, so the EV counts it in the rainbow tier. In Rare Secret, the 11 cards other than Snorlax average about $7.

These are raw Near Mint prices. A PSA 10 of a modern English card usually sells for more than a raw Near Mint copy, but hobby guides do not agree on the size of the gap: see raw vs graded.

Pull rates

This set has published pull rates of its own, not an era-wide stand-in: each is the midpoint of pack-opening counts for Chilling Reign gathered in September 2026. Sources are in the methodology.

That table has five rates: its Rare Ultra and Rare Rainbow rows are the source's regular full-art and rainbow tiers, and the two alternate-art tiers have rows of their own. A 36-pack box averages about 1.3 regular full arts (1 in 27 packs) and 1.2 Rare Holo VMAX cards (1 in 30), with a rainbow card (1 in 122) in roughly one box out of four. Counting the alternate-art rows as well, the chance of at least one Rare Ultra or Rare Rainbow of any kind is about 5.4 percent per pack and about 86 percent in a booster box, so roughly one box in seven has neither.

Alternate arts have published tiers of their own in this set: about 1 in 147 packs for any of 10 alternate-art V cards and about 1 in 455 for any of three alternate-art VMAX cards. The counts stop at the tier, not the card, so take the cards of a tier as equally likely. Galarian Moltres V #177, an alternate-art V, is then about 1 in 1,470 packs: about 41 boxes, roughly $19,700 today, for a card of about $235. Blaziken VMAX #201, an alternate-art VMAX, is about 1 in 1,365 packs, about 38 boxes or roughly $18,300. Both are far longer than the printed rarity's headline rate.

Both tiers feed the EV above. The site's card data has the printed rarity and no alternate-art mark, so Pullnomics keeps its own list of this set's 13 alternate arts, taken from TCGplayer's product names and checked against the card counts the source gives for each tier. Those cards get the alternate-art rates. The 29 regular full arts share the 1 in 27 rate, about 1 in 783 packs for any one of them, and the 20 rainbow cards share 1 in 122, about 1 in 2,440 each. Before September 20, 2026 the EV left the alternate-art tiers out and split each printed rarity's rate evenly: about 1 in 1,053 packs for any one of 39 Rare Ultra cards and about 1 in 2,806 for any one of 23 Rare Rainbow cards. That made the alternate-art V cards easier to pull than the counts say and every other card here harder. The two errors nearly cancelled: on the same prices the pack EV was about $2.20 where it is now about $2.27. Every published tier is on the Chilling Reign pull-rate page.

Opening packs versus buying singles

For one named card the comparison is lopsided. On the alternate-art tiers, one box at about $482 has about a 2.4 percent chance of holding Galarian Moltres V #177 and about 2.6 percent for Blaziken VMAX #201.

For the whole set, one of every card is about $2,056. The same money is a little over four boxes, about 154 packs. Those packs average six or seven Rare Ultra pulls across 39 cards, alternate arts included, and one or two Rare Rainbow pulls across 23, duplicates included. For players, the regular printings are cheap: Rare Holo V cards average about $1.14 and Rare Holo VMAX cards about $2.44.

For the experience of opening packs, the cheapest unit is the loose pack at about $12 for about $2.27 of expected cards. A sealed box has a market price of about $482, and the cards inside one average about $82.

Checking prices below market

Every Chilling Reign card and sealed product page shows the TCGplayer market price, its history, the price 12 percent below market, and two eBay buttons. One button opens eBay's own search results: Buy It Now listings from US sellers, sorted by price plus shipping, without proxies, lots, code cards or look-alike products, and capped at 12 percent under market. The other opens that search uncapped. Both are affiliate links. The block below opens eBay searches for this set's main sealed products, already filtered under each one's below-market price.

The cap looks at the item price alone, so add shipping yourself. A listing counts as below market only when its landed price, item plus shipping, is at least 12 percent under the adjusted market price: about $424 for the booster box. If the capped search is empty, nothing is listed below market at that moment. The uncapped button shows every current price, and eBay's own "Save this search" emails new matches.

The Deal Score steps in the methodology set a Lightly Played copy against 85 percent of the Near Mint market price. For Blaziken VMAX #201 the 12 percent line is a landed price of about $337 Near Mint or about $287 Lightly Played. eBay's Authenticity Guarantee covers trading cards sold for $200 or more in the US. Two Chilling Reign cards have a market price above $200: Blaziken VMAX #201 and Galarian Moltres V #177. For sealed product of this age, how to spot resealed booster boxes and packs covers what to check.

Bottom line

Chilling Reign's sealed price is a collector's price. A box is about $482 against about $82 of average pulls at TCGplayer market prices before any selling fees, an EV ratio of about 0.17. A pack holding about $2.27 of expected cards costs about $12 loose or about $13.40 by the box. On the published alternate-art tiers Galarian Moltres V #177 is about 1 in 1,470 packs and Blaziken VMAX #201 about 1 in 1,365. Current prices for every card and product are on the Chilling Reign set page.