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

Verdict

Only if the opening itself is the point. A Silver Tempest booster box costs about $519 as of mid-September 2026 and should be expected to return about $115 in raw card value, roughly 22 cents per dollar. 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 $528. It is worth more than half of the main set and costs almost exactly what a box does, while a box gives you, on a generous assumption, about a 1 in 35 chance of pulling it. If you want the Lugia, buy the Lugia. For packs, the Build & Battle Stadium is cheapest at about $13.40 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.

The median main-set card sits at about 35 cents. Thirteen cards clear $10 and exactly one clears $50. One of each main-set card costs about $1,006 at market.

Lugia V #186 is about 52 percent of that by itself. By group, the 26 Rare Ultra cards hold about $714, the Rare Rainbows about $151 and the Rare Secrets about $43, leaving about $98 for the remaining 169 cards. The six Lugia cards together, at about $633, are 63 percent of the main set.

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 $3.19 in every product, so the rows on the sealed EV board differ only in what each pack costs you.

At about $14.42 per pack the booster box has an EV ratio of about 0.22, and a net EV of about $76 after fees and shipping. A typical booster box on the board returns roughly 30 to 35 cents per dollar, so this box is below typical.

The best row is the Build & Battle Stadium: about $147 for 11 packs and a ratio of about 0.24. The Elite Trainer Box (about $162, or $18 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 0.17, and the Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Box, about $411 for 11 packs, is lowest at about 0.09.

Of that $3.19, average prices and pull rates put Rare Ultra at about 57 cents per pack, Rare Holo V at about 25 cents, Rare Rainbow and Rare Secret at about 20 cents between them and Radiant Rare at about 8 cents. That is about $1.10 from the main set's hit tiers, 42 cents of it from Lugia V #186 alone. On the main set only, the method gives about $1.86 per pack, the extra 76 cents being the baseline for the common, uncommon and rare slots. The Trainer Gallery adds about $1.33: roughly 42 percent of the pack, and about three 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 15 percent, but it counts only the rainbow, gold secret and gold gallery VMAX tiers, and neither of the set's two expensive cards is in them.

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 $528, Lugia VSTAR #202 at about $40, Unown V #177 at about $31 and Regidrago V #184 at about $28. Four are on the Trainer Gallery's list: Rayquaza VMAX TG20 at about $195, Blaziken VMAX TG15 at about $35, the gold Rayquaza VMAX TG29 at about $31.50 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 $14.61 and the standard full-art #185 about $17.24, against about $528 for #186. Averages hide this: Rare Ultra cards average about $27.48, but without the Lugia the other 25 average about $7.46.

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 Rare Ultra. About 47 percent of boxes contain no Rare Ultra. 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.

Published Sword & Shield rates group cards by their printed rarity, and alternate arts have no published rate of their own. Lugia V #186 is inside the Rare Ultra group, and the EV treats it as equally likely as each of the other 25 cards there. That makes the real odds of this one alternate art much longer than the rarity's headline rate. At 1 in 48 packs for the group, a specific Rare Ultra is about 1 in 1,248 packs on the equal assumption. That is about 35 boxes, or roughly $18,000 of sealed product, in pursuit of a $528 card. If the alternate art is scarcer than that, the $3.19 is too kind.

Rayquaza VMAX TG20 has the same problem on a smaller scale. Its tier is 1 in 32 packs and holds at least ten V and VMAX cards plus the gallery's Trainer cards, so the odds of that specific card are longer than 1 in 320 packs, about nine boxes.

Who should open it and who should buy singles

Anyone who wants the alternate-art Lugia V should buy it as a single. The card and the box cost about the same, and the box is about a 1 in 35 shot on the favorable assumption.

The same goes for Rayquaza VMAX TG20, which is nearly half the cost of the gallery's twelve most valuable cards.

Set builders should buy singles as well. The $1,006 that buys every main-set card would buy about 70 packs at the box price, which averages between one and two of the 26 Rare Ultras.

If you open packs for fun, expect about $3.19 of cards from each.

How to buy it cheaper

Each Silver Tempest card page and sealed product page shows the TCGplayer market price, the price history, the price that counts as 12 percent below market, and two eBay buttons. 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. The block below holds eBay search buttons for Silver Tempest's main sealed products, each capped at that product's below-market price.

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 $457 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 $465 landed, and a Lightly Played copy, valued at 85 percent of market, near $395. A landed price under 10 percent of market, about $53 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 $195. For a card at this price, read how to spot fake Pokémon cards first.

Bottom line

Silver Tempest is one $528 card, one $195 gallery card and a long tail. A pack holds about $3.19 of expected cards and costs about $14.42 inside a booster box. About 42 percent of the EV comes from the Trainer Gallery and about 42 cents per pack from a Lugia that, even on the generous assumption, turns up once in about 1,248 packs. The practical route is the Silver Tempest set page: choose the single you are after, and its first eBay button opens a search that shows whether anything is listed below market today.