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

Verdict

Prismatic Evolutions is the most expensive Scarlet & Violet set to open per pack, and the numbers say it is also one of the most lopsided. A loose pack sells for about $14 and holds roughly $5.84 of expected raw card value, an EV ratio of about 0.41. Almost all of that value sits in the Special Illustration Rares, which land about once every 49 packs. If you want the Eeveelution art and the ripping experience, open it with your eyes open. If you want specific cards, buy the singles and skip the packs.

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. It is the set that introduced Master Ball reverse holos, a pattern that appears at roughly 1 in 19.5 packs and 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 50 cents. Only about 34 cards in the set clear $10, and about 16 clear $50, so the vast majority of what falls out of a pack is bulk.

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 $149 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 $3,770 together, roughly three quarters of the whole set's value on their own. Umbreon ex #161 alone is worth about $1,420, 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 $19, and only Pikachu ex #179 at around $62 is worth much. The 25 Double Rares average about $2.58, with Umbreon ex #60 topping out near $9. The 12 Ultra Rares average about 70 cents and none clears $1.10. The six ACE SPECs average about 53 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 unusually generous for a modern set; the main Scarlet & Violet sets around it run closer to 1 in 85 to 1 in 95, and the Mega era sits near 1 in 80 to 1 in 100. That is the one thing in this set's favour. 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 1,500 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.

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 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 $14 with an EV near $5.84 gives roughly 0.41. The Elite Trainer Box is about 0.37, the booster bundle about 0.38, and the mini tins land between roughly 0.28 and 0.36. The Pokémon Center ETB, at over $400, drops to about 0.13, and the Super-Premium Collection to about 0.23 because you are paying for figures, sleeves and packaging 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 $3.95; for an ETB about $36 against a price around $140.
• Chase share is the fraction of hit EV that comes from SIRs and Hyper Rares. Here it is about 87 percent. The SIR slot alone contributes roughly $3 of the $5.84 per-pack EV. That is why this set feels so streaky to open: most packs are worth a couple of dollars, and a small minority are worth hundreds.

For context, a Surging Sparks pack has an EV near $2.59 at a price around $7.90, so Prismatic Evolutions packs carry more than twice the expected value but cost nearly twice as much. The ratio is similar; the variance is far higher.

Who should open it

Open Prismatic Evolutions if you like the Eeveelutions, you enjoy opening packs, and you can treat the cost as entertainment with some resale value on the back end. The 1-in-49 SIR rate means a bundle or ETB gives you a real, if minority, shot at one of the alt arts, and the Master Ball reverses give every pack a secondary thing to hope for.

Do not open it to acquire specific cards. Every playable Ultra Rare and ACE SPEC in the set is under $1.10 as a single, and the Double Rares average under $3. Buy those directly. If your target is one of the nine Eeveelution SIRs, the expected spend to pull a specific one dwarfs its price; the sensible route is to watch the singles market and buy the card.

Do not open it to complete the set. The 32 SIRs cost about $4,750 as singles at current prices, and opening enough packs to find all of them would cost far more than that.

How to buy it cheaper

The site's Deal Score compares each eBay listing's landed price (item plus shipping) to the TCGplayer market price, adjusted for condition, and only surfaces listings at least 12 percent below market after shipping. Here are the best current Prismatic Evolutions deals across singles and sealed.

A few practical notes for this set specifically:

• Compare sealed products by price per pack, not by sticker price. At current market a bundle works out near $15 a pack and an ETB near $15.60; a loose pack is around $14. The booster bundle and the Elite Trainer Box pages show live EV and ratio.
• Opened or resealed product is excluded from deal scoring entirely, and so are lots and mystery repacks. If a sealed listing is far below the market price, treat it as a warning rather than a bargain.
• For singles, condition drives the adjusted market: Lightly Played is priced at 85 percent of Near Mint, Moderately Played at 70 percent. A "cheap" Umbreon is usually a played one.
• Set a free alert at /alerts?set=sv8pt5. Listings are rescanned every 15 minutes, and the good sealed deals on this set do not sit for long.

Bottom line

Prismatic Evolutions has the best SIR odds of any recent main-line-adjacent set and the most valuable chase cards in Scarlet & Violet, but you pay for both up front. At roughly $14 a pack and an EV ratio near 0.41, a typical ETB returns about $53 of raw card value against a price around $140, with roughly a one-in-six chance of an SIR. Open it if the Eeveelution art and the ripping are the point. If a specific card is the point, buy the single and put the difference toward something else. 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.