Is Darkness Ablaze worth opening? EV, pull rates and chase cards

Verdict

At TCGplayer market values as of September 28, 2026, no Darkness Ablaze product with both a price and an EV holds more than about 18 cents of raw card value per dollar of its price, and the most valuable card in the set is a regular VMAX, not a rainbow or a secret rare. Every price and EV figure in this guide is from that date. A Darkness Ablaze booster box sells for about $363.94 and its 36 packs hold about $65.45 of cards at raw market prices, an EV ratio of about 0.18. A typical booster box on the sealed EV board holds roughly 30 to 35 cents per dollar and a typical Elite Trainer Box roughly 15 to 20 cents, against about 0.13 for the Darkness Ablaze Elite Trainer Box. The set released in August 2020 and is out of print, so its sealed price carries a collector premium for the sealed product itself, which is why the ratios sit this low.

The rates behind the EV are Sword & Shield era averages, because the source the site uses has no counts from Darkness Ablaze packs. Each of the five tiers above the ordinary slots has one. The 18 Rare Holos have none, so their prices, about $9 of the $254 that one of every card costs, reach no part of the $1.82 pack EV, which is a floor on that count. The era rates themselves could be off in either direction, and the card most exposed to them is Charizard VMAX #20: at about $43.86 it is about 17 percent of the value of one of every card and about 16 percent of the pack EV, on odds taken wholly from the era average for a regular VMAX.

What Darkness Ablaze is

Darkness Ablaze released on August 14, 2020 in the Sword & Shield series, with the set code DAA. The database carries 201 cards, 189 in the printed numbering and 12 above it. Five rarities sit above the ordinary slots of a pack: 14 Rare Holo V, 7 Rare Holo VMAX, 13 Rare Ultra, 7 Rare Rainbow and 5 Rare Secret. The other 155 are 18 Rare Holos, 34 Rares, 50 Uncommons and 53 Commons.

All 201 cards carry a market price. The median card is about 21 cents, five cards reach $10 and none reaches $50. One of every card comes to about $254, about 70 percent of the price of one booster box. The seven Rare Rainbows hold about $71 of that and the seven Rare Holo VMAX about $65, so those two small tiers are over half the set's value. The 13 Rare Ultras hold about $41, the 14 regular V cards about $29, the five Rare Secrets about $20 and the 155 ordinary cards about $28 between them.

The block below shows the headline statistics live.

Sealed EV

Sealed EV is what a product's packs hold on average at TCGplayer market prices; the formula is on the methodology page and in how sealed EV works. A Darkness Ablaze pack works out at about $1.82: Rare Holo VMAX about $0.42, Rare Holo V about $0.26, Rare Ultra about $0.10, Rare Rainbow about $0.10 and Rare Secret about $0.04, with the remaining $0.89 or so the baseline for the ordinary slots.

So the baseline is about half the pack EV, and the regular V and VMAX cards, which the site does not count as hits, add about $0.68 against about $0.25 from the three tiers it does count. About two thirds of the VMAX line, roughly $0.28 a pack, is Charizard VMAX #20. That is why the chase share of about 15 percent understates where the value sits: it measures the Rare Rainbow and Rare Secret lines, about $0.14 of the $0.93 the five rated tiers add, and the top card sits outside them.

The table below ranks the packs, the booster box, the Elite Trainer Box, the art bundles and the blisters by EV ratio, and it updates daily.

For the booster box: market about $363.94, or about $10.11 a pack, gross EV about $65.45, net EV about $36.38, break-even price about $65.45. The loose pack, at about $9.85, is the lowest price per pack of any Darkness Ablaze product with an EV, and its ratio edges the box's. The Elite Trainer Box is about $115.43 for eight packs, or about $14.43 a pack, with gross EV about $14.55 and net EV about $8.09. The blisters run from about 0.13 (the Eevee 3-pack at about $41.49, the Hatenna single pack at about $13.64) down to about 0.05 for the Pikachu single pack at about $35.21. EV counts packs only, so anything else a blister or an Elite Trainer Box holds adds nothing to it.

Net EV takes a 15 percent marketplace fee and $1 of shipping off the average card of each rated tier, all five of which average more than a dollar here, and counts the ordinary slots at half their gross value. It comes to about $1.01 a pack, or about 10 cents per dollar of the booster box's price.

The Build & Battle Box (about 0.12) and the two cases (about 0.17 and 0.12) carry an EV that the table does not rank. The premium collections, the V Box and the theme deck have no pack count on the site, and so no EV.

The chase cards

The block below shows the set's eight most valuable cards.

Charizard VMAX #20 leads at about $43.86, about two and a half times the next card. It is filed as a Rare Holo VMAX and numbered inside the main set, so it shares a tier, and a rate, with six other VMAX cards that average about $3.57; the dearest of those is Butterfree VMAX #2 at about $5.37.

The rainbows follow: Butterfree VMAX #190 at about $17.64, Salamence VMAX #194 at about $15.63, Scizor VMAX #193 at about $12.11 and Eternatus VMAX #192 at about $10.60. Those four and Charizard VMAX are the five cards at $10 or more. Charizard V #19, a regular V, is next at about $8.25, then Centiskorch VMAX #191 at about $7.39 and Rillaboom #197, the dearest Rare Secret, at about $7.04.

The Rare Ultras are led by Butterfree V #177 at about $6.67, and Mew V #69 at about $5.64 is the second regular V. All of these are raw Near Mint prices.

Pull rates and what "1 in N" means

Darkness Ablaze is not on the site's pull-rate board, which covers sets with published rates of their own. The EV uses the Sword & Shield era averages instead: a Rare Holo V about 1 in 8 packs, a Rare Holo VMAX about 1 in 22, a Rare Ultra about 1 in 30, and a Rare Rainbow and a Rare Secret about 1 in 100 each. The footer of the block below marks them as era defaults.

Every card in a tier is taken as equally likely, which is what turns a tier rate into odds on one card. Charizard VMAX #20, one of seven VMAX cards at 1 in 22, is about 1 in 154 packs, and Charizard V #19, one of 14 regular V cards at 1 in 8, about 1 in 112. One named Rare Ultra is about 1 in 390, one named Rare Secret about 1 in 500, and one named Rare Rainbow, Butterfree VMAX #190 among them, about 1 in 700. On a set valued on era averages those odds rest on two assumptions rather than one: a tier rate that was not measured on this set, and an even split inside the tier.

A 36-pack booster box averages about 4.5 regular V cards, 1.6 VMAX cards, 1.2 Rare Ultras and about a third each of a Rare Rainbow and a Rare Secret. Counting only Rare Ultra, Rare Rainbow and Rare Secret as hits, as the site does, about one pack in 19 holds a hit and a box averages about 1.9 of them, with about an 86 percent chance of at least one, so roughly one box in seven has none. At these odds a box has about a 21 percent chance of holding Charizard VMAX #20. An Elite Trainer Box holds eight packs, the Sword & Shield count rather than the nine used from Scarlet & Violet on, and averages about one regular V and a little over a third of a VMAX, with about a 35 percent chance of at least one hit.

What the era averages mean here

With no rate of their own, the Rare Holos could only enter the EV through the baseline, and it values the rare slot at the plain Rares' average of about $0.26, so their own prices, a mean of about $0.51 with none above $1.78, never reach the pack EV. The shortfall is small, and it runs one way.

Beyond that, the pack EV rests on the rates, and each tier's line scales directly with its rate. The VMAX line, about $0.42 of the $1.82, is the largest of the five and mostly one card, so its rate matters most, and nothing measured on Darkness Ablaze says whether the true rate is above or below the era's 1 in 22. The baseline rests on a convention as well: it counts each ordinary Common and Uncommon slot at half the set's average for those cards, with each card capped at $1, a choice of the model rather than a measurement.

Who opens it and who buys singles

For the top cards, Charizard VMAX #20 is about $43.86 as a single against an average of about 154 packs, a little over four booster boxes or about $1,560 at $363.94 a box. Butterfree VMAX #190 is about $17.64 as a single against about 700 packs, roughly 19 boxes or about $7,080.

For players, the 14 regular V cards average about $2.07, so a copy of every regular V is about $29, a little less than three loose packs.

For set collectors, the seven Rare Rainbows and five Rare Secrets are about $91 of the $254 that one of every card costs, and the other 189 cards about $163, Charizard VMAX #20 included.

Buying it below market

Each priced Darkness Ablaze card and sealed product page, code cards aside, shows the TCGplayer market price and its history, with an eBay search for Buy It Now listings from US sellers, sorted by price plus shipping, that filters out proxies, lots, code cards and look-alike products. The eBay buttons are affiliate links. A page priced at $5 or more also shows the price that counts as 12 percent below market and has two buttons: the first caps the search at that price, the second runs it without the cap. A page under $5, which at these prices is most of the set's cards, has only the uncapped search, as does a page whose market price sits more than 10 percent above every copy TCGplayer lists. An empty capped search means nothing was listed under that price when it ran, and eBay's own "Save this search" emails matching listings as they appear.

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, and a seller's crossed-out "was" price counts for nothing. For the booster box that line is about $320, at which its ratio would be about 0.20. For sealed product this old, how to spot resealed booster boxes and packs covers what to check, and the Deal Score method is at /methodology.

The block below lists the best-scored Darkness Ablaze eBay listings that the site's scan has matched to an exact card or sealed product and found at least 12 percent under adjusted market after shipping, with a link to all of them; when it is empty, the scan has found none that qualifies.

What changes and what stays

The dated figures are every price, EV figure, ratio and price per pack in this guide, the median card, the five cards at $10 or more, the total for one of every card and the order of the chase cards. They are TCGplayer values from the date given in the verdict, and they move with the market. The set statistics, EV table and chase card blocks on this page read prices that update daily, so where they differ from the prose, the blocks hold the figure to use.

The lasting facts are the release date, the pack counts, the 201-card list with its five rated tiers, which would change if the catalog the site draws on added or refiled a printing, and the way the site computes EV, set out on the methodology page, which changes only with the site's model. The pull rates hold until a published pack-opening count for Darkness Ablaze is added to the source the site uses, or the era averages are revised; either would move every odds figure and the pack EV with it. A Rare Holo rate in that source, or a change to how the baseline values its slots, would also move the pack EV. The collector premium in the sealed price rests on the set staying out of print, which a reprint would change.

Bottom line

A Darkness Ablaze booster box holds about 18 cents of raw card value per dollar against roughly 30 to 35 cents for a typical box on the board, and its Elite Trainer Box about 13 cents against a typical 15 to 20, because the sealed price of an out-of-print set carries a collector premium. About half of the $1.82 pack EV is the ordinary slots, and Charizard VMAX #20 alone is about 16 percent of it. Every odds figure rests on Sword & Shield era averages that could be off in either direction, and the 18 Rare Holos, under 4 percent of the set's value, have no rate and reach no part of the pack EV.