Is Silver Tempest worth opening? Lugia V odds and box EV

Verdict

No Silver Tempest product holds its price in raw card value: EV ratios run from about 0.09 to about 0.30. A Silver Tempest booster box costs about $521 as of September 20, 2026 and holds about $134 of expected raw card value, roughly 26 cents per dollar of sealed price. The set is out of print, and the sealed box carries a collector premium of its own, which is the main reason the ratio is low. The set is opened for one card, the alternate-art Lugia V #186, at about $517. It is worth more than half of the main set and costs almost exactly what a box does, while a box gives you about a 1 in 19 chance of pulling it. For packs, the Build & Battle Stadium is cheapest at about $12.28 each.

What Silver Tempest is

Silver Tempest released on November 11, 2022 in the Sword & Shield series (set code SIT). The checklist is printed as 195 cards, and 20 secret cards numbered beyond it bring the full set to 215. Lugia is the face of the set and appears on six cards: three printings of Lugia V and three of Lugia VSTAR.

By rarity the set has 15 Rare Holo V, six Rare Holo VSTAR, one Rare Holo VMAX, three Radiant Rares, 26 Rare Ultra (full arts, alternate-art V cards included), 14 Rare Rainbow and six gold Rare Secrets, above 144 Commons, Uncommons, Rares and Rare Holos.

The packs also contain a companion checklist, the 30-card Silver Tempest Trainer Gallery, which runs from holo character cards up to gold VMAX cards. On Pullnomics the gallery has its own set page, but the sealed EV shown for Silver Tempest counts its cards.

The numbers

Start with the summary statistics from the Silver Tempest set page. They describe the 215 main-set cards, and the Trainer Gallery is counted on its own page.

As of September 27, 2026, the median main-set card sits at about 20 cents. An earlier version of this page gave the median as about 35 cents, a figure that valued each card at its dearest printing rather than its standard one. At September 20, 2026 prices, thirteen cards clear $10 and exactly one clears $50. Recomputed on September 27, 2026, one of each main-set card costs about $966 at market.

Lugia V #186 is about 54 percent of that total by itself. By group, at September 20, 2026 prices, the 26 Rare Ultra cards hold about $702, the Rare Rainbows about $151 and the Rare Secrets about $43, leaving about $70 of the September 27, 2026 total for the remaining 169 cards. The six Lugia cards together, at about $620, are 64 percent of that total.

Sealed EV by product

Sealed EV is the average value of what a product contains at today's TCGplayer market prices, and the formula is on the methodology page. A Silver Tempest pack has an EV of about $3.72 in every product, so the rows on the sealed EV board differ only in what each pack costs you.

At about $14.48 per pack the booster box has an EV ratio of about 0.26, and a net EV of about $91 after fees and shipping. A typical booster box on the board holds roughly 30 to 35 cents of raw card value per dollar, so this box is below typical.

The highest ratio belongs to the Build & Battle Stadium: about $147 for 12 packs and a ratio of about 0.30. The Elite Trainer Box (about $162 for eight packs, or about $20 per pack) is about 0.18, inside the usual Elite Trainer Box range of 15 to 20 cents. The booster bundle (about $114) is about 0.20, and the Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Box, about $408 for 10 packs, is lowest at about 0.09.

Of that $3.72, average prices and pull rates put the four alternate-art V cards at about 87 cents per pack, Rare Holo V at about 24 cents, Rare Rainbow and Rare Secret at about 20 cents between them, the 14 full-art V cards at about 11 cents, the seven regular VMAX and VSTAR cards (1 in 24.5 packs) at about 9 cents, Radiant Rare at about 8 cents and the eight full-art Trainers at about 5 cents. That is about $1.65 from the main set's hit tiers, 77 cents of it from Lugia V #186 alone. On the main set only, the method gives about $2.41 per pack, the extra 76 cents being the baseline for the common, uncommon and rare slots. The Trainer Gallery adds about $1.32: roughly 35 percent of the pack, and about 1.7 times what the Lugia contributes.

The source publishes three gallery rates: holo character cards, then V, VMAX and Trainer cards, then gold VMAX cards. Each tier is valued at the average price of its own cards, so an expensive VMAX is never averaged with a cheap holo.

Chase share is about 41 percent. It counts the alternate-art tier, which holds the Lugia, together with the rainbow, gold secret and gold gallery VMAX tiers. Rayquaza VMAX TG20 sits in the middle gallery tier, outside it.

Chase cards

This block lists the eight most valuable cards from the main set and the Trainer Gallery combined.

Four are on the main set's list: Lugia V #186 at about $517, Lugia VSTAR #202 at about $40, Unown V #177 at about $30 and Regidrago V #184 at about $27. Four are on the Trainer Gallery's list: Rayquaza VMAX TG20 at about $192, Blaziken VMAX TG15 at about $35, the gold Rayquaza VMAX TG29 at about $31 and Blaziken V TG14 at about $29.

After Lugia V and Rayquaza VMAX TG20, nothing in the set or the gallery is above $40. This is a two-card set.

Lugia shows how far apart printings of one Pokémon can be. The regular Lugia V #138 is about $13.72 and the standard full-art #185 about $17.31, against about $517 for #186. Averages hide this: Rare Ultra cards average about $27.01, but without the Lugia the other 25 average about $7.43.

Pull rates

The table uses rates measured on Silver Tempest packs, not a Sword & Shield era default. They are midpoints of published pack-opening counts, collected in September 2026, and the methodology lists where they come from.

A 36-pack box averages three gallery holos, about one card from the middle gallery tier and three quarters of a full-art V: the 1 in 48 in the table is the source's full-art V tier. The source counts full-art Trainers (1 in 99) and alternate-art V cards (1 in 168) as tiers of their own, and the table gives each a row. With all three added a box averages about 1.3 Rare Ultra cards, and about 26 percent of boxes contain none. A Rare Rainbow (1 in 79.5 packs) appears in about 37 percent of boxes and a gold gallery VMAX (1 in 111) in about 28 percent. About one pack in five contains a Radiant Rare, a gallery card or a Rare Ultra or better.

The published counts give Silver Tempest's four alternate-art V cards a tier of their own, about 1 in 168 packs. No count goes card by card, so take the four as equally likely: Lugia V #186 is then about 1 in 672 packs. That is about 19 boxes, or roughly $9,700 of sealed product, in pursuit of a $517 card. The EV in this guide uses that tier. The card database files Lugia with the other 25 Rare Ultra cards, with nothing to mark it as an alternate art, so Pullnomics keeps its own list of the four alternate arts and the eight full-art Trainers, taken from TCGplayer's product names and the cards' Trainer type and checked against the source's card counts. The alternate arts get the 1 in 168 rate, the Trainers the 1 in 99 rate, about 1 in 792 packs each, and the 14 full-art V cards share 1 in 48, about 1 in 672 each. Before September 20, 2026 the EV left those two tiers out and gave all 26 an equal share of the 1 in 48 rate, about 1 in 1,248 packs each, and counted nothing for the VMAX and VSTAR tier; on the same September 20, 2026 prices the pack EV came to about $3.16, where the method in this guide gives about $3.72. The Silver Tempest pull-rate page lists every tier.

Rayquaza VMAX TG20 has the same problem on a smaller scale. Its tier is 1 in 32 packs and holds 17 cards, the gallery's V, VMAX and Trainer cards, so with every card taken as equally likely that specific card is about 1 in 544 packs, about 15 boxes.

Who should open it and who should buy singles

The alternate-art Lugia V costs about $517 as a single and a booster box about $521, and the box is about a 1 in 19 shot.

Rayquaza VMAX TG20 is about $192, nearly half the cost of the gallery's twelve most valuable cards, at about 1 in 544 packs.

For a set builder, the $966 that every main-set card cost on September 27, 2026 would buy about 67 packs at the box price, which averages between two and three of the 26 Rare Ultras with those three tiers added.

A pack opened for fun holds about $3.72 of expected cards.

How to buy it cheaper

Each Silver Tempest card page and sealed product page, code cards aside, shows the TCGplayer market price and the price history and, unless that market is under $5 or, as of October 8, 2026, more than 10 percent above TCGplayer's highest listing, the price that counts as 12 percent below market and two eBay buttons; otherwise it has only the uncapped search. The first button opens eBay's own search results, limited to Buy It Now listings from US sellers, leaving out proxies, lots, code cards and look-alike products, sorted by price plus shipping and capped at 12 percent under market. The second drops the cap and keeps the other filters. Both are affiliate links. Since October 8, 2026, a page where TCGplayer's market is more than 25 percent above its middle listing is an exception: it gives no below-market figure and has only the uncapped search. 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.

The cap is on the item price, so you add shipping yourself. A listing is only worth calling below market when the landed price, item plus shipping, is at least 12 percent under: about $459 delivered for the booster box. An empty capped search means nothing is listed below market at that moment, so press the second button to see every current price, and use eBay's own "Save this search" so eBay emails you new matches.

Every card price on the site is a raw Near Mint price. Under the Deal Score method on the methodology page, a Near Mint Lugia V #186 qualifies near $455 landed. Since October 8, 2026 a Lightly Played copy, or one whose listing states no condition, gets no Deal Score, because the site has no sourced price for a played copy. A landed price under 10 percent of market, about $52 here, is treated as a mismatch or a scam. In the US, eBay's Authenticity Guarantee covers trading cards sold for $200 or more. At market price only Lugia V #186 clears that line, and Rayquaza VMAX TG20 sits just under it at about $192. For a card at this price, read how to spot fake Pokémon cards first.

Bottom line

Silver Tempest is one $517 card, one $192 gallery card and a long tail. A pack holds about $3.72 of expected cards and costs about $14.48 inside a booster box. About 35 percent of the EV comes from the Trainer Gallery and about 77 cents per pack from a Lugia that the published alternate-art rate puts at about 1 in 672 packs. Every single is on the Silver Tempest set page, and a card page's first eBay button opens a search that shows whether anything is listed below market today.