Is Fusion Strike worth opening? Box EV and the Gengar VMAX odds

Verdict

Not on the numbers. A Fusion Strike booster box is about $969 at mid-September 2026 prices, and the average pulls from its 36 packs come to about $120 of TCGplayer market value, before any selling fees. That is an EV ratio of about 0.12, roughly 12 cents of raw card value per sealed dollar. Fusion Strike is out of print, so the box price includes a collector premium for the sealed product itself and says little about the cards inside. Gengar VMAX #271, a Rare Rainbow at about $1,020, costs a little more than the box and is about 44 percent of the whole checklist's value. A loose booster pack is about $19 and holds about $3.33 of expected cards. Boxed or loose, a pack is entertainment with long odds attached.

What Fusion Strike is

Fusion Strike is a Sword & Shield series set (code FST) that came out on November 12, 2021. It has 284 cards: 264 on the printed checklist and 20 more numbered past it.

It uses the Sword & Shield rarity groups: 19 Rare Holo V, 8 Rare Holo VMAX, 20 Rare Ultra, 15 Rare Rainbow and 5 Rare Secret, sitting over 217 Commons, Uncommons, Rares and Rare Holos. Our data records the printed rarity only, so this page does not mark which cards are alternate arts.

The numbers

These are the set's headline figures as of today; every card is listed on the Fusion Strike set page.

Half the cards in the set are worth about 33 cents or less. Only 13 of the 284 are worth $10 or more, and six are worth $50 or more. Buying one of each at market would cost about $2,312, about the price of 2.4 booster boxes.

Most of that $2,312 is Rare Rainbow and Rare Ultra. The 15 Rare Rainbow cards hold about $1,804, about 78 percent of the set, and the 20 Rare Ultra cards add about $299. Everything else in the set, 249 cards, comes to about $209. The six cards above $50 hold about $1,904 between them, about 82 percent of the set.

Sealed EV by product

The table in this section prices each product's expected pulls at the current TCGplayer market price, using the sealed EV formula set out on the methodology page. Whichever product a Fusion Strike pack comes out of, its EV is about $3.33, so only the price paid per pack changes.

Divide the box price by 36 and each pack costs about $27, against $3.33 of expected cards. Gross EV is about $120, and net EV, after a 15 percent marketplace fee and $1 of shipping on every card worth $1 or more, about $84. On the sealed EV board a typical booster box holds roughly 30 to 35 cents of raw card value per dollar, and the Sword & Shield era boxes run from roughly 10 to 28 cents, so Fusion Strike's 12 cents is low on both counts. The sealed price is the reason, not the cards: the other Sword & Shield era boxes carry roughly $1.70 to $3.80 of EV per pack, with Evolving Skies the one exception at about $7.03.

A loose booster pack is about $19, a ratio of about 0.17, and the art bundle of four loose packs (about $74) is about $18.60 per pack, about 0.18 and the best figure in the table. Thirty-six loose packs at the single-pack price come to about $693, about $276 less than the sealed box. That gap is the premium for the box as a sealed object.

The Elite Trainer Boxes sit at the bottom of the table. The eight-pack Elite Trainer Box (about $326) is about $41 per pack, a ratio of about 0.08, where a typical one on the board holds roughly 15 to 20 cents per dollar. The 10-pack Pokémon Center version (about $480) is about $48 per pack, about 0.07.

The set's chase share is about 55 percent, meaning more than half of the hit EV comes from the rarest tiers, here Rare Rainbow and Rare Secret. In practice it is nearly all Rare Rainbow, which supplies about $1.31 of each pack's $3.33. About 74 cents of that is Gengar VMAX #271 alone.

Chase cards

The grid below shows the set's eight highest-priced cards today.

Gengar VMAX #271 is about $1,020, Espeon VMAX #270 about $344 and Mew VMAX #269 about $253, all three Rare Rainbow. Then come a second Rare Rainbow Mew VMAX, #268, at about $103, and two Rare Ultras, Mew V #251 at about $103 and Celebi V #245 at about $81. After those six, Gengar VMAX #157, a Rare Holo VMAX, is about $44 and Mew V #250 about $34.

Name and rarity group do not settle the price: the two Rare Rainbow Mew VMAX cards are about $253 and $103, and the two Rare Ultra Mew V cards about $103 and $34.

A group's mean price says little about a typical pull. The Rare Rainbow mean is about $120, yet about $1,720 of the group's $1,804 sits in four cards, and nine of the 15 are under $10. In Rare Ultra, five cards hold about $260 of the group's $299, which leaves the other 15 at about $2.60 each. Rare Secret, the hardest group to pull, averages about $5.

Pull rates

Fusion Strike has its own measured pull rates, so the table below does not lean on a Sword & Shield era average. Every rate in it is a midpoint across published pack-opening datasets, collected in September 2026; the methodology page gives the sources.

Over a 36-pack box the rates average about three Rare Holo V cards and between one and two each of Rare Ultra (1 in 26 packs) and Rare Holo VMAX (1 in 26.5). A Rare Rainbow, at 1 in 92, appears in about a third of boxes, and a Rare Secret, at 1 in 120, in about a quarter. A box has about an 88 percent chance of at least one Rare Ultra, Rare Rainbow or Rare Secret, which leaves about one box in eight topping out at a Rare Holo VMAX.

The published pull rates for Fusion Strike are grouped by the rarity printed on the card. An alternate-art V is printed as a Rare Ultra and an alternate-art VMAX as a Rare Rainbow, and the source has no separate alternate-art tier for this set, so the EV treats an alternate art as equally likely as any other card of its printed rarity. That means the true odds of one specific alternate art are much longer than its group's headline rate.

Rare Rainbow cards come 1 in 92 packs and there are 15 of them, so on equal odds any one named Rare Rainbow, Gengar VMAX #271 included, is about 1 in 1,380 packs. In booster boxes that is about 38 of them, or roughly $37,000 at today's price, to chase a single that sells for about $1,020.

Opening versus singles, by goal

If the goal is Gengar VMAX #271, the comparison is about $1,020 for the single against roughly a 1 in 38 chance per $969 box, on the equal-odds assumption.

If the goal is the full set, one of every card is about $2,312 at market. At about $19 each that sum pays for about 120 loose packs, which at the measured rates average 1.3 Rare Rainbow pulls from a group of 15 and 4.6 Rare Ultra pulls from a group of 20.

If the goal is the fun of opening, loose packs are the lowest price per pack in the sealed EV table above, about $19 each or about $18.60 in the four-pack art bundle, and about 94 percent of packs stop at a Rare Holo VMAX or lower.

Finding a price below market

Any Fusion Strike card or sealed product page gives the TCGplayer market price, its price history, the figure 12 percent under market, and two eBay buttons. Button one opens an eBay search for Buy It Now listings from US sellers that leaves out proxies, lots, code cards and look-alike products, sorts by price plus shipping and stops at 12 percent under market. Button two is the same search with no price cap. Each button is an affiliate link. Below are eBay searches for Fusion Strike's main sealed products, with that price cap already applied.

The cap applies to the item price, so shipping has to be added by hand. A listing counts as below market only when its landed price, item plus shipping, is at least 12 percent under market: about $853 delivered for the booster box and about $898 for a Near Mint Gengar VMAX #271. When the capped search is empty, nothing is listed below market at that moment; the second button shows every current price, and eBay's own "Save this search" emails new matches.

Card prices on the site are for raw Near Mint copies. The Deal Score steps on the methodology page apply a 0.85 condition factor to a Lightly Played copy before the 12 percent test, which puts the qualifying landed price for a Lightly Played Gengar VMAX #271 at about $763. A PSA 10 of a modern English card usually sells for more than a raw Near Mint copy; raw vs graded sets out what is known about the gap.

Bottom line

Fusion Strike's packs carry more card value than most of its Sword & Shield neighbors, about $3.33 each, but they cost about $19 loose and about $27 inside a box, so the box holds about $120 of expected cards against a price of about $969. The set is out of print, and part of that $969 is a collector premium for the sealed box itself. The card value is concentrated: one Rare Rainbow Gengar VMAX is about 44 percent of the set, six cards are about 82 percent, and the published rates stop at the rarity group, with no separate figure for any single card. Every card's price is on the Fusion Strike set page, and the first eBay button on a card page opens eBay's search capped at 12 percent under market.