Is Phantasmal Flames worth opening? EV, pull rates and chase cards

Verdict

A Phantasmal Flames booster box holds about 35 cents of raw card value per dollar of sealed price, and about half of that value sits in two Mega Charizard X ex cards. As of September 20, 2026, a Phantasmal Flames booster box sells for about $398 and the cards inside are worth about $137 at raw market value, an EV ratio of roughly 0.35. Across the sealed EV board a typical booster box holds roughly 30 to 35 cents of raw card value per dollar, so this box sits at the top of the usual range, but this set has an unusual shape: about 67% of the hit value comes from the Special Illustration Rare and Mega Hyper Rare slots, and two versions of one card account for almost all of that. The 128 cards that are not the two Charizards add up to roughly $210 as singles, and about nine boxes in ten contain neither of them.

What Phantasmal Flames is

Phantasmal Flames (set code PFL) released on November 14, 2025 as the second main set of the Mega Evolution era. It is a small set: 94 cards in the printed numbering and 130 in total once the secret rares are counted. The rarity names tell you the structure. Double Rares are the ex and Mega ex cards in their standard frames, Ultra Rares are the full-art versions, Illustration Rares are the alternate-art single Pokémon, Special Illustration Rares are the alternate-art ex and Supporter cards, and the single Mega Hyper Rare is the gold card at the very end of the numbering. The published pull-rate data for this era also lists a Mega Attack Rare slot at about 1 in 40 packs.

Here is where the set stands today.

Of 130 priced cards, the median is about $0.18 as of September 27, 2026. Only nine cards are worth $10 or more, and only two are worth $50 or more. An earlier version of this page gave the median as about $0.24, a figure that valued each card at its dearest printing rather than its standard one. Add up every card in the set at market and you get about $1,160, of which about $950 is the two Mega Charizard X ex cards.

The chase cards

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

Mega Charizard X ex #125, the Special Illustration Rare, sits at about $695. Mega Charizard X ex #130, the Mega Hyper Rare, is about $254. After those two, the next most valuable card is the Ultra Rare Charizard at about $21, then a cluster of Special Illustration Rares and Illustration Rares between $12 and $19: Dawn #129, Mega Sharpedo ex #127, Meowth #106, Rotom ex #126, Mega Lopunny ex #128 and Piplup #98.

The rarity averages show how lopsided this is. The five Special Illustration Rares average about $152, but that average is almost entirely Charizard; the other four SIRs average around $17. The 13 Illustration Rares average about $5.20, the 17 Ultra Rares about $2.70, and the ten Double Rares about $1.25. Pull an SIR that is not the Charizard and you have a nice card worth roughly the price of a pack and a half.

Pull rates and what "1 in N" means

These are the pull rates the site uses for the set, given as packs per hit: the published rates, plus one row marked as an era average.

Illustration Rares show up about once every 9 packs, Ultra Rares about once every 12, Special Illustration Rares about once every 80, and the Mega Hyper Rare about once every 1,260 packs. The Mega Charizard X ex SIR on its own is about 1 in 400 packs. The source lists no rate for Double Rares in this set, so the site uses the era average of 1 in 5 packs for them, and the block above labels that row as an era average. The full tier list is on the Phantasmal Flames pull-rates page.

A booster box has 36 packs. At these rates a box averages about seven Double Rares, four Illustration Rares, three Ultra Rares and a bit under half a Special Illustration Rare (36 ÷ 80 ≈ 0.45). Around one box in three contains an SIR at all, and only one in every five SIRs is the Charizard, so you should expect to open roughly 11 boxes on average before hitting the $695 card, and about 35 boxes before hitting the Mega Hyper Rare. About 1 pack in 5 in this set (0.196) has a hit of any kind, which comes to about seven hits per box. Double Rares are not counted as hits in that figure.

An Elite Trainer Box has 9 packs: about two Double Rares, about one Illustration Rare, under one Ultra Rare, and roughly a 1 in 9 chance at any SIR. The model gives an ETB about an 86% chance of containing at least one hit of any kind. That is the shape of the product: an average ETB holds about two Double Rares and one Illustration Rare, a little over half of ETBs hold an Ultra Rare, and about nine in ten hold no Special Illustration Rare.

Sealed EV

Here is the expected value of each Phantasmal Flames product against its current market price.

Three numbers matter. EV ratio is gross EV divided by the product's market price; a ratio of 0.35 means the cards inside are worth 35 cents for every dollar you pay. Net EV is what you would actually clear if you sold everything: it takes off a 15% marketplace fee and $1 shipping per card worth at least $1, and treats everything under $1 as bulk at about two cents. Chase share is the fraction of the hit EV that comes from SIRs and Mega Hyper Rares.

For the booster box: market about $398, gross EV about $137, net EV about $94, ratio about 0.35, chase share about 0.67. The break-even box price, where gross EV equals price, is about $137. The market price is nearly three times that, so opening one means paying roughly $260 per box for the entertainment and the Charizard lottery ticket. The single-pack EV is about $3.82; at about $12.05 per loose pack, the ratio is about 0.32.

That $3.82 splits by tier as follows. Special Illustration Rares add about $1.90 to a pack, Illustration Rares about $0.58, Double Rares about $0.25, Ultra Rares about $0.22 and the Mega Hyper Rare about $0.20; the remaining $0.66 or so is the baseline for the common, uncommon and rare slots. The Double Rare line is the one that rests on the era average: ten cards averaging about $1.25, at 1 in 5 packs.

Per dollar, the booster box (about 0.35) and the four-pack art bundle (about 0.33) have the highest ratios in this set. Sealed cases carry no EV on the site. The Elite Trainer Box is about 0.23, the booster bundle about 0.26, and the Pokémon Center ETB at about $287 is about 0.15. The premium checklane blisters for Blaziken and Hydrapple sit lowest at about 0.12, because the promo card drives the price. The Build & Battle display carries no EV: its price is for a retail display, and the site does not count its packs.

A chase share of about 0.67 is the key thing to understand. Take the two Charizards out of the math and the per-pack EV falls by roughly half, from about $3.82 to about $1.88; an ordinary box with no SIR holds Illustration Rares and Ultra Rares worth a few dollars each.

Who should open this

Players: the ten Double Rares average about $1.25 and the dearest of them, Mega Charizard X ex #13, is about $5. Four copies of an average Double Rare cost about $5 as singles, less than half the price of one loose pack at about $12.05, and a pack holds a Double Rare only about 1 time in 5.

Set collectors: as of September 27, 2026, the 128 cards that are not the two Charizards sum to roughly $195 at market, about half the price of one booster box, and the median card is about $0.18. The two Charizards together cost about $950 as singles, and the Special Illustration Rare alone would take about 11 boxes on average to pull.

Chase hunters: at about $398 a box and about 11 boxes per expected Charizard SIR, the average cost of pulling one from sealed is about $4,400, against the roughly $695 it costs as a single. A box is a chance at the card, not the card: roughly two boxes in three hold no Special Illustration Rare of any kind.

People who like ripping packs: a booster box works out to about $11.06 a pack, the lowest price per pack of any Phantasmal Flames product with an EV on the site, against about $12.05 for a loose pack, about $14.61 in a booster bundle and about $16.90 in an Elite Trainer Box. At a ratio of about 0.35, roughly $260 of the $398 is the price of the opening itself. The set is short, the Illustration Rares are well drawn, and a box will give you around seven hits.

How to buy it cheaper

Every Phantasmal Flames sealed product page on this site shows the TCGplayer market price, the price history and, unless that market is under $5, more than 10% above the dearest copy TCGplayer lists or more than 25% above TCGplayer's middle listing, the price that counts as 12% below market, which is the figure to hold a listing against once shipping is included. 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% under market; if the site's eBay scan were off, it would show eBay searches for the set's main sealed products instead.

The eBay buttons on the booster box and Elite Trainer Box pages open eBay's own search results, limited to Buy It Now listings from US sellers, with common junk keywords excluded and sorted by price plus shipping. If no box or ETB is listed under the price today, use eBay's own "Save this search" on that results page so that eBay emails new matches. The rule that matters is landed price versus market: add the shipping to the item price before you compare, ignore any "was $X" strikethrough, and check that the listing is factory sealed, English and not a repack. A box at 15% below market moves the ratio from about 0.35 to about 0.41, so the raw card value is still under half of the price paid. The Deal Score method for weighing a listing, which you can apply by hand, is documented at /methodology, and every sealed product for this set is on /sets/phantasmal-flames.

Bottom line

Phantasmal Flames is a Charizard set with 128 other cards attached. As of September 20, 2026, the booster box holds about 35 cents of raw card value per dollar of sealed price, and about 67% of the hit value rides on the SIR and Mega Hyper Rare slots. The Mega Charizard X ex costs about $695 as a single, against an average of about $4,400 of booster boxes to pull one. The 128 cards that are not the two chase Charizards add up to roughly $210 as singles. What a box adds beyond the cards is the opening itself: 36 packs at about $11 each, around seven hits, and about a 9% chance at the Charizard SIR.