Is Scarlet & Violet worth opening? EV, pull rates and chase cards

Verdict

A Scarlet & Violet booster box holds about 40 cents of raw card value per dollar of sealed price, and the tier carrying the most of that value is the Illustration Rares rather than the top chase tier. As of September 22, 2026, a booster box sells for about $295.43 and the cards inside are worth about $117.85 at raw market, an EV ratio of about 0.40. The board at /sealed-ev puts most booster boxes between roughly 30 and 35 cents of raw card value for each dollar of price, which places this one just past the top of that band. The unusual part is where it sits: the 24 Illustration Rares add about $1.43 to the $3.27 a pack is worth, roughly 59% of the hit value, while the Special Illustration Rares and Hyper Rares together account for about 28% of it.

What Scarlet & Violet is

Scarlet & Violet (set code SVI) released on March 31, 2023 and shares its name with its series. The site's database carries 258 cards for the set, every one of them priced, against a printed numbering of 198.

The counts line up with that split: 105 Commons, 60 Uncommons, 21 Rares and 12 Double Rares come to 198, and the 24 Illustration Rares, 20 Ultra Rares, 10 Special Illustration Rares and 6 Hyper Rares come to the 60 beyond it. Those four higher tiers are what the EV counts as hits when it works out the odds of one. Double Rares sit outside that rate but inside the hit EV the chase share is measured against.

Where the set stands today:

The median card is about $0.27, 22 cards reach $10 or more and just two reach $50. One of every card at market comes to about $785.91, and the 24 Illustration Rares are about $446 of that, more than any other tier holds.

The chase cards

The set's most valuable cards as prices stand.

Gardevoir ex #245, a Special Illustration Rare illustrated by Jiro Sasumo, leads at about $71.02. Behind it come Drowzee #210 at about $59.48, Ralts #211 at about $44.75, Kirlia #212 at about $40.38 and Slowpoke #204 at about $39.55, every one of them an Illustration Rare. Eleven of the fifteen dearest cards come from that tier. The other four are Special Illustration Rares: the Gardevoir, Miraidon ex #244 at about $24.63, Miriam #251 at about $23.46 and Koraidon ex #247 at about $23.32.

The 24 Illustration Rares average about $18.60 and the 10 Special Illustration Rares about $18.40, so the tier that turns up about once every 13 packs averages a shade more than the tier that turns up about once every 32. The 6 Hyper Rares, the rarest tier, average about $5.39 and top out at Miraidon ex #253 at about $7.96. The 20 Ultra Rares average about $3.23, led by Arcanine ex #224 at about $14.06.

Pull rates and what "1 in N" means

The table below gives this set's rates as packs per hit. They come from published community counts for Scarlet & Violet itself rather than an era fallback, so nothing in it is tagged as an era average.

Double Rares arrive about once every 7 packs, Illustration Rares once every 13, Ultra Rares once every 15, Special Illustration Rares once every 32 and Hyper Rares once every 53. Within a tier every card is taken as equally likely, so a named card comes out at the tier rate times the number of cards in it: about 1 in 300 packs for a named Ultra Rare, 1 in 312 for an Illustration Rare, 1 in 318 for a Hyper Rare and 1 in 320 for a Special Illustration Rare. The odds on any one named card in those four tiers land within 20 packs of each other, while their averages run from about $3.23 to about $18.60. The full tier list is on the Scarlet & Violet pull-rates page, with the derivation at /methodology#pull-rates.

A booster box is 36 packs. At these rates it averages about five Double Rares, 2.8 Illustration Rares, 2.4 Ultra Rares, 1.1 Special Illustration Rares and 0.7 Hyper Rares. About two boxes in three hold at least one Special Illustration Rare, and a Hyper Rare turns up in about half of them. Roughly 18% of packs, about 1 in 5.5, contain an Illustration Rare or better, which comes to six or seven packs per box, and on the model a box has a 99.9% chance of containing at least one.

The Koraidon and Miraidon Elite Trainer Boxes hold 9 packs: about 1.3 Double Rares, 0.7 Illustration Rares, 0.6 Ultra Rares and roughly a 1 in 4 chance at a Special Illustration Rare, with the model giving each an 83% chance of holding at least one hit. A six-pack booster bundle comes to about 70%, a four-pack Build & Battle Box about 55%.

Sealed EV

Sealed products and their current market prices.

Three figures drive that block. The EV ratio divides gross EV by the market price, so 0.40 says a box holds about 40 cents of cards for each dollar it costs. Net EV is that gross figure once a 15% marketplace fee plus $1 of per-card shipping come off, with any rarity averaging under $1 counted as bulk at two cents and the baseline slots halved: a box nets about $79.23 against $117.85 gross. The chase share of about 0.28 is how much of the hit EV, the $2.44 a pack the rated rarities carry, sits in the Special Illustration Rares and Hyper Rares.

The $3.27 a pack splits by tier. Illustration Rares add about $1.43, Special Illustration Rares about $0.57, Ultra Rares about $0.22, Double Rares about $0.12 and Hyper Rares about $0.10, and the last $0.83 or so is what the common, uncommon and rare slots carry. The Illustration Rare line alone is about 44% of a pack's whole value and roughly two and a half times the Special Illustration Rare line.

Per dollar, the Build & Battle Stadium sits at about 0.41 and the booster box at about 0.40. A loose pack is about 0.36 at about $9.10, the Build & Battle Box about 0.32 and the blisters about 0.25 to 0.32. The Koraidon Elite Trainer Box is about 0.22 at about $131.56 and the Miraidon about 0.20 at about $144.74, break-even about $29.46 for either. The booster bundle is about 0.19: about $104.72 for six packs, or about $17.45 a pack, more per pack than either of those Elite Trainer Boxes. The two Pokemon Center Elite Trainer Boxes sit lowest at about 0.13 and 0.11, or about $26.10 and $28.82 a pack for 11 packs. The Build & Battle Box Display at about $389.90 carries no pack count on this site, and so no EV.

Break-even, where gross EV equals the price, is about $117.85 against a market price of about $295.43. The roughly $178 between them is what a sealed box of a set that released on March 31, 2023 carries above the raw value of its cards, part of it the price of the sealed box itself.

Who opens it and who buys singles

Players: the set's 12 Double Rares average about $0.82, topping out at Gyarados ex #45 at about $1.73, so four copies at that average run about $3.28 as singles, against about $9.10 for a loose pack holding a Double Rare roughly once in 7. The 21 Rares and 60 Uncommons average about $0.29 each, the 105 Commons about $0.24.

Set collectors: one of each of the 258 cards is about $785.91, about the price of 2.7 booster boxes. Take out the two Illustration Rare tiers and the other 224 cards come to about $156, a bit above half a box's price.

Illustration Rare collectors: all 24 come to about $446, led by Drowzee and Ralts. One named Illustration Rare averages about 312 packs, which at the booster box price of about $8.21 a pack is roughly $2,560 of sealed product.

Chase hunters: Gardevoir ex #245 sells for about $71.02 as a single. Pulling one averages about 320 packs, roughly $2,630 of booster box packs. Odds, not ownership: about one box in three ends with no Special Illustration Rare in it.

People who like opening packs: a booster box comes to about $8.21 a pack and the Build & Battle Stadium to about $8.01, against about $14.62 in a Koraidon Elite Trainer Box. Booster box vs ETB vs bundle makes the same comparison across sets.

Buying it below market

Every sealed product in this set has a page here with its TCGplayer market price, a price history and a 12% below-market figure, the level a listing has to come in under once its shipping is counted. The buttons below search eBay for this set's main sealed items with that cap already applied.

Every button lands on eBay's own results page, filtered to Buy It Now from US sellers, cleaned of the usual junk keywords, and ordered by price with shipping included. The same buttons sit on the booster box and Koraidon Elite Trainer Box pages. An empty capped search means nothing is under the below-market price at that moment, and eBay's "Save this search" link on that results page will mail new matches as they appear. Landed price is what matters: shipping counts toward it, a strikethrough "was $X" does not, and the item has to be factory sealed English product rather than a repack. A box at 12% under market lifts the ratio to about 0.45 from about 0.40. /methodology sets out the full method, how sealed EV works covers the model behind these figures, and /sets/scarlet-and-violet lists every sealed product the set has.

Bottom line

Scarlet & Violet is a set whose value sits one tier below the top. As of September 22, 2026, a booster box costs about $295.43 and holds about $117.85 of raw card value, about 0.40 on the ratio, against the board's usual 30 to 35 cents. The 24 Illustration Rares carry about $1.43 of the $3.27 a pack is worth, against about 28% of the hit value for the Special Illustration Rares and Hyper Rares together. Gardevoir ex #245 at about $71.02 is the only card above $60, and any one named card from the four hit tiers averages between about 1 in 300 and about 1 in 320 packs.