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

Verdict

As of October 6, 2026, no Pitch Black product holds its price in raw card value: ratios run from about 0.10 for a premium checklane blister to about 0.43 for a sealed six-box booster box case. A single booster box holds roughly 41 cents of raw card value per dollar of sealed price, the expected value of a pack is about $2.21, and almost half of the hit value (about 49 percent) sits in seven cards that most boxes do not contain. The Mega Darkrai ex Special Illustration Rare costs about $161 as a single, less than one booster box (about $193), while that specific card is about a 1 in 615 pack pull, roughly 17 boxes. Short of a sealed case, the booster box has the highest ratio and the lowest price per pack (about $5.35); the six-box case is higher on ratio and lower on price per pack (about $5.10). The Elite Trainer Box sits at about 0.26 and about $8.44 per pack. One of every card in the set comes to about $613 at market, and each of the 10 Double Rares, the set's regular ex cards, costs 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 as of October 6, 2026 the median card is worth about 20 cents and only seven cards clear $10. An earlier version of this page, before September 27, 2026, gave the median as about 25 cents, a figure that valued each card at its dearest printing rather than its standard one. 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 $161 and the Mega Hyper Rare at about $142, together account for close to half of the set's entire summed market value (about $613 across all 120 cards). Add the other five Special Illustration Rares, which run from about $26 (Gladion's Final Battle) to about $64 (Morpeko ex), and seven cards hold roughly 81 percent of the set's raw value.

Below that tier the drop is steep. The 18 Ultra Rares average about $3.92, and none reaches $10: the most expensive, Misty's Vitality, is $9.99. The 11 Illustration Rares average about $2.51, topped by Slowbro at about $6.34. Double Rares average under a dollar. If you are not holding one of the seven top cards, a typical "hit" from this set is an Illustration Rare averaging about $2.51 or an Ultra Rare averaging about $3.92.

Pull rates

The rates below are Pitch Black's own published rates, not an era average: midpoints of published pack-opening datasets (TCGplayer opening counts of 1,000 to 8,000 or more packs per set, plus community counts), collected in September 2026. Because they are midpoints, read the Special Illustration Rare and Mega Hyper Rare lines as estimates, not fixed odds.

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.

A nine-pack Elite Trainer Box tells the same story in miniature: about an 84 percent chance of at least one hit above Double Rare, 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 live table covers Pitch Black's booster box, Elite Trainer Boxes, bundles, loose packs and blisters. Three of the sealed cases and the Build & Battle Box carry an EV on their own product pages and are not ranked in it (the cases are compared below); the booster bundle case and the 3-pack blister case have no pack count on the site and carry no EV. 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 $193 holding about $79 of expected card value (36 packs at about $2.21 each) has a ratio of roughly 0.41; the sealed EV board linked above, updated daily, compares it with other sets' booster boxes. 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 $47, so net EV for an average box is a little under 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 49 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 $79. 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, the booster box (about 0.41) has the highest ratio among the products the table ranks, ahead of loose booster packs (about 0.37 at about $5.89 a pack) and, further down the table, the six-pack booster bundle (about 0.34). Three sealed cases carry an EV on the site: the six-box booster box case, at about $1,102 or about $5.10 per pack, has a ratio of about 0.43, a little above a single box; the 144-pack sleeved booster case sits at about 0.39 and the ten-box Elite Trainer Box case at about 0.28. The Elite Trainer Box, at about 0.26, holds nine packs plus accessories for about $76, which works out to about $8.44 per pack against about $5.35 per pack in a booster box. The Pokémon Center ETB (about 0.20) and the premium checklane blisters (about 0.10 to 0.14) have the lowest ratios in the set.

Who should open this

Players: the set's 10 Double Rares, its regular ex cards, average about 64 cents as singles. Four copies of the most expensive one, the regular Mega Chandelure ex at about 87 cents, come to about $3.48, a little under 60 percent of the price of one loose pack (about $5.89), and a pack holds a Double Rare about 1 time in 5.

Set collectors: every card in the set added together is worth about $613 at market. That is a little more than the price of three booster boxes (about $578), and three boxes, 108 packs, average about one of the six Special Illustration Rares, with the rest of the packs adding duplicate commons.

Chase hunters: the Mega Darkrai ex SIR is about $161 as a single. With the six Special Illustration Rares taken as equally likely, a specific one is about a 1 in 615 pack pull, roughly 17 boxes, or about $3,300 of sealed product at the October 6, 2026 box price. The Mega Hyper Rare is about a 1 in 1,315 pack pull, and its single (about $142) costs less than one box.

People who like opening packs: this is the audience for sealed Pitch Black. Short of a six-box case (about $5.10 per pack, ratio about 0.43), the booster box has the lowest price per pack (about $5.35) and the highest ratio, and the average box holds about $79 of raw card value against a price of about $193.

How to buy it cheaper

A Pitch Black listing, single or sealed, is only worth calling below market when its landed price (item plus shipping) is at least 12 percent under market, and seller "was $X" claims count for nothing. Every Pitch Black card and sealed product page reachable from the set page, which leaves out code cards, shows the TCGplayer market price, its price history, the price that counts as 12 percent below market (as of October 8, 2026, not where the market is under $5, more than 10 percent above TCGplayer's highest listing or more than 25 percent above its middle listing), and buttons that open eBay's own search results filtered to Buy It Now listings from US sellers, with proxies, lots and code cards excluded, sorted by price plus shipping. The block below lists this set's eBay listings that are matched and scored at least 12 percent under market.

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. The price cap in the eBay search applies to the item price, so add the shipping yourself before you call anything a discount. If the under-market button on the booster box page returns no results, nobody is listing a box below market at that moment: open the second button to see every current price, and use eBay's own "Save this search" on that results page so eBay emails new matches.

For singles, condition applies. Site card prices are raw Near Mint, and the site has no sourced price for a played copy, so since October 8, 2026, the Deal Score method scores only a card listing whose condition is stated as Near Mint: a Lightly Played Darkrai SIR, or a listing that states no condition, gets no Deal Score. A single that looks cheap against the Near Mint market may be a played copy. The methodology page sets out the full scoring, step by step, so you can run it by hand on any listing you find.

What changes and what stays

The dated figures are every price in this guide and everything computed from one: the pack EV of about $2.21, the EV ratios from about 0.10 to about 0.43, net EV, break-even, price per pack, the median card, the count of cards at $10 or more, the one-of-every-card total, the share of value held by the top cards, and which card and which product rank first. They are TCGplayer values as of October 6, 2026. The set statistics, chase cards and EV table on this page read prices that update daily, so where they differ from the prose, the blocks hold the figure to use.

The lasting facts are the July 17, 2026 release, the 120-card list (84 printed) and its rarity ladder, the pack counts (36 in a booster box, nine in an Elite Trainer Box, 11 in the Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Box, six in a booster bundle), the published pull rates, and the way the site computes EV, set out on the methodology page. The pull rates change only if the pack-opening datasets behind them are revised, which would move every odds figure and the pack EV with them. The pack counts change only with a new product configuration, the card list only if the card database adds or re-files a Pitch Black printing, and the EV method only with a change to the site's model.

Bottom line

As of October 6, 2026, a Pitch Black booster box holds about 41 cents of raw card value per dollar of sealed price, a Special Illustration Rare is about a 1 in 102 pack pull, and two Mega Darkrai ex cards carry close to half of the set's summed value. An average box holds about $79 of cards against a price of about $193, and about seven boxes in ten contain no Special Illustration Rare. The Mega Darkrai ex SIR costs about $161 as a single, against roughly 17 boxes of packs for the same card at the published odds. Every card page, reachable from the set page, has the eBay button that searches for copies listed under market, except, as of October 8, 2026, where the market is under $5, more than 10 percent above TCGplayer's highest listing or more than 25 percent above its middle listing.