Is Paradox Rift worth opening? Box EV, pull rates and chase cards

Verdict

Paradox Rift has one of the higher booster box ratios on the board and a top end that is wide instead of tall. As of mid-September 2026 a booster box has a market price of about $280, and the average pulls are worth about $123 at TCGplayer market prices, before any selling fees. That is an EV ratio of 0.44, about 44 cents of raw card value per dollar of sealed price, against the 30 to 35 cents a typical booster box shows. Chase share is low at about 18 percent, because most of the value sits in 34 Illustration Rares that average about $22 and turn up about once in 12.5 packs. Only three cards are worth $50 or more, led by the Groudon Illustration Rare at about $118. The booster bundle and the Elite Trainer Boxes are the weakest main formats at 0.21 to 0.23.

What Paradox Rift is

Paradox Rift released on November 3, 2023 in the Scarlet & Violet series, set code PAR. The set is numbered to 182 and the full list runs to 266 cards. The 84 cards past 182 match the four top tiers exactly: 34 Illustration Rares, 28 Ultra Rares, 15 Special Illustration Rares and 7 Hyper Rares. Below them sit 20 Double Rares, 27 rares, 54 uncommons and 81 commons.

The set page lists the sealed products: a booster box (36 packs), Iron Valiant and Roaring Moon Elite Trainer Boxes (nine packs each, 11 in the Pokémon Center versions), a booster bundle (six), a Build & Battle Box (four), a Build & Battle Stadium (11), blisters, and loose and sleeved packs.

The numbers

The block below pulls the set's current card prices.

TCGplayer has a market price for each of the 266 cards, with a median of about 27 cents. There are 36 cards at $10 or more and three at $50 or more: Groudon, the Morpeko Illustration Rare at about $59 and the Altaria ex Special Illustration Rare at about $53.

One of every card costs about $1,229, roughly 4.4 booster boxes. The 34 Illustration Rares account for about $746 of that and the 15 Special Illustration Rares for about $299, so 49 cards hold about 85 percent of the value. The other 217 cards add up to about $184.

Sealed EV by product

Sealed EV prices the average contents of a product at current raw market prices, using the formula in the sealed EV section of the methodology. The table below applies it to the Paradox Rift products.

The packs are the same in every product, about $3.41 of expected value each, so products differ only in the price paid per pack. The booster box at about $280 works out to about $7.77 per pack and a ratio of 0.44, higher than any other product listed. The ratio is gross EV divided by the sealed market price. Loose booster packs at about $8.33 come in at 0.41, and the 11-pack Build & Battle Stadium at about $95 lands at 0.40.

The booster bundle costs about $90 for six packs, about $14.92 each, for a ratio of 0.23. Bundles across the sealed EV board typically sit a little under 30 cents per dollar, which puts this one below the usual bundle even though the box is above the usual box. The Iron Valiant Elite Trainer Box is about $135 for nine packs, about $14.95 each and 0.23, and the Roaring Moon version is about $143 and 0.21. Both sit a little above the 15 to 20 cents a typical Elite Trainer Box shows, but each pack costs about twice what it costs in a booster box. The Pokémon Center versions are lower again at about $191 (0.20) and about $222 (0.17). The half booster box has no current market price, so it has an EV, about $61, but no ratio.

After the method's selling costs, a 15 percent marketplace fee plus $1 of shipping on each card worth $1 or more, with cheaper cards counted as bulk, the booster box nets about $83, about 30 cents per dollar of box price. Chase share is about 18 percent. Working from the pull rates and tier averages, the Illustration Rare slot adds about $1.76 to each pack, a little over half of the $3.41. The Special Illustration Rare slot adds about 40 cents and the Hyper Rare slot about 7 cents.

The value does not rest on one card. Groudon contributes only about 28 cents of each pack's expected value, about $10 across a box. Count Groudon as worth nothing and the box EV only falls to about $113.

Chase cards

Below are the eight highest-priced cards in the set right now.

Groudon #199, an Illustration Rare with art by Nurikabe, leads at about $118, roughly twice the next card. Morpeko #206 follows at about $59 and the Altaria ex #253 Special Illustration Rare at about $53. Then come two Illustration Rares by the same artist, OKACHEKE: Plusle #193 and Minun #194 at about $46 each. Steelix #208 is about $37, level with the Roaring Moon ex #251 Special Illustration Rare.

Ten of the 15 most valuable cards are Illustration Rares and the other five are Special Illustration Rares. The easier tier is also the more valuable one on average: about $22 against about $20, and about $19 without Groudon. Ultra Rares average about $3.28 and Hyper Rares about $5.71, with nothing in either tier above about $18.

Every price here is for a raw Near Mint copy. A PSA 10 of a modern English card usually sells for more than a raw copy, but hobby guides do not agree on the size of the gap, and raw vs graded explains why it moves.

Pull rates

The pull-rate source for Paradox Rift is published, not era-default: the odds below are midpoints of pack-opening counts recorded for this set itself. The methodology page has a section on pull rates.

Across 36 packs the averages work out to about 5.5 Double Rares, 2.9 Illustration Rares and 2.6 Ultra Rares. Special Illustration Rares land once in 49.5 packs, about one every box and a third, and Hyper Rares once in 81.5 packs, so plenty of boxes have neither.

About 17 percent of packs, roughly one in six, contain something rarer than a Double Rare. That gives a 99.9 percent chance that a booster box has at least one such hit, about 82 percent for an Elite Trainer Box and about 68 percent for a bundle.

Priced at the box rate of about $7.77 a pack, 49.5 packs come to about $385, set against an average Special Illustration Rare of about $20.

Specific cards are a much longer shot. With 34 cards sharing a 1 in 12.5 slot, an equal split puts Groudon at about 1 in 425 packs: close to 12 boxes, about $3,300 at the box price, against about $118 for the single. Nothing in the published counts shows the 34 are printed in equal numbers, so this is an order of magnitude, not a measured rate.

Opening packs versus buying singles

For a player after specific Double Rares or Ultra Rares, the comparison is short: those tiers average about 90 cents and about $3.28, and one pack from a box costs about $7.77.

For a set collector, four booster boxes cost about $1,120, close to the $1,229 for one of every card. On average they give 11 or 12 of the 34 Illustration Rares, duplicates included, and about three of the 15 Special Illustration Rares, about $490 of cards in all. Groudon alone costs less than half the price of one box.

For someone who enjoys opening packs, a box means about $7.77 a pack and just under three Illustration Rares on average, from a tier that averages about $22. On the cost side, the average box holds about $157 less in cards than it costs. Booster box vs ETB vs bundle covers why the per-pack price differs so much between formats.

Finding it below market

Pullnomics calls a listing below market only if the landed price, item plus shipping, comes in at least 12 percent under the adjusted market price, and a seller's "was $X" markdown gets no weight. On any Paradox Rift card or sealed product page you get the TCGplayer market price and its history, the 12-percent-under figure, and two eBay buttons, both affiliate links. Button one goes to eBay's own results for Buy It Now listings from US sellers, sorted by price plus shipping, with proxies, lots, code cards and look-alike products filtered out and the item price capped 12 percent under market. Button two is the same search with the cap removed. The block below opens those searches for this set's main sealed products, already filtered under the below-market price.

With the booster box at about $280, 12 percent under market is about $246, and shipping comes on top of the capped item price. If the capped search on the booster box page comes back empty, nothing is listed under that price at that moment. The second button lists every current price, and turning on eBay's "Save this search" feature there gets new matches emailed by eBay.

Site prices assume a raw Near Mint card. Under the methodology, Lightly Played carries a 0.85 multiplier, so a Lightly Played Groudon has an adjusted market of about $100, and 12 percent under that is about $88.

Bottom line

Paradox Rift's booster box shows about 44 cents of raw card value per dollar, one of the higher ratios on the board, in a set whose value is spread across 34 Illustration Rares instead of stacked on one or two cards. The average pulls from a $280 box are worth about $123 at market prices and about $83 net of the 15 percent fee, shipping and bulk pricing the method applies. The bundle and the Elite Trainer Boxes hold the same $3.41 packs at roughly twice the per-pack price. Any single card, from Groudon down, costs a small fraction of the sealed product it takes to pull it on average, and the set page links to every card.