If there is one card you want, buying it is cheaper than chasing it. That is not a slogan — it is what the numbers say, and the gap is far wider than most people expect.
Last updated 7 October 2026.
On 7 October 2026 this site held an estimated cost-to-pull for 2,852 cards. For 2,324 of them we also had a current market price, so the two could be compared directly: what you would expect to spend opening packs until that specific card appears, against what it costs to simply buy it.
Not one of the 2,324 was cheaper to pull. Only two were within ten times. The median card cost 829 times more to chase than to buy.
That median deserves a second read. It does not mean chasing is a little worse. It means that for a typical card on this site, the money you would expect to spend opening packs for it would buy you that card eight hundred times over.
Averages invite the suspicion that a few absurd outliers are dragging them. So here is the opposite — every card where the gap is narrowest, out of all 2,324. This is opening at its most defensible:
| Card | Set | Cost to pull | Buy it for | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mega Charizard X ex | Phantasmal Flames | $4,320.89 | $662.41 | 6.5× |
| Lugia V (Alt Art) | Silver Tempest | $3,677.41 | $507.04 | 7.3× |
| Mew ex | Paldean Fates | $11,103.88 | $872.64 | 12.7× |
| Bulbasaur | Stellar Crown | $1,406.20 | $95.82 | 14.7× |
| Squirtle | Stellar Crown | $1,406.20 | $93.11 | 15.1× |
| Mega Darkrai ex | Pitch Black | $2,566.80 | $161.39 | 15.9× |
| Lugia | 30th Celebration | $3,434.48 | $203.24 | 16.9× |
| Magikarp | Paldea Evolved | $6,051.43 | $356.60 | 17.0× |
The single most favourable card in the catalogue still costs six and a half times more to chase than to buy. Nothing in the table is close to break-even, and these are the winners.
The figure is deliberately simple: the price of a pack divided by your odds of pulling that specific card. A card that appears in one pack in 500, from packs costing $5, has an expected cost to pull of $2,500.
Two choices in that calculation both favour opening, which matters when reading the numbers above:
So the gap is not an artefact of assuming someone buys expensive single packs. It is what you get after assuming they shop as well as possible.
It is also an *expectation*, not a bill. Pull the card in your first pack and it cost you $5. That is exactly the point: roughly half the time you would spend more than the figure shown, and the distribution has a long, ugly tail. A number you beat by getting lucky is still the number to plan against.
The usual intuition is that a chase card showing "1 in 83 packs" means spending about 83 packs. That rate is almost always for the tier, not the card.
Take a Special Illustration Rare at 1 in 83 in a set with six of them. One pack in 83 contains *a* Special Illustration Rare — but it is equally likely to be any of the six. Your odds on the one you actually want are 1 in 498. Six times the packs, six times the money, from the same published number.
This is why we show both figures on every card page: the tier rate, and the rate for that one exact card. The second is the one your wallet experiences, and it is the one almost nobody quotes.
Add the second effect and the picture is complete. Sealed product is priced against the *total* contents of a pack — every common, every uncommon, every reverse holo — while a single is priced against demand for that one card. You are buying a lottery ticket whose price reflects the whole prize pool, in order to win one specific prize.
It does not say opening packs is a mistake. It says opening packs as a way of acquiring one specific card is a mistake, which is a much narrower claim.
The honest counterargument is that you keep everything else. Cost-to-pull answers one question — what if this card is the thing I want — and deliberately ignores the rest of what falls out of the packs. That value is real, and it is a different number: pack expected value, which this site computes for every set and which is the right figure when you are opening for the contents rather than for a target.
Even then, expected value is usually well under what a pack costs. The two numbers are answering different questions and they happen to agree about the direction.
Opening still defends itself in cases this page cannot measure:
What the numbers rule out is the specific belief that chasing is the cheaper path to a card you have already decided you want. Across 2,324 cards, on the best day and the best product for each, it never once was.
Figures are from this site's own data on 7 October 2026 and move with the market — check the card's own page for today's numbers. This is information about prices and published odds, not financial or investment advice, and sealed product is not an investment product.