ProfPokeQuant

I think I just found something the Pokémon card market hasn't caught onto yet. Some booster packs now have a calculated expected return of over 200%. Here's the math. A few months ago, I wrote a post about calculating the expected value of opening every Pokémon booster pack using pull rates, recent sales, and PSA grading data. One set stood out: Fates Collide. At the time, a pack cost about $44, and its contents were worth $36.47 on average if you sold or graded each hit optimally. An 83% expected return. Better than a lottery ticket, but still a losing proposition. But something has changed. Graded Pokémon card prices have skyrocketed, while sealed pack prices haven't kept up. Today, the math looks completely different: • Pack price: $44.88 • Expected value: $107.57 • Expected return: 240% So where does all that EV come from? Take Mew Holo #29. A PSA 10 is now worth around $3,000, up 743% in the past year. But unlike the ultra-rare chase cards, you pull Mew about once every 34 packs. Obviously, not every copy gets a PSA 10. So I weight each possible grade by its historical PSA frequency, subtract grading costs, and account for the probability of pulling the card. The result? Mew alone contributes $18.16 of EV to every Fates Collide pack. Lugia BREAK adds another $9.46. I repeat this process for every card in the set. Interestingly, despite the 240% expected return, there's still a 76% chance of getting back less than 25% of your money. Most packs lose money. A handful of enormous hits pull the average way up. And Fates Collide isn't alone anymore. Several other sets now have positive modeled EV too. The prices of individual graded cards are moving faster than the sealed packs containing them. I've made the entire pack EV tool free on Cardboard Terminal if you want to check it out: cardboardterminal.app/packs