Is Temporal Forces worth opening? Box EV, pull rates, chase cards

Verdict

Temporal Forces has the highest booster box EV ratio on the Pullnomics board at October 21, 2026 prices, and the box still holds less raw card value than it costs. As of October 21, 2026 a box sells for about $312 and holds about $160 of expected raw card value, a ratio of roughly 0.51. At those prices no other booster box we track holds more raw card value per dollar of sealed price, and a typical box holds 30 to 35 cents. Only about 17 percent of the hit value comes from the rarest tiers, so the average is built from cards you will actually pull, not one lottery card. The most expensive single, Gastly at about $89, costs less than a third of a box.

What Temporal Forces is

Temporal Forces released on March 22, 2024 as a main expansion in the Scarlet & Violet series (set code TEF). The printed checklist is 162 cards and the full set runs to 218 with the secret rares. The headline Pokémon are Raging Bolt ex, Gouging Fire ex, Walking Wake ex, Iron Crown ex, Iron Leaves ex and Gengar ex. The hit tiers are the usual Scarlet & Violet ones plus one that earlier sets such as Obsidian Flames lack: seven ACE SPEC Rares.

Sealed, there is a 36-pack booster box, two nine-pack Elite Trainer Boxes (Iron Leaves ex and Walking Wake), 11-pack Pokémon Center versions of both, a six-pack booster bundle, a four-pack Build & Battle Box, loose packs, art bundles and blisters. Temporal Forces was released in March 2024, so part of every sealed price is a premium for the sealed item itself.

The numbers

Here are the live figures from the Temporal Forces set page.

All 218 cards carry a TCGplayer market price. As of October 21, 2026, the median is about 19 cents, normal for a modern set. An earlier version of this page gave the median as about 30 cents and one of every card as about $1,253, figures that valued each card at its dearest printing rather than its standard one. The depth above it is not normal: 35 cards are worth $10 or more and five clear $50, in a set where no card reaches $100. Obsidian Flames, a slightly larger set, has 11 and one.

Recomputed on October 21, 2026, one of every card at market adds up to about $1,140, a little over three and a half booster boxes. The 22 Illustration Rares hold about 46 percent of that and the 10 Special Illustration Rares about 32 percent, while the most valuable card is under 8 percent.

Sealed EV by product

Expected value is what a product's cards are worth on average at raw market prices, and how sealed EV works has the arithmetic. This is the live table, recomputed daily.

Every pack carries about $4.45 of expected value, so products differ only in price per pack. The booster box at about $312 is about $8.67 a pack and a ratio of about 0.51, the top booster box on the sealed EV board at October 21, 2026 prices. The four-pack art bundle at about $40 (0.45), the three-pack blisters at about $31 (0.43) and loose packs at about $10.46 (0.43) come next.

The Iron Leaves ex Elite Trainer Box is about $127 for nine packs, about $14.08 a pack, for 0.32, and the Walking Wake version is about $145 and 0.28. Both are high for an ETB, where 0.15 to 0.20 is typical. The booster bundle is the surprise: about $88 for six packs is about $14.73 a pack, more than the Iron Leaves ETB charges, for 0.30. The lowest ratios in the table belong to the Pokémon Center ETBs (about $197 and $210 for 11 packs, about 0.25 and 0.23) and the Togekiss premium checklane blister (about $20 for one pack, 0.22). Cases carry an EV that the table does not rank: the 144-pack sleeved booster case, at about $1,219, comes to about $8.47 a pack and 0.53.

Break-even for the box is its gross EV, about $160. Net EV, which takes off a 15 percent marketplace fee plus $1 of shipping for each card at $1 or more, is about $109, a little over a third of the box price.

Chase share is the other half of the story: the portion of hit EV that comes from the rarest tiers, here Special Illustration Rares and Hyper Rares. For Temporal Forces it is about 17 percent, against about 48 percent for Pitch Black and about 49 for Destined Rivals. An average that leans on a 1 in 75 pull is one most boxes never reach: you hit the big card or finish well under it. When 83 percent of hit value comes from tiers you hit about two to six times per box, a typical box lands much closer to the average.

Chase cards

These are the most valuable cards at current TCGplayer market prices.

The top card is neither an ex nor a Special Illustration Rare. Gastly #177, an Illustration Rare illustrated by Mousho, leads at about $89. Then come the Special Illustration Rare Raging Bolt ex #208 at about $61, the Ultra Rare Gengar ex #193 at about $52, the Illustration Rare Sawsbuck #166 at about $51 and the Special Illustration Rare Gouging Fire ex at about $50, the five cards above $50. Iron Crown ex at about $49 and Morty's Conviction at about $48 sit just under.

Seven of the 15 most valuable cards are Illustration Rares, a rarity you hit about once in 12.5 packs. The 22 average about $24: the top seven run from about $29 (Arbok) up to Gastly, and the other 15 average roughly $14. The 10 Special Illustration Rares average about $36, not much more.

Below that, the 18 Ultra Rares average about $6, or about $3 without Gengar ex, and the seven ACE SPEC Rares about $6. The six Hyper Rares average about $11, less than a third of the Special Illustration Rare average, so the hardest pull adds the least to pack EV, about 8 cents a pack.

Pull rates

Temporal Forces has its own measured rates: each figure in the table is the midpoint of published pack-opening counts for this set, not an era average.

A 36-pack box averages about six Double Rares, three Illustration Rares, two or three Ultra Rares and two ACE SPEC Rares. The Special Illustration Rare, at 1 in 74.5 packs, is roughly one every two boxes: about 39 percent of boxes contain at least one and about six in ten contain none. The Hyper Rare, at 1 in 139, shows up in fewer than one box in four.

In dollars, at about $8.67 a pack you open about $646 of packs per Special Illustration Rare, a card worth about $36 on average. The Illustration Rare slot contributes about $1.92 of the $4.45 pack EV, against about 48 cents from the Special Illustration Rare slot and 8 cents from the Hyper Rare slot, so a box that misses both rare tiers gives up only about $20 of its $160 average. Results still vary with which Illustration Rares you pull.

If the 22 Illustration Rares are printed evenly, which the opening counts neither confirm nor rule out, a specific one such as Gastly appears about once in 275 packs, between seven and eight boxes. A particular Special Illustration Rare would be about 1 in 745 packs, more than 20 boxes.

Who should open it and who should buy singles

For opening packs: among the products in the EV table, the booster box has the lowest price per pack, about $8.67, ahead of the four-pack art bundle at about $9.98 and the three-pack blisters at about $10.34. A $312 box holds about $160 of cards on average.

For one card: Gastly is about $89 as a single and would take seven or eight boxes to pull on average, about $2,400 of sealed product. Every Special Illustration Rare is under $65.

For the full set: recomputed on October 21, 2026, all 218 cards total about $1,140 as singles, and four boxes average about two of the 10 Special Illustration Rares.

For players: the regular ex cards are Double Rares averaging about $1.20 and the ACE SPEC Rares average about $6 as singles. At 1 in 20 packs, one ACE SPEC Rare takes about $173 of box packs on average.

How to buy it cheaper

Open any card or sealed product page from the set page. It gives the TCGplayer market price and its history, the price that sits 12 percent under market, and two eBay buttons (affiliate links), except when the market is under $5, more than 10 percent above the highest TCGplayer listing, or more than 25 percent above the middle one: then it gives no below-market price and only the uncapped button. The first sends you to eBay's own search results, narrowed to Buy It Now listings from US sellers and sorted by price plus shipping, with proxies, lots, code cards and look-alike products filtered out and the price capped at 12 percent under market. The second drops the cap. 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.

If a capped search comes back empty, no seller has it listed under market right now. The uncapped button shows every current price, and eBay's own "Save this search" on that page means eBay emails new matches.

The cap looks only at the item price, so add shipping yourself. The site's rule of thumb: a listing counts as below market only when item plus shipping, the landed price, comes in at least 12 percent under the market price. For the booster box at about $312 that means about $275 landed. Seller "was $X" discounts count for nothing.

For singles, condition decides whether a listing is scored. Site prices are raw Near Mint, and a Near Mint Gastly at about $89 has to land near $78 to count. Since October 8, 2026 the Deal Score method scores only a card listing stated as Near Mint, so a Lightly Played or Moderately Played copy, or one that states no condition, gets no score. The methodology page sets out each step, and how to buy Pokémon cards on eBay goes deeper.

Bottom line

Temporal Forces has the highest booster box EV ratio on the board at October 21, 2026 prices, about 0.51, and one of the lowest chase shares among Scarlet & Violet boxes, about 17 percent. An average box holds about $160 of raw card value for about $312, and an ordinary box has a fair chance of landing near that, because the money sits in 22 Illustration Rares, not one chase card. That is still about 51 cents of raw card value per dollar of sealed price. Among the products in the EV table the booster box has the lowest price per pack, about $8.67, while the Pokémon Center ETBs (about 0.25 and 0.23) and the premium checklane blisters (0.22 and 0.26) have the lowest ratios. For Gastly or another specific card, the eBay buttons are on its card page. Prices move daily, and the sealed EV board has today's figures.