Is Destined Rivals worth opening? EV, pull rates and chase cards

Verdict: hold. Buy the singles you want and leave the sealed product alone at current prices. A Destined Rivals booster box sells for about $430, the highest of the four recent sets covered in these guides, and the cards inside are worth about $120 at raw market, an EV ratio of about 0.28. That is below the usual 0.3–0.55 range for a modern box and the lowest of the four sets. The set itself is strong, with eleven Special Illustration Rares averaging about $111 and unusually valuable Illustration Rares, but the sealed price has moved well past what the packs return. If you must open it, the four-pack art bundle at about 0.34 loses the least per dollar.

What Destined Rivals is

Destined Rivals (set code DRI) released on May 30, 2025 in the Scarlet & Violet era. It is a large set: 182 cards in the printed numbering and 244 in total. The rarity names show the SV-era structure: Double Rares are the standard ex cards, Ultra Rares the full-art versions, Illustration Rares the alternate-art single Pokémon, Special Illustration Rares the alternate-art ex and Trainer cards, and Hyper Rares the gold cards. The set is built around Trainer's Pokémon, cards owned by named characters, which is why the top of the list is full of Team Rocket's, Cynthia's, Ethan's and Misty's Pokémon.

Here is where the set stands today.

All 244 cards are priced. The median card is about $0.32, 25 cards are worth $10 or more and eight are worth $50 or more. The whole set at market sums to roughly $1,780, the highest total of the four sets covered here.

The chase cards

Here are the most valuable cards in the set right now.

Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex #231, the Special Illustration Rare, is about $448 and accounts for about a quarter of the entire set's market value on its own. Cynthia's Garchomp ex #232 is about $232, Ethan's Ho-Oh ex #230 about $153, Team Rocket's Nidoking ex #233 about $98 and Team Rocket's Moltres ex #229 about $94. Those five SIRs add up to roughly $1,025, or about 58% of the set.

What sets Destined Rivals apart is the layer below. Misty's Psyduck #193 is an Illustration Rare at about $61, Misty's Lapras #194 about $32, and Ethan's Typhlosion #190 and Team Rocket's Meowth #203 about $25 each. The 23 Illustration Rares average about $11.80, well above the $5 to $8 IR averages in the other three sets covered here. The six Hyper Rares average about $23, led by the gold Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex #240 at about $56. The 22 Ultra Rares average about $4 and the 17 Double Rares under a dollar.

Pull rates and what "1 in N" means

The published pull rates for this set cover three rarities, in packs per hit.

Illustration Rares come about once every 12 packs, Special Illustration Rares about once every 94 packs, and Hyper Rares about once every 149 packs. Because the published counts for this set only cover those three rarities, the EV model treats them as the hits; Ultra Rares and Double Rares sit in the baseline. That is why the per-pack hit rate reads about 0.10, or about 1 pack in 10, lower than the roughly 1 in 5 shown for the Mega-era sets, where Ultra Rares are counted.

A 36-pack booster box averages three Illustration Rares, about 0.38 Special Illustration Rares (36 ÷ 94) and about 0.24 Hyper Rares. Roughly one box in three contains an SIR; the model puts the chance of at least one hit of any kind at about 98%. If the eleven SIRs are equally likely, a specific one such as the Mewtwo is about 1 in 1,034 packs, or about 29 boxes.

A 9-pack Elite Trainer Box averages under one Illustration Rare and has roughly a 1 in 10 chance at an SIR. The model gives an ETB about a 61% chance of at least one hit, so about two ETBs in five open to nothing better than an Ultra Rare.

Sealed EV

Here is the expected value of each Destined Rivals product against its current market price.

EV ratio is gross EV divided by market price. Net EV is what you would actually clear on resale after a 15% marketplace fee and $1 shipping per card worth at least $1, with cards under $1 counted as bulk at about two cents. Chase share is the fraction of hit EV that comes from Special Illustration Rares and Hyper Rares.

The per-pack EV is about $3.33, the highest of the four sets covered here, which shows how good the cards are. The problem is the price. The booster box at about $430 has a gross EV of about $120 and a net EV of about $85, for a ratio of about 0.28. Break-even, where gross EV equals price, is about $120 a box, and current listings are more than three and a half times that. The full case of six boxes is about the same ratio at about $2,606.

Per dollar, the booster pack art bundle, four packs at about $39, is the most efficient product at about 0.34, followed by the sleeved art bundle at about 0.31 and the six-pack booster bundle at about $67 and 0.30. The Elite Trainer Box at about $117 is about 0.26, slightly better than the box because ETB prices have not run up as far. The half booster box at about $308 for 18 packs is about 0.19, worse than buying a full box. The Pokémon Center exclusive ETB at about $451 is about 0.07, and the premium checklane blisters for Togekiss and Skeledirge at about $40 to $43 are under 0.09; those prices are for the promo cards, not the packs.

The chase share is about 0.58. More than half of the hit value depends on the SIR and Hyper Rare slots, but the Illustration Rares carry a real share, so a box without an SIR still returns about three IRs that average about $12 each.

Who should open this

Players: no. Double Rares average under a dollar and Ultra Rares about $4; buy the playset.

Set collectors: no, and be deliberate about the top. The 239 cards outside the top five SIRs sum to roughly $755 at market, spread across many cards under a dollar, and the five big SIRs are about $1,025 together. Neither half is cheaper to pull than to buy at a 0.28 ratio.

Chase hunters: this is the wrong product for it. The Mewtwo is worth about $448, and at about 29 boxes per expected pull the sealed route costs many times that. Buy the card.

People who like ripping packs: only at a discount and only in small formats. The art bundle at about 0.34 and the booster bundle at about 0.30 are tolerable; the booster box at 0.28 is the most expensive way in.

How to buy it cheaper

The site rescans eBay every 15 minutes for Destined Rivals sealed listings that land at least 12% below TCGplayer market once shipping is included. These are the current ones.

Set an alert at /alerts?set=sv10 so you hear when a box or bundle drops. Compare the landed price, item plus shipping, to the market price for that exact product, and ignore seller strikethrough prices. Even a box at 20% below market only reaches a ratio of about 0.35, so the discount changes the size of the loss, not its direction. The scoring rules are on /methodology and every product for this set is on /sets/destined-rivals.

Bottom line

Destined Rivals is a good set to own and a poor set to open at today's prices. The cards are the strongest of the four recent sets, with a per-pack EV of about $3.33 and Illustration Rares that average about $12, but the box costs about $430 and returns about 28 cents on the dollar, the lowest ratio of the four. Buy Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex and the other singles you want, and if you open anything, make it a discounted art bundle rather than a box.