Is Prismatic Evolutions worth opening? EV, pull rates, chase cards

Verdict

Prismatic Evolutions is one of the more expensive Scarlet & Violet sets to open per pack, and the numbers say it is also one of the most lopsided. As of September 20, 2026, a loose pack sells for about $13.70 and holds roughly $4.31 of expected raw card value, an EV ratio of about 0.31. About 70 percent of that value sits in the Special Illustration Rares, which land about once every 49 packs. No Prismatic Evolutions product holds its price in raw card value: ratios run from about 0.115 for the Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Box to about 0.31 for the loose pack.

What Prismatic Evolutions is

Prismatic Evolutions (set page) released on January 17, 2025 as a special Scarlet & Violet set built around Eevee and its evolutions. The printed set is 131 cards, but with secret rares the full list runs to 180. The set has Master Ball reverse holos, a foil pattern that sits alongside the normal reverse holo slot.

There is no booster box for this set in the Pullnomics catalog. It was sold as Elite Trainer Boxes, booster bundles, mini tins, collection boxes, a Super-Premium Collection and various blisters, which is part of why per-pack prices stayed high. Here is where the set stands today.

The median card is worth about 27 cents as of September 27, 2026. An earlier version of this page gave the median as about 50 cents, a figure that valued each card at its dearest printing rather than its standard one. Only 33 cards in the set clear $10, and 16 clear $50, so the vast majority of what falls out of a pack is bulk.

Sealed EV: what a pack is actually worth

Pullnomics computes the expected value of a pack by taking each rarity's odds, multiplying by the average market price of that rarity in the set, and adding a small baseline for the guaranteed slots. The baseline prices those slots at each card's regular printing, with caps, so Master Ball reverses and other foil parallels do not inflate it. The table below is live and updates daily.

Three columns matter most:

• EV ratio is gross EV divided by the product's market price. A loose booster pack at about $13.70 with an EV near $4.31 gives roughly 0.31. The Elite Trainer Box is about 0.28, the booster bundle about 0.29, and the mini tins land between roughly 0.21 and 0.27. The Pokémon Center ETB, at over $400, drops to about 0.115. The Super-Premium Collection, which holds 15 packs, is about 0.26, and the Premium Figure Collection, which holds 11, is about 0.21; both sit below the loose pack because part of the price pays for the other contents of the box rather than packs.
• Net EV is what you would actually clear if you sold every card, after a 15 percent marketplace fee and $1 shipping per card worth $1 or more, with sub-$1 cards counted as bulk. For a pack that is about $3.16; for an ETB about $28 against a price around $140.
• Chase share is the fraction of hit EV that comes from Special Illustration Rares (SIRs) and Hyper Rares. Here it is about 88 percent. The SIR slot alone contributes roughly $3.02 of the $4.31 per-pack EV, and everything else adds about $1.29. That is why this set feels so streaky to open: most packs hold a dollar or so of cards, and a small minority hold hundreds.

For context, a Surging Sparks pack has an EV near $2.80 at a price around $8.29, so Prismatic Evolutions packs carry about one and a half times the expected value and cost about 1.65 times as much. The ratios are close, about 0.34 for Surging Sparks against about 0.31 here; the difference is the chase share, about 44 percent there against about 88 percent here.

Across the whole sealed EV board, a typical Elite Trainer Box holds about 15 to 20 cents of raw card value per dollar and a typical booster bundle a little under 30 cents, which puts this set's ETB above the usual figure for its format and its bundle about level with it. The set's other collection boxes, its displays and its sealed cases have no verified pack count on the site, so they carry no EV.

The chase cards and where the value sits

These are the most valuable cards in the set at today's TCGplayer market prices.

The set has 32 Special Illustration Rares with an average market price of about $148 each. Multiply that out and the SIRs alone account for roughly 96 percent of the combined market value of every card in the set. The nine Eeveelution SIRs (the eight evolutions plus Eevee ex) are worth about $3,750 together, roughly three quarters of the whole set's value on their own. Umbreon ex #161 alone is worth about $1,410, which is more than a quarter of the set's total value in a single card.

Everything below that tier is cheap. The five Hyper Rares average about $18, and only Pikachu ex #179 at around $62 is worth much. The 25 Double Rares average about $2.28, with Umbreon ex #60 topping out near $8.60. The 12 Ultra Rares average about 70 cents and none clears $1.15. The six ACE SPECs average about 50 cents. In other words, if a pack does not contain an SIR, it usually contains a few dollars of cards at most.

Pull rates

The published pull rates for this set, using midpoints of the reported ranges, look like this.

A Special Illustration Rare at 1 in about 49 packs is a shorter rate than in the sets released around it: the main Scarlet & Violet sets of that period run closer to 1 in 85 to 1 in 95, and the Mega era sits near 1 in 80 to 1 in 100. Work it through the products you can actually buy:

• A 9-pack Elite Trainer Box has about a 17 percent chance of at least one SIR (1 minus (48/49) to the ninth power).
• A 6-pack booster bundle has about a 12 percent chance.
• A 2-pack mini tin has about a 4 percent chance.

And an SIR is not the same thing as the Umbreon. If the 32 SIRs were printed evenly, any one of them would show up about once every 1,570 packs. That even-print assumption is not something the datasets verify, but it is the right order of magnitude to keep in mind: the card that makes this set famous is a once-in-many-cases pull.

The rest of the pack is more predictable. Double Rares fall about 1 in 6 packs, Ultra Rares about 1 in 19.5, ACE SPECs about 1 in 25 and Hyper Rares about 1 in 166. Combining the tiers above Double Rare, roughly one pack in nine contains an Ultra Rare, ACE SPEC, SIR or Hyper Rare. That is about a 51 percent chance of at least one in a booster bundle and about 66 percent in an ETB.

Who should open it

Prismatic Evolutions fits a buyer who likes the Eeveelutions, enjoys opening packs and treats the cost as entertainment with some resale value on the back end. The 1-in-49 SIR rate gives a bundle about a 12 percent chance and an ETB about a 17 percent chance of one of the alt arts, and the Master Ball reverses give every pack a secondary thing to hope for.

For specific cards the comparison runs the other way. Every playable Ultra Rare and ACE SPEC in the set is under $1.15 as a single, and the Double Rares average under $3, against about $13.70 for one loose pack. For one of the nine Eeveelution SIRs, the even-print figure of about 1,570 packs per named card comes to roughly $21,500 of loose packs at $13.70 each, against single prices of about $177 to about $1,410.

Set completion shows the same gap. The 32 SIRs cost about $4,730 as singles at September 20, 2026 prices. At 1 in 49, even 32 SIR pulls with no duplicates would take about 1,570 packs on average, roughly $21,500 of loose packs.

How to buy it cheaper

Deal Score is the method Pullnomics documents on the methodology page: take an eBay listing's landed price (item plus shipping), compare it to the TCGplayer market price, and count it as a deal only when it lands at least 12 percent below market after shipping and, for a single card, its condition is stated as Near Mint. You can run that check by hand. Every Prismatic Evolutions card and sealed product page linked from the set page, which leaves out code cards, shows the market price, the price that counts as 12 percent below it (none when the market is under $5, more than 10 percent above the highest TCGplayer listing, or more than 25 percent above the middle one), and buttons that open eBay's own search results filtered to Buy It Now listings from US sellers, with junk such as proxies and code cards excluded, sorted by price plus shipping. 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 percent under market; if the site's eBay scan were off, it would show eBay searches for the set's main sealed products instead.

A few practical notes for this set specifically:

• Price per pack, not sticker price, is the figure that compares sealed products. At September 20, 2026 market prices a bundle works out near $14.90 a pack and an ETB near $15.50; a loose pack is about $13.70, the Super-Premium Collection (15 packs) about $16.60 a pack and the Premium Figure Collection (11 packs) about $20.10. The booster bundle and the Elite Trainer Box pages show live EV and ratio.
• The Deal Score method leaves out opened or resealed product entirely, and lots and mystery repacks with it. The eBay buttons on sealed product pages drop titles that say opened, resealed or empty, but a search filter cannot inspect shrink wrap. If a sealed listing is far below the market price, treat it as a warning rather than a bargain.
• For singles, the market price is a Near Mint price, and since October 8, 2026, the Deal Score method scores only a card listing whose condition is stated as Near Mint: a played copy, or a listing that states no condition, gets no score. A "cheap" Umbreon is usually a played one.
• Listings under the below-market price come and go, so look more than once. Open the eBay button on the booster bundle or Elite Trainer Box page, and if nothing is listed under the below-market price, use eBay's own "Save this search" on that results page so eBay emails new matches. The cap on that button applies to the item price, so add the shipping line yourself before you call anything a deal.

Bottom line

Prismatic Evolutions has SIR odds of about 1 in 49, against 1 in 85 to 1 in 95 for the main sets around it, and a chase card above $1,400, and the pack price carries both. A loose pack is about $13.70 with an EV ratio near 0.31. An ETB holds about $38.80 of raw card value against a price around $140, about 28 cents per dollar, with roughly a one-in-six chance of an SIR. About 88 percent of the hit value sits in the SIRs and Hyper Rares, so the Eeveelution art chase and the opening itself are what the pack price buys. Every named hit costs less as a single on the set page than the packs it takes on average to pull it. See the pull rates by set and booster box vs ETB vs bundle guides for how the odds and product formats compare across sets, and the methodology for how the numbers are built.