Is Pitch Black worth opening? EV, pull rates and chase cards

Verdict

Pitch Black is a set to open for the experience, not for the cards you expect to get back. At current prices a booster box returns roughly 44 cents of raw card value per dollar spent, and almost half of that expected value sits in seven cards you will usually not pull. If what you want is the Mega Darkrai ex Special Illustration Rare, buying it as a single (about $195) is far cheaper than chasing it through sealed product. If you like ripping packs, the booster box or loose packs are the right products and the Elite Trainer Box is the wrong one. Set collectors should build from singles, and players get everything they need from Double Rares that cost well under a dollar.

What Pitch Black is

Pitch Black released on July 17, 2026 as the fifth main set of the Mega Evolution series (set code PBL). The printed checklist runs to 84 cards, with the full set at 120 once you count the secret-rare slots numbered above the printed total. It is a small set by modern standards, built around Mega Darkrai ex, with Mega Zeraora ex, Mega Chandelure ex, Mega Excadrill ex and Morpeko ex filling out the ex line-up.

The rarity ladder is the standard Mega-era one: Double Rares (the regular ex cards), Ultra Rares (full-art ex and Trainer cards), Illustration Rares (single-Pokémon art cards), Special Illustration Rares (the alternate-art ex and Trainer cards) and a single Mega Hyper Rare, the gold-treatment Mega Darkrai ex numbered 120/84. Unlike Perfect Order and Ascended Heroes, there is no Mega Attack Rare slot in this set.

Here are the live set-level numbers from the Pitch Black set page.

The chase cards

All 120 cards carry a TCGplayer market price, but the median card is worth about 25 cents and only eight cards clear $10. These are the top cards right now.

The value is extremely concentrated. The two Mega Darkrai ex secret rares, the Special Illustration Rare at about $195 and the Mega Hyper Rare at about $152, together account for close to half of the set's entire summed market value (about $731 across all 120 cards). Add the other five Special Illustration Rares, which run from about $28 (Gladion's Final Battle) to about $82 (Morpeko ex), and seven cards hold roughly 80 percent of the set's raw value.

Below that tier the drop is steep. The 18 Ultra Rares average about $5, with Misty's Vitality the only one above $10. The 11 Illustration Rares average about $3, topped by Slowbro at about $9. Double Rares average under a dollar. If you are not holding one of the seven top cards, a typical "hit" from this set is a $3 to $8 card.

Pull rates

The rates below are midpoints of published pack-opening counts, including TCGplayer's authentication-center count of more than 4,000 Pitch Black packs. Other trackers put the Special Illustration Rare rate closer to 1 in 80, so treat the SIR line as the conservative end of the range.

Here is what "1 in N packs" means for a 36-pack booster box. You should see about seven Double Rares, three or four Illustration Rares (1 in 10) and three Ultra Rares (1 in 12), so nearly every box (about 99.9 percent) contains at least one hit above Double Rare. The Special Illustration Rare, at about 1 in 102 packs, works out to roughly one every three boxes; put another way, about seven boxes in ten contain no SIR at all. The Mega Hyper Rare, at about 1 in 1,315 packs, is roughly one per 36 boxes, or one per six sealed cases.

A nine-pack Elite Trainer Box tells the same story in miniature: about an 84 percent chance of at least one Illustration Rare or better, and roughly a 1 in 12 chance of a Special Illustration Rare.

Sealed EV

Expected value here is the average raw market value of the cards inside a product, computed from the pull rates above and the mean price of each rarity. This is the live table for every Pitch Black product we track; the full cross-set comparison lives on the sealed EV board.

Three numbers matter. EV ratio is gross EV divided by the product's market price. A booster box at about $198 holding about $87 of expected card value has a ratio of roughly 0.44, which sits in the middle of the 0.3 to 0.55 range modern boxes usually land in. Net EV subtracts a 15 percent marketplace fee and $1 of shipping per card worth at least $1, and treats cards under $1 as bulk; for the booster box that is about $54, so the realistic cash-out from an average box is little more than a quarter of the box price. Chase share is the fraction of hit EV that comes from Special Illustration Rares and the Mega Hyper Rare; for Pitch Black it is about 48 percent, which means the seven boxes in ten with no SIR will land well below the average.

Break-even for the booster box is the gross EV, about $87. Nobody sells sealed boxes at that price, and the point is not that they should; it is that every dollar above it is what you are paying for the experience of opening.

On EV per dollar, loose booster packs (ratio about 0.44) and booster boxes (about 0.44) are tied for the best mainstream option, with the full booster box case slightly better still at about 0.50 because cases trade cheaply per pack. The Elite Trainer Box, at about 0.30, gives you nine packs plus accessories for about $73, so you are paying roughly $8 per pack for sleeves and dice. The Pokémon Center ETB (about 0.17) and the premium checklane blisters (about 0.10 to 0.14) are the worst ways to buy packs of this set.

Who should open this

Players: no. The competitive ex cards are Double Rares that average about 73 cents; buy the copies you need as singles.

Set collectors: build from singles. Every card in the set added together is worth about $731 at market, and you can assemble a master set for less with patient bidding. Opening boxes toward a complete set means paying several hundred dollars for duplicate commons.

Chase hunters: buy the single. The Mega Darkrai ex SIR is about $195. Even if the six Special Illustration Rares were printed evenly, a specific one would be around a 1 in 600 pack pull, roughly 17 boxes. The odds are far worse for the Mega Hyper Rare, and the single costs less than a box.

People who like opening packs: this is the audience for sealed Pitch Black. Buy a booster box or loose packs, understand that the average box gives back about $87 of cards, and enjoy it.

How to buy it cheaper

Below-market listings for Pitch Black singles and sealed product appear here as the eBay scans find them. A listing has to be at least 12 percent under adjusted market on landed price (item plus shipping) to qualify, and seller "was $X" claims are ignored entirely.

The rule that keeps sealed buyers out of trouble is simple: compare landed price, not sticker price, against the TCGplayer market for the product. Condition does not apply to sealed items, but shipping and sales tax do. A box at $180 plus $15 shipping is not cheaper than one at $190 shipped. If nothing qualifies today, set an alert for the set and let the scanner watch the 15-minute rescans for you: /alerts?set=me5.

For singles, the same logic applies with condition multipliers: a Lightly Played Darkrai SIR is scored against 85 percent of Near Mint market, so a listing that looks cheap may just be a played copy at a fair price. The methodology page explains the full scoring.

Bottom line

Pitch Black is a hold for anyone buying with a calculator. Boxes return about 44 cents on the dollar in raw card value, the Special Illustration Rare is the hardest pull of the Mega era at about 1 in 102 packs, and two Mega Darkrai ex cards carry most of the set's worth. Open a box if you enjoy the process and are comfortable getting about $87 of cards for about $198. Otherwise, buy the Mega Darkrai ex SIR or whichever card you actually want as a single, and use the deals page to buy it under market.