Is Surging Sparks worth opening? Booster box EV and pull rates

Verdict

Surging Sparks is a fun set with one famous card, and the numbers reflect that. As of September 20, 2026, a booster box sells for about $305 and holds about $101 of expected raw card value, an EV ratio of about 0.33. That is inside the 30 to 35 cents of raw card value per dollar that a typical booster box holds, but the cost per pack (about $8.47 from a box) is well above the roughly $5.16 a pack of a Pitch Black box on the same date. No Surging Sparks product holds its price in raw card value: ratios run from about 0.07 for a premium checklane blister to about 0.34 for a loose pack. Close to half of the set's card value sits in three Special Illustration Rares, and the most expensive of them, the Pikachu ex at about $286, costs less as a single than one booster box.

What Surging Sparks is

Surging Sparks (set page) released on November 8, 2024 as a main Scarlet & Violet expansion. The printed set is 191 cards and the full list, with secret rares, runs to 252. It is best known for the Special Illustration Rare Pikachu ex #238, which has become the card most people mean when they say "the Surging Sparks Pikachu," and it also carries Latias ex, Milotic ex and a deep run of Illustration Rares. Here is where the set stands today.

The median card is worth about 16 cents as of September 27, 2026. An earlier version of this page gave the median as about 28 cents, a figure that valued each card at its dearest printing rather than its standard one. Only around 17 cards clear $10 and just 4 clear $50, so the set is bulk with a thin top end.

The chase cards and where the value sits

These are the most valuable cards in the set at today's TCGplayer market prices.

Pikachu ex #238 at about $286 is worth roughly 23 percent of the combined market value of all 252 cards. Add Latias ex #239 at about $186 and Milotic ex #237 at about $124, and three cards account for close to half the set's value. The gold Pikachu ex #247 Hyper Rare, at about $83, is the only non-SIR above $50.

The 11 Special Illustration Rares average about $71 and together make up roughly 62 percent of the set's value. Below them the drop is steep but not to zero. The 23 Illustration Rares average about $9, led by Latios #203 near $36 and Ceruledge #197 near $25, and as a group they hold about 16 percent of the set's value. The 21 Ultra Rares average about $3.50 (Pikachu ex #219 at around $31 is the exception), Double Rares about $1.31 and ACE SPECs about $1.37.

That structure matters for how the set opens: it is less all-or-nothing than Prismatic Evolutions, because an Illustration Rare is a small consolation rather than nothing, but most of the money is still in a handful of ex cards.

Pull rates

Published pull-rate counts for Surging Sparks, using midpoints of the reported ranges, look like this.

The source lists no rate for this set's Double Rares and ACE SPEC Rares, so the site uses the Scarlet & Violet era averages for them, 1 in 6 packs and 1 in 20 packs, and the block labels those rows "era average". The Surging Sparks pull-rate page has the full tier list.

Translate those into a 36-pack booster box:

• Double Rares at the era average of 1 in 6: about 6 per box.
• Illustration Rares at 1 in 13 packs: about 2.8 per box.
• Ultra Rares at 1 in 15: about 2.4 per box.
• ACE SPEC Rares at the era average of 1 in 20: about 1.8 per box.
• Special Illustration Rares at 1 in 85: about 0.42 per box. The chance a box contains at least one is 1 minus (84/85) to the 36th power, roughly 35 percent. Put another way, about two boxes in three have no SIR at all.
• Hyper Rares at 1 in 189: about 0.19 per box, or roughly a 17 percent chance of at least one.

A 9-pack Elite Trainer Box has about a 10 percent chance of an SIR. And the SIR you pull is not necessarily the Pikachu. If the 11 SIRs were printed evenly, that one card would appear about once every 935 packs, which is about 26 boxes; the odds of it showing up in any given box are under 4 percent. The even-print assumption is not something the pack-opening datasets confirm, but the scale is right.

Across all the tiers above Double Rare, ACE SPECs included, about 19.5 percent of packs contain a hit, so a box averages about seven hit packs. A 9-pack Elite Trainer Box has about an 86 percent chance of at least one.

Sealed EV: what the products are worth

Pullnomics computes a pack's expected value by multiplying each rarity's odds by the average market price of that rarity in the set and adding a small baseline for the guaranteed slots. Multiplying by the pack count gives each product's EV. As of September 20, 2026, a Surging Sparks pack comes to about $2.80. The table is live and refreshes daily.

How to read it for this set:

• EV ratio is gross EV divided by the product's market price. The booster box, at about $305 with an EV near $101, comes out around 0.33. A loose pack at about $8.29 is a little higher at roughly 0.34 because loose packs are cheaper per pack than any box product here. The retail booster bundle, about $61 for six packs, is about 0.27. The Elite Trainer Box, about $126 for nine packs, is about 0.20, and the Pokémon Center version at about $271 is about 0.11. The three-pack blisters come in at about 0.18 to 0.19, and the premium checklane blisters are the lowest in the set at about 0.07 to 0.09.
• Net EV is what you would clear selling every card, after a 15 percent marketplace fee and $1 shipping per card worth $1 or more, with sub-$1 cards counted as bulk. A box nets about $64 against a price of about $305. A pack nets about $1.78.
• Chase share is the fraction of hit EV coming from SIRs and Hyper Rares, and here it is about 44 percent. That is a much lower concentration than Prismatic Evolutions (about 88 percent), because Illustration Rares at 1 in 13 packs and $9 on average contribute roughly 70 cents of the per-pack EV, almost as much as the SIR slot's roughly 84 cents. Ultra Rares add about 24 cents and Hyper Rares about 11 cents. Double Rares and ACE SPECs, at the era averages, add about 22 cents and about 7 cents, and the baseline for the non-hit slots makes up the remaining 65 cents or so. Surging Sparks is a set where the mid-tier pulls are real, which makes it steadier to open even though the ceiling is lower.

For perspective, on September 20, 2026 a Pitch Black box was about $186 at TCGplayer market, or about $5.16 a pack, with an EV ratio near 0.44. Surging Sparks costs about $8.47 a pack at a 0.33 ratio; the premium is for the set's age and the Pikachu, not for more card value per dollar.

Who should open it

The set fits a collector who likes the Scarlet & Violet Illustration Rare style and wants a shot at the Pikachu or Latias. For that purpose the box and loose packs carry the lowest price per pack, about $8.47 and about $8.29, against about $14.50 to $15.75 in a three-pack blister. A box gives you a roughly one-in-three chance at an SIR and a near-certain handful of Illustration Rares and Ultra Rares.

For playables, the comparison is with singles. The average Ultra Rare is about $3.50 and the average ACE SPEC about $1.37 as singles. An Ultra Rare arrives about once in 15 packs and an ACE SPEC about once in 20 at the era average, which is about $124 and about $166 of loose packs at $8.29 each.

Pikachu ex #238 specifically costs about $286 as a single, less than a single box and far less than the roughly 26 boxes, about $7,900 at the September 20, 2026 box price, that it takes on average to pull one.

The Elite Trainer Box costs about $14.03 per pack, about 66 percent more per pack than a box; the difference is the price of the sleeves, dice and promo.

How to buy it cheaper

Deal Score, documented on the methodology page, is a check you can apply to any eBay listing yourself: add the item price and shipping to get the landed price, compare that to the TCGplayer market price, and treat the listing as a deal only if it comes in at least 12 percent below market after shipping and, for a single card, its condition is stated as Near Mint. The card and sealed product pages linked from the Surging Sparks set page do the first half of that work. Each one shows the market price and the price that counts as 12 percent below it (none when the market is under $5, more than 10 percent above the highest TCGplayer listing, or more than 25 percent above the middle one), with buttons that open eBay's own search results filtered to Buy It Now listings from US sellers, junk such as proxies and code cards excluded, sorted by price plus shipping. 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.

Some notes for this set:

• Compare sealed products by price per pack. At September 20, 2026 market prices: box about $8.47, loose pack about $8.29, bundle about $10.24, ETB about $14.03, three-pack blister about $14.50 to $15.75. A discounted ETB can still cost more per pack than a box.
• A sealed listing well under the market price is a red flag rather than a saving. The Deal Score method leaves opened, resealed and repackaged product out entirely.
• For singles, the market price is a Near Mint price, and since October 8, 2026, the Deal Score method scores only a card listing whose condition is stated as Near Mint: a played copy, or a listing that states no condition, gets no score. A cheap Pikachu is usually a played Pikachu.
• Open the eBay button on the booster box page, or on the page of the card you want, such as Pikachu ex #238. If the capped search comes back empty, nothing is listed below market at that moment: the second button shows every current price, and eBay's own "Save this search" on that results page makes eBay email new matches. The cap on that button applies to the item price, so check the shipping line before you buy.

Bottom line

Surging Sparks spreads its pack value more evenly than a chase-heavy set like Prismatic Evolutions, thanks to a deep Illustration Rare roster, but the box price is about three times the raw card value inside. A box of about $305 holds about $101 of raw card value, with an SIR in roughly one box in three and the Pikachu in perhaps one box in 26. Per pack, the box costs about $8.47, a loose pack about $8.29 and the ETB about $14.03, and Pikachu ex #238 as a single costs less than one box. The live Sealed EV board shows the current ratio for every product. The pull rates by set guide shows how these odds compare to every other recent set, and booster box vs ETB vs bundle covers the product formats in general.