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

Verdict: hold, unless you are specifically buying a shot at Mega Charizard X ex. 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 0.34. That is inside the normal 0.3–0.55 range for a modern box, but this set has an unusual shape: about 72% 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. Set collectors and players should buy singles. People who enjoy ripping packs should buy below market and go in knowing that the typical box does not contain a Charizard.

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 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 $0.25, only nine cards are worth $10 or more, and only two are worth $50 or more. Add up every card in the set at market and you get about $1,180, of which about $960 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 $705. Mega Charizard X ex #130, the Mega Hyper Rare, is about $256. After those two, the next most valuable card is the Ultra Rare Charizard at about $24, then a cluster of Special Illustration Rares and Illustration Rares between $13 and $20: 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 $155, but that average is almost entirely Charizard; the other four SIRs average around $17. The 13 Illustration Rares average about $5.40, the 17 Ultra Rares about $2.90, and the ten Double Rares about $1.40. 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 published pull rates for the set, given as packs per hit.

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.

A booster box has 36 packs. At these rates a box averages about 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 $700 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.

An Elite Trainer Box has 9 packs: 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 reality of the product: most ETBs deliver an Illustration Rare or two and nothing more.

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 0.34 means the cards inside are worth 34 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 $99, ratio about 0.34, chase share about 0.72. The break-even box price, where gross EV equals price, is about $137. No one is selling boxes anywhere near that, so opening one means paying roughly $260 per box for the entertainment and the Charizard lottery ticket. The single-pack EV is about $3.81; at about $12.50 per loose pack, the ratio is about 0.30.

Per dollar, the booster box (about 0.34) and the four-pack art bundle (about 0.32) are the most efficient ways to open this set; the full booster box case edges the box at about 0.35 but costs about $2,380. The Elite Trainer Box is about 0.22, the booster bundle about 0.27, and the Pokémon Center ETB at about $288 is about 0.12. The premium checklane blisters for Blaziken and Hydrapple sit at about 0.12 as well, because the promo card drives the price. Avoid the Build & Battle display at about 0.03; that price is for the display, not the packs.

A chase share of about 0.72 is the highest of the four recent sets covered in these guides, and it is the key thing to understand. Take the two Charizards out of the math and the per-pack EV falls by roughly half; an ordinary box with no SIR returns Illustration Rares and Ultra Rares worth a few dollars each.

Who should open this

Players: no. The Double Rares average about $1.40 and the playable Mega ex cards are cheap as singles. Buy the copies you need.

Set collectors: no. The 128 cards that are not the two Charizards sum to roughly $220 at market, and the median card is a quarter. Buy the set as singles and decide separately whether you want the Charizards, which together cost about $960 and would take about 11 boxes on average to pull.

Chase hunters: only with a firm budget. At about $398 a box and about 11 boxes per expected Charizard SIR, the average cost of pulling one from sealed is far above the roughly $705 it costs to buy. You are not buying the card; you are buying the chance.

People who like ripping packs: yes, if you buy below market and accept the 0.34 ratio as the cost of the experience. The set is short, the Illustration Rares are well drawn, and a box will give you around seven hits.

How to buy it cheaper

The site rescans eBay every 15 minutes for Phantasmal Flames sealed listings that land at least 12% below the TCGplayer market price once shipping is included. Here are the current ones.

Set an alert at /alerts?set=me2 to hear when a box or ETB drops below market. 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 0.34 to about 0.41, which is still a loss on paper but a meaningfully smaller one. Full details of how listings are scored are at /methodology, and every sealed product for this set is on /sets/phantasmal-flames.

Bottom line

Phantasmal Flames is a Charizard set with a hundred other cards attached. The booster box returns about 34% of its price in cards, and about 72% of the hit value rides on the SIR and Mega Hyper Rare slots. If you want the Mega Charizard X ex, buying it outright at about $705 is far cheaper than the expected cost of pulling it. If you want the rest of the set, it is one of the cheapest sets to complete with singles. Open it only for the fun of it, and buy the box below market when you do.