New drop: Pokémon Starter joins 49 live packs — and a €83.50 Flareon leads week 39

Week 39 in numbers

Quiet weeks are still useful weeks. Thirty-nine cards left the sealed pools and went into collectors' vault accounts over the last seven days, one new pack went live, and the top end of the One Piece market kept doing what it has done all quarter: drifting upward while everything under €50 stays flat. Below is the honest snapshot before we get into the new drop.

That works out to an average of €5.54 of market value per card opened — which is exactly what you would expect from a week dominated by Starter- and Core-tier openings rather than slab-heavy Elite packs. Averages like this are not a promise of anything; they are a description of what actually happened, pulled straight from the ledger of openings.

The new drop: Pokémon Starter

The headline this week is Pokémon Starter, which brings the live catalogue to 49 packs across Pokémon, Magic, One Piece, Lorcana, Dragon Ball, Star Wars and the cross-game Mystery line. Starter tiers exist for one reason: they let you see how the system works — sealed pool, published odds, recomputable draw certificate — without committing to a Premium or Elite price point.

The pool for this pack is published with an expected value of 100% of the pack price. That number deserves a proper explanation rather than a headline, so here it is.

What "100% expected value" actually means

Expected value is the average market value of every card in the sealed pool, weighted by its exact draw probability. At 100%, the maths says: if you could open this pack an infinite number of times, the average market value you receive would equal what you paid.

• It is an average, not an outcome. Most single openings land below the average, because a small number of high-value cards carry a large share of the total pool value.
• It is measured in market value, not store credit. Sell-back to store credit happens at our published buy-back rate, which sits below full market value — that spread is how the shop stays solvent.
• It moves. Card prices change; the EV figure is recalculated against current market data, and the pool is sealed and hashed before any pack in that run is sold.

If you want value certainty, buy the single. If you want the experience of opening plus a real card in a vault at the end of it, that is what a pack is for. We would rather write that sentence than a slogan.

Pull of the week: a raw NM Flareon

The biggest single card to come out of a pack this week was a Jungle Flareon in raw near-mint, valued at €83.50. Not a record, not a headline-grabber — but a genuinely lovely card, and a good example of what the raw side of the catalogue quietly holds.

Raw Jungle holos in honest NM condition are the kind of card that behaves well over time: a recognisable set, a character with permanent demand, and a condition tier that leaves grading on the table as an option rather than a sunk decision. The collector who pulled it can leave it in the insured vault, request shipping, or sell it back for euro store credit at any point.

The rest of the week's openings

Here is the honest tail behind that Flareon. A Beautifly PSA 9 from the Japanese M2A-Mega Dream EX set at €20.24 and a raw Nidoqueen from Jungle at €18.74 were the next two in line; after that the week settles into single-digit trainers and commons, which is exactly what a 39-card sample of Starter-tier openings looks like.

Flareon (Jungle)€83.50 · RAW NMBeautifly (M2A-Mega Dream EX)€20.24 · PSA 9Nidoqueen (Jungle)€18.74 · RAW NMFloat Stone (Plasma Freeze)€7.85 · RAW NMButterfree (HeartGold & SoulSilver)€7.59 · RAW NMRapid Strike Urshifu VMAX€3.01 · RAW NM

We publish the small cards alongside the big one deliberately. A feed that only shows the top card of the week tells you nothing about what an average opening looks like — and the average is the part you should be planning around.

Focus game: One Piece and the manga-rare ceiling

One Piece remains the most top-heavy game in our 357,310-card price index. The ten most valuable One Piece cards we track are almost entirely manga rares and alternate arts, and seven of the ten are Luffy.

How to read a ceiling like this

The gap between #1 at €18,763.76 and #10 at €5,400.00 is smaller than it looks for a game this young — the One Piece top end is dense rather than spiky. Practically, that means two things for collectors: tournament promos and manga rares hold the value, and character concentration is a real risk. If seven of your ten most valuable cards are the same character, your portfolio moves with that character's popularity.

Graded market movers

Outside the pools, these are the graded sales that moved our index this week:

1. 2002 Pokémon Japanese e-Card Promo #014/P Charizard Holo PSA 10 — €20,240.00
2. 2025 One Piece Simplified Chinese, One Piece Day Vol.2 Monkey D. Luffy PSA 10 — €253.00
3. 2025 One Piece Japanese V Jump January 2026 #115 Boa Hancock PSA 10 — €207.00
4. 2026 MTG Secret Lair Drop #7094 Academy Manufactor PSA 10 — €165.60
5. 2025 Pokémon Japanese M-P Promo McDonald's #020 Pikachu PSA 10 — €91.95
6. 2026 Pokémon MEP EN-ME Black Star Promo #038 Charmander PSA 9 — €76.35

The Charizard is the outlier by two orders of magnitude, but the more interesting signal is the Charmander PSA 9 at €76.35 — modern black star promos in 9 are starting to hold value that used to be reserved for 10s, which narrows the grading gamble that collectors take when submitting fresh cards.

Vault, credit or doorstep

Whatever comes out of a pack, the three options are the same and always available: leave it in the insured vault at no extra cost, sell it back for euro store credit at the published rate, or request shipping and have it in your hands. Every opening carries a draw certificate you can recompute against the sealed pool hash, so the outcome is verifiable after the fact — not something you have to take on trust.

See you next week with the week 40 numbers, good or bad.