Is Stellar Crown worth opening? Box EV, pull rates and top cards

Verdict

Stellar Crown is a small set with a box ratio above the board's typical range and a thin top end. As of October 21, 2026 a booster box costs about $300 and holds about $123 of expected raw card value, a ratio of about 0.41 against the 30 to 35 cents of raw card value per dollar that a typical box holds. Chase share is low, about 17 percent, with Special Illustration Rares at about 1 in 90 packs and modestly priced. What carries the set is a pair of Illustration Rares, Squirtle at about $96 and Bulbasaur at about $86. One of every card costs about $554, a little under the price of two booster boxes. Among the three main products the booster box has the lowest price per pack, about $8.35, and the Elite Trainer Box the highest, about $17.78, for a ratio of about 0.19.

What Stellar Crown is

Stellar Crown released on September 13, 2024 as the seventh main expansion of the Scarlet & Violet series (set code SCR). The printed checklist is 142 cards and the full list is 175, small next to the 279 of Paldea Evolved from the same series. The 33 cards numbered above the printed total are 13 Illustration Rares, 11 Ultra Rares, 6 Special Illustration Rares and 3 Hyper Rares. Under them are 14 Double Rares, 3 ACE SPEC Rares and 125 commons, uncommons and rares.

The sealed line-up on the set page includes a 36-pack booster box, an 18-pack half booster box, a nine-pack Elite Trainer Box and an 11-pack Pokémon Center version, a six-pack booster bundle, a four-pack Build & Battle Box, blisters, and loose and sleeved packs. Stellar Crown was released in September 2024, and part of its sealed price is a premium for the sealed item itself, not for its contents.

The numbers

This is the live snapshot of card prices across the set.

All 175 cards carry a TCGplayer market price. As of October 21, 2026, the median is about 20 cents. An earlier version of this page gave the median as about 26 cents and one of every card as about $610, figures that valued each card at its dearest printing rather than its standard one. Only 11 cards clear $10, and only three clear $50: Squirtle, Bulbasaur and the Dachsbun ex Special Illustration Rare. Those three are worth about $252 together, about 46 percent of the set's summed value.

One of every card at market costs about $554, a little under the price of two booster boxes, which hold about $246 of expected card value between them. Of that $554, the 13 Illustration Rares and 6 Special Illustration Rares hold about $456, roughly 82 percent, and the other 156 cards about $97.

Sealed EV by product

Expected value is what the cards in a product are worth on average at today's raw market prices, and the methodology page sets out how it is built. Here is the live table for Stellar Crown.

Each pack holds about $3.42 of expected value whatever it comes in, so the comparison is price per pack. The booster box at about $300 is about $8.35 per pack with an EV ratio of about 0.41, the highest in the table. Loose booster packs at about $10.86 come in at about 0.31, and the booster bundle, about $70 for six packs or about $11.75 each, at 0.29. On the wider sealed EV board a typical bundle holds a little under 30 cents of raw card value per dollar, so this bundle sits in the typical range while the box sits above the 30 to 35 cents of a typical box.

The half booster box costs about $246 for 18 packs, about $13.68 each and a ratio of 0.25, when a full box is only about $54 more for twice the packs. The Elite Trainer Box costs about $160 for nine packs, about $17.78 each, for a ratio of 0.19, the lowest of the three main products. The lowest ratio in the table belongs to the Miraidon premium checklane blister: about $21 for one pack, about 0.16. The Sleeved Booster Master Carton, a bulk carton at about $1,152, carries no pack count on the site and therefore no EV. The two sealed cases do carry one that the table does not rank: the booster box case, six boxes or 216 packs at about $1,866, has a ratio of about 0.40, and the Elite Trainer Box case, ten boxes or 90 packs at about $1,490, about 0.21.

Net EV for the booster box, after a 15 percent marketplace fee and $1 of shipping per card worth $1 or more, is about $79, or about 26 cents per dollar. Chase share is about 17 percent: the Special Illustration Rare slot adds only about 35 cents to each pack and the Hyper Rare slot about 6 cents, while the Illustration Rare slot adds about $1.57, nearly half of the pack's entire EV.

That low chase share is only half the story. Squirtle and Bulbasaur hold about two thirds of their tier's value, about $1.08 of every pack's $3.42. Remove them from the average and a box holds about $84 of cards. About two boxes in three contain neither starter, so that lower figure is what most boxes look like.

Chase cards

These are the most valuable Stellar Crown cards at today's market prices.

The top card is an Illustration Rare: Squirtle #148 at about $96, with Bulbasaur #143 second at about $86. Third is the Dachsbun ex #169 Special Illustration Rare at about $70, then prices step down: Hydrapple ex #167 at about $37, Terapagos ex #170 at about $34 and Galvantula ex #168 at about $19.

The six Special Illustration Rares average about $32. The 13 Illustration Rares average about $20, but only about $8 without the two starters. Ultra Rares average about $3, Hyper Rares about $8, Double Rares about $1.16 and ACE SPEC Rares about 38 cents. Set the three cards over $50 aside and the average hit, whether Ultra Rare, Hyper Rare or Illustration Rare, is worth $3 to $8.

Pull rates

Stellar Crown has its own published rates: the table uses midpoints of published pack-opening counts for this set, not an era default. Pull rates by set shows how they compare.

A 36-pack box averages just under three Illustration Rares and two or three Ultra Rares. About one pack in five has something rarer than a Double Rare, counting the 1 in 20 ACE SPEC Rares, so virtually every box has one, against about 86 percent of Elite Trainer Boxes and 73 percent of bundles.

Special Illustration Rares land about once in 90 packs, a much longer shot than the 1 in 33.5 measured for Paldea Evolved: about one box in three contains one, and a nine-pack Elite Trainer Box has about a 10 percent chance.

In dollars, at about $8.35 per pack you spend about $751 on packs for each Special Illustration Rare, and the average one is worth about $32. Squirtle, one of 13 Illustration Rares at 1 in 13, is about 1 in 169 packs if the tier is printed evenly: nearly five boxes, around $1,410 of sealed product, for a card that costs about $96. The published counts do not confirm even printing, so treat this as scale, not exact odds.

Who should open it and who should buy singles

For players, the comparison is a single card against a pack: the Double Rares, ACE SPEC Rares and Ultra Rares average about $1.16, 38 cents and $3 a card, all far less than the price of one pack.

For set collectors, two boxes, about $601, cost about $47 more than one of every card bought as singles, about $554, and would typically hold five or six Illustration Rares and quite possibly none of the six Special Illustration Rares.

For Squirtle or Bulbasaur, the two cards together cost about $182 as singles, less than two thirds of the price of one booster box, and a box has only about a one in three chance of holding either.

For opening packs, the box has the lowest price per pack in the line-up, about $8.35, against about $11.75 in a bundle and about $17.78 in an Elite Trainer Box. A box brings plenty of small hits, about one pack in five, and the downside is a box with nothing above $10 in it. Booster box vs ETB vs bundle compares the three formats on price per pack.

How to buy it cheaper

The site's working rule is that "below market" means a landed price, item plus shipping, at least 12 percent under the market price, and that a seller's "was $X" claim means nothing. Every Stellar Crown card page and sealed product page, code cards aside, shows the TCGplayer market price, its price history, the price 12 percent below market, and two eBay buttons, except that, as of October 8, 2026, a page whose market price is under $5, more than 10 percent above the highest TCGplayer listing or more than 25 percent above the middle one shows no below-market price and only the uncapped button. One opens eBay's own search results: Buy It Now listings from US sellers only, with proxies, lots, code cards and look-alike products excluded, sorted by price plus shipping, and capped at 12 percent under market. The other runs the identical search with no price cap. These buttons are affiliate links. 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.

For the booster box, market is about $300 and the below-market line is about $264. That cap is on the item price only, so add the shipping yourself. A capped search on the booster box page that comes back empty means no seller is under that line today. The uncapped button then shows the real spread of asking prices, and saving that search with eBay's own "Save this search" option means eBay emails new matches.

Every card price on the site is raw Near Mint, and since October 8, 2026, the Deal Score method scores only a card listing whose condition is stated as Near Mint: a Lightly Played Squirtle, or a listing that states no condition, gets no Deal Score, because the site has no sourced price for a played copy. Under the method a listing cannot qualify when the card's market price is under $5, which rules out most of this set, so for cheap cards the shipping charge matters more than the sticker price. The methodology page walks through every step.

Bottom line

Stellar Crown's booster box holds about 41 cents of raw card value per dollar of sealed price, above the 30 to 35 cents of a typical box on the board, inside a set where only 11 cards are worth $10 or more as of October 21, 2026. A $300 box holds about $123 of cards on average, about $84 if neither Squirtle nor Bulbasaur turns up, and a Special Illustration Rare in roughly one box in three. The Elite Trainer Box and the half box sit lower, at ratios of about 0.19 and 0.25, and Squirtle and Bulbasaur together cost about $182 as singles, less than two thirds of one box. Each card's page is linked from the set page, and its capped eBay button, where the page has one, tells you whether a copy is listed under the 12 percent line.