Is Evolving Skies worth opening? Box EV and the Umbreon VMAX odds

Verdict

No Evolving Skies product holds its price in raw card value: EV ratios run from about 0.06 to about 0.16. As of September 20, 2026 an Evolving Skies booster box sells for about $2,426 and holds about $253 of expected raw card value, roughly 10 cents per dollar. It is the most expensive booster box on our sealed EV board, at more than double any other set's box, and no other set's box holds less raw card value per dollar. That price is a collector premium for a sealed, out-of-print box, not a statement about what is inside. The box also costs more than the card it is opened for: the alternate-art Umbreon VMAX #215 is about $2,283 as a single. A loose pack costs about $46 and holds about $7.03 of expected cards.

What Evolving Skies is

Evolving Skies released on August 27, 2021 in the Sword & Shield series (set code EVS). The printed checklist is 203 cards and the full set is 237, with 34 secret cards numbered above the printed total. It is built around Eevee's evolutions and Dragon types, and those are the cards at the top of its price list.

The rarity groups are the Sword & Shield ones: 18 Rare Holo V, 15 Rare Holo VMAX, 38 Rare Ultra (full arts, alternate-art V cards included), 22 Rare Rainbow (in this data, alternate-art VMAX cards included) and 12 gold Rare Secret cards, above 132 Commons, Uncommons, Rares and Rare Holos.

Pullnomics tracks the booster box (36 packs), a half booster box (18), two Elite Trainer Boxes (eight packs each), two Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Boxes (10), a Build & Battle Box (four), sleeved and loose booster packs, and one-pack and three-pack blisters. All of it is out of print, so every price carries that collector premium.

The numbers

The block below shows today's headline figures from the Evolving Skies set page.

As of September 27, 2026, the median card is worth about 35 cents. An earlier version of this page gave the median as about 42 cents, a figure that valued each card at its dearest printing rather than its standard one. Forty-seven cards clear $10 and 18 clear $50. A copy of every card at market runs about $8,182.

Almost all of that sits in two rarity groups. The 22 Rare Rainbow cards and 38 Rare Ultra cards hold about $7,854 between them, about 96 percent of the set. The other 177 cards add up to about $305 as of September 27, 2026. Umbreon VMAX #215 alone is about 28 percent of the set's value, and with Rayquaza VMAX #218 it is 43 percent.

Sealed EV by product

Sealed EV prices the average contents of a product at today's TCGplayer market; the methodology has the formula. Every Evolving Skies pack has the same EV, about $7.03, the highest per-pack figure of any booster box on the sealed EV board. The low ratio comes from the pack price, not from the cards.

The booster box works out to about $67 per pack and an EV ratio of about 0.10, with a net EV of about $197 once a 15 percent marketplace fee and $1 shipping per card worth $1 or more come off. A typical booster box across the board holds roughly 30 to 35 cents of raw card value per dollar, and the other Sword & Shield boxes on the board hold roughly 12 to 29 cents.

The box is also not the cheapest way to buy packs. The art bundle of four loose packs (about $173) is about $43 per pack, a ratio of about 0.16 and the highest in the set. A single loose booster pack is about $46 (about 0.15). The cheaper Elite Trainer Box (Glaceon, Vaporeon, Sylveon and Espeon, about $507 for eight packs) is about $63 per pack (about 0.11), and the other one (about $566) about $71 (about 0.10). The lowest ratios in the table belong to the Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Boxes: about $1,089 and $1,093 for 10 packs, about $109 per pack, a ratio of about 0.06.

So the lowest price per pack is in loose packs, not in the box, because the sealed box is itself the collectible.

Chase share is about 79 percent: the two alternate-art tiers, with a little from the rainbow and gold cards. About $4.67 of each pack's $7.03 comes from the 17 alternate arts, about $4.52 of it from the twelve most valuable, and about $1.22 comes from the Umbreon VMAX alone.

Chase cards

These are the eight most valuable cards in the set right now.

Umbreon VMAX #215, the card collectors call Moonbreon, is about $2,283. Rayquaza VMAX #218 is about $1,255, Dragonite V #192 about $523, Rayquaza V #194 about $492, Leafeon VMAX #205 about $406, Umbreon V #189 about $386, Sylveon VMAX #212 about $384 and Glaceon VMAX #209 about $313. The next four, Espeon V, Sylveon V, Glaceon V and Leafeon V, run from about $241 down to about $151. All twelve are alternate arts, and together they cost about $6,800, 83 percent of the set.

The same Pokémon in the same rarity group can be a different card entirely. The rainbow Umbreon VMAX #214 is about $84 against $2,283 for #215. Rayquaza VMAX #217 is about $111 against $1,255 for #218.

That is why the group averages mislead. Rare Rainbow cards average about $232, but seven of them hold about $4,836 of the group's $5,106, and the other 15 average about $18. Rare Ultra has the same shape: outside its top eight, the other 30 cards average about $17. Pulling a Rare Rainbow usually means a card worth about $18.

Pull rates

The rates below were measured for Evolving Skies itself, not taken from a Sword & Shield era average. Each is the midpoint of published pack-opening counts gathered in September 2026, and the methodology names the sources.

A 36-pack box averages four Rare Holo V cards, about two VMAX cards and about one regular full art: the table's 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 rainbow card, at 1 in 113 packs, shows up in only about 27 percent of boxes. Counting the alternate-art rows as well, a box averages about 1.4 cards printed as Rare Ultra, about 35 percent of boxes hold a card printed as Rare Rainbow, and about 88 percent contain at least one Rare Ultra or better, so roughly one box in nine holds nothing above a regular VMAX.

The published counts for this set give alternate arts tiers of their own: about 1 in 96 packs for any of the 11 alternate-art V cards, and about 1 in 312 packs for any of the 6 alternate-art VMAX cards. No count goes card by card, so take every card of a tier as equally likely. A specific alternate-art VMAX such as Umbreon is then about 1 in 1,872 packs. That is about 52 booster boxes, roughly $126,000, for a card that costs about $2,283. A specific alternate-art V such as Dragonite V is about 1 in 1,056 packs. The Evolving Skies pull-rate page lists every tier.

The EV in this guide uses those two tiers. The card database files an alternate-art V under Rare Ultra and an alternate-art VMAX under Rare Rainbow, with nothing to tell them from the other cards there, so Pullnomics keeps its own list of the set's 17 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 27 regular full arts share the 1 in 36.5 rate, about 1 in 986 packs for any one of them, and the 16 rainbow cards share 1 in 113, about 1 in 1,808 each. Before September 20, 2026 the EV left the alternate-art tiers out and spread each printed rarity's rate evenly over all of its cards: about 1 in 1,387 packs for any one of the 38 Rare Ultra cards and about 1 in 2,486 for any one of the 22 Rare Rainbow cards. Those were longer odds than the counts give for every one of these cards, and on the same September 20, 2026 prices the pack EV came to about $5.70 against about $7.03 with the alternate-art tiers.

Who should open it and who should buy singles

A collector who wants Umbreon VMAX pays about $2,283 for it as a single. The box costs more than the card and carries about a 1 in 52 chance of holding it.

A set builder faces the same comparison. The $8,182 cost of one of every card, spent on boxes, buys about 121 packs: on average between one and two Rare Rainbows of 22 and four or five Rare Ultras of 38, alternate-art tiers included.

For a player, the Rare Holo V cards average about $2.25 each as singles, against about $46 for a loose pack.

For the experience of opening, a loose pack holds about $7.03 of expected cards, and about 94 percent of packs hold nothing above a regular VMAX.

If you already own a sealed box, opening it trades a $2,426 collectible for about $253 of expected cards.

How to buy it cheaper

Each Evolving Skies card page and sealed product page, code cards aside, carries the TCGplayer market price, its history, the price that would be 12 percent below market, and two eBay buttons, except that, as of October 8, 2026, a page whose market price is under $5, more than 10 percent above the highest TCGplayer listing or more than 25 percent above the middle one shows no below-market price and only the uncapped button. The first opens an eBay search restricted to Buy It Now listings from US sellers, with proxies, lots, code cards and look-alike products filtered out, sorted by price plus shipping and capped at 12 percent under market. The second is the same search with no cap. Both are affiliate links. Since September 23, 2026, the block below lists the best-scored of this set's eBay listings that are matched and scored at least 12 percent under market; if the site's eBay scan were off, it would show eBay searches for the set's main sealed products instead.

That cap covers the item price only, so add shipping yourself. Only a landed price, item plus shipping, that is 12 percent or more under market counts: about $2,135 delivered for the booster box. Ignore any seller "was $X" markdown. An empty capped search means no listing sits below market right now. Switch to the uncapped button to see every current price, and turn on eBay's own "Save this search" so eBay emails new matches.

With singles, keep in mind that every card price on the site is raw Near Mint. Under the Deal Score method on the methodology page, a Near Mint Umbreon VMAX #215 qualifies near $2,009 landed. Since October 8, 2026 the method scores only a card listing stated as Near Mint, so a Lightly Played copy, or one that states no condition, gets no score. The same method treats a landed price under 10 percent of market, about $228 for this card, as a mismatch or a scam. In the US, eBay's Authenticity Guarantee applies to trading cards sold for $200 or more, which at market price takes in the top ten cards here. Graded copies are not scored by the method; raw vs graded explains the gap.

Bottom line

Evolving Skies has the most valuable packs of any booster box on the board and the lowest EV ratio of any set's box: about $7.03 of expected cards in a pack that costs $46 to $67, and about $253 in a box that costs about $2,426. Twelve alternate arts carry the set, and the published alternate-art VMAX rate puts Umbreon VMAX at about 1 in 1,872 packs, taking the six cards of that tier as equally likely. About 94 percent of packs hold nothing above a regular VMAX. For the cards themselves, start at the Evolving Skies set page, open the card you want and, where its page offers a capped search, press its first eBay button to see whether any copy is listed under market today.