Is Paldea Evolved worth opening? EV, pull rates and the Magikarp

Verdict

Paldea Evolved is one of the friendlier Scarlet & Violet sets to open, and still a poor way to get any one card. As of mid-September 2026 a booster box sells for about $478 and holds about $187 of expected raw card value, a ratio of 0.39, a little above the 30 to 35 cents per dollar a typical box returns. The value is well spread: 36 Illustration Rares averaging about $38 turn up roughly once every 12.5 packs, and a Special Illustration Rare arrives about once per box. The Magikarp Illustration Rare, the set's most valuable card, is about $377, roughly a 1 in 450 pack pull if the tier is printed evenly, and should be bought as a single. If you open, open the booster box, not the Elite Trainer Box or the bundle.

What Paldea Evolved is

Paldea Evolved released on June 9, 2023 as the second main expansion of the Scarlet & Violet series (set code PAL). The printed checklist is 193 cards and the full list runs to 279, which makes it a large set. All 86 cards numbered above the printed total are hits: 36 Illustration Rares, 26 Ultra Rares, 15 Special Illustration Rares and 9 Hyper Rares. Below them sit 17 Double Rares and 176 commons, uncommons and rares.

The sealed range on the set page is wide: a 36-pack booster box, a nine-pack Elite Trainer Box and an 11-pack Pokémon Center version, a six-pack booster bundle, a four-pack Build & Battle Box, blisters, and loose and sleeved packs. The set is more than three years old, so part of any sealed price today is a collector premium for sealed product itself, not for the cards inside.

The numbers

Here is the live snapshot of the set's card prices.

All 279 cards carry a TCGplayer market price. The median card is worth about 28 cents, so half the checklist is bulk, yet 50 cards clear $10 and ten clear $50. One of every card at market comes to about $1,966, close to the price of four booster boxes, and those four boxes would hold only about $746 of expected card value.

The money sits in the art cards. The 36 Illustration Rares add up to about $1,353, roughly 69 percent of the set's value, and the 15 Special Illustration Rares add about $385, another 20 percent. The other 228 cards are worth about $228 combined.

Sealed EV by product

Expected value (EV) is what a product's cards are worth on average at raw market prices: each rarity's pull rate times its mean price, plus a baseline for the non-hit slots. How sealed EV works explains the model. This is the live table for Paldea Evolved.

Every pack carries the same expected value, about $5.18, so products differ only in what they charge for it. The booster box at about $478 is about $13.29 per pack with an EV ratio of 0.39, the best in the table. A loose booster pack at about $15.67 is 0.33. The booster bundle is about $128 for six packs, about $21.32 each, for 0.24, and the Elite Trainer Box is about $218 for nine packs, about $24.18 each, for 0.21.

Across the sealed EV board a typical box returns 30 to 35 cents per dollar and a typical bundle a little under 30, so this box is above average and this bundle below. At the bottom of the table sits the Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Box: about $612 for 11 packs holding about $57 of expected cards, a ratio of 0.09.

Net EV takes a 15 percent marketplace fee and $1 of shipping off every card worth $1 or more and counts cheaper cards as bulk. For the booster box it is about $136, or about 28 cents per dollar. Chase share, the part of hit EV that comes from Special Illustration Rares and Hyper Rares, is about 21 percent, which is low: about $3 of each pack's $5.18 comes from the Illustration Rare slot alone.

That figure needs one caution. Chase share only counts the rarest tiers, and this set's biggest card is an Illustration Rare. Magikarp holds about 28 percent of its tier's value, about 84 cents of every pack's EV. Take it out and an average box holds about $156, and since roughly 12 boxes in 13 contain no Magikarp, that is the more honest expectation.

Chase cards

These are the most valuable cards in the set at today's market prices.

Magikarp #203, illustrated by Shinji Kanda, is about $377, more than three and a half times the next card and about 19 percent of the set's summed value. It is an Illustration Rare, not a Special Illustration Rare, the tier that supplies the top card in sets such as Obsidian Flames, 151 and Twilight Masquerade. Here the five most valuable cards are all Illustration Rares: Magikarp, Raichu #211 at about $103, Maushold #226 at about $98, Tyranitar #222 at about $74 and Sprigatito #196 at about $59.

The Special Illustration Rares start in sixth place. Tinkaton ex #262 at about $57, and Chi-Yu ex #259 and Iono #269 at about $55 each, are the only three above $50, and the tier averages about $26. The Illustration Rares average about $38, and about $28 even with Magikarp removed, so the easier tier to pull is also the more valuable one.

Below the art cards, the 26 Ultra Rares average about $4, the nine Hyper Rares about $6.50 and the 17 Double Rares about $1.11.

Pull rates

These are measured rates, not an era default: each line is the midpoint of published pack-opening counts for Paldea Evolved itself. The sources are listed under pull-rate sources on the methodology page.

A 36-pack booster box averages about five Double Rares, about three Illustration Rares and two or three Ultra Rares. The Special Illustration Rare rate of 1 in 33.5 is generous: Stellar Crown, from the following year, measures 1 in 90. A box averages just over one SIR, though about one box in three still contains none. Just under one pack in five holds an Illustration Rare or better, so nearly every box has one, against about 85 percent of Elite Trainer Boxes and 71 percent of bundles.

In dollars it is less friendly. At about $13.29 per pack you spend about $445 on packs for each Special Illustration Rare, and the average one is worth about $26. Magikarp, one of 36 Illustration Rares at 1 in 12.5, is about 1 in 450 packs if the tier is printed evenly: 12.5 boxes, or about $6,000 of sealed product, for a card that costs about $377. The datasets do not confirm even printing within a tier, but the scale is right.

Who should open it and who should buy singles

Players should buy singles: the regular ex cards (Double Rares) average about $1.11 and the Ultra Rares about $4, against packs at $13 or more each.

Set collectors should buy singles too. The real cost is the 51 Illustration Rares and Special Illustration Rares, about $1,738 of the $1,966 total, and pulling 36 different Illustration Rares at three per box is not a plan.

Anyone who wants Magikarp should buy Magikarp. The single costs less than one booster box, and a box has about a 1 in 13 chance of containing it.

Pack openers are the audience. Expect about three Illustration Rares, usually a Special Illustration Rare, and between $156 and $187 of cards for about $478. Booster box vs ETB vs bundle covers the formats, and here the box wins clearly.

How to buy it cheaper

The site's rule of thumb is strict. Add shipping to the item price, and only when that landed total is at least 12 percent under the adjusted market price is the listing worth calling below market. A seller's "was $X" markdown proves nothing. Each Paldea Evolved card page and sealed product page gives you the TCGplayer market price, its price history, the figure 12 percent below market, and two eBay buttons. Button one goes to eBay's own search results, narrowed to Buy It Now listings from US sellers, with proxies, lots, code cards and look-alike products excluded, ordered by price plus shipping and capped at 12 percent under market. Button two is the same search with the cap removed. Both are affiliate links. Below, the same pair of buttons appears for each of Paldea Evolved's main sealed products, the first already capped under its below-market price.

For the booster box, market is about $478, so the below-market line is about $421. The cap works on the item price alone, so the shipping is yours to add. An empty result from the capped search on the booster box page means no box is listed under that line right now. In that case the uncapped button shows what sellers are asking, and turning on eBay's own "Save this search" means that eBay, not this site, emails new matches.

Singles need the condition factor. Site prices are raw Near Mint, and the Deal Score method sets a Lightly Played copy against 85 percent of that figure. For Magikarp the Lightly Played adjusted market is about $320 and its below-market line about $282, so a played copy priced near the Near Mint figure is no bargain. A Near Mint copy at market also clears the $250 threshold for eBay's Authenticity Guarantee in the US. The methodology page sets out every step.

Bottom line

Paldea Evolved is a good set to open and a bad set to open with a target in mind. A box returns about 39 cents per dollar of raw card value, and the Special Illustration Rare odds are far kinder than in later sets such as Stellar Crown. None of that makes a $478 box a way to come out ahead: expect about $187 of cards on average and closer to $156 without Magikarp. If you want Magikarp or any other specific card, skip the packs: every card is linked from the set page, and the capped eBay button on its page will show whether any copy is listed below the 12 percent line.