Should You Buy a Pokémon Elite Trainer Box?
I mean, yeah, they’re awesome. But what are you actually getting for your money?
About a year ago, I started playing the Pokémon Trading Card Game competitively. Although Pokémon is one of the cheapest trading card games to keep up with — the deck I’m currently competing with cost me about $30 — it’s still a hobby you can sink endless amounts of money into if you’re not careful. One of the best ways to manage your spending is to pick a financially-responsible amount that you can spend on each set in advance and stick to it. If that sounds familiar, good: It’s just basic budgeting.
When I was creating my budget for Pokémon, I settled on buying just one Elite Trainer Box (ETB) for every new set of cards. (For those who don’t know, new sets generally come out every 2–3 months.) I don’t collect the cards, so I didn’t feel the need to buy dozens of booster packs for every set release. A single ETB would give me the fun of opening up a new set, and I could use the money I didn’t spend on additional packs to buy the cards I actually need for my deck as singles. It’s common knowledge that opening sealed product is the worst way to get cards you need to play competitively, but it’s also common knowledge that opening booster packs is incredibly fun. This plan felt like a healthy middle ground. But what all would I be getting for my money?
Each Elite Trainer Box includes 9 booster packs, 60 sleeves, a set of dice, poison and burn markers, a bundle of basic energy cards, a booklet, 4 card dividers, and a storage box. For $10 more, you can also get the “Pokémon Center” version that includes 2 more booster packs and an extra stamped promo card. This article is about a standard ETB, which retails for $50 (although you can often find them for $45 at your local card shop).
Whether a Pokémon product is a “good deal” or not is usually determined by the price-per-pack. You can buy a single sleeved booster pack for $5.00, so that’s the standard to evaluate costs on. A booster box, which is a sealed display container of 36 packs, officially retails for $161.64 — but you can almost always find one in the $100–130 range. At the time of writing this, a booster box of the newest set, Stellar Crown, is available online for $108.95 with shipping included. That’s a price-per-pack of $3.00 — in other words, there’s a bit of a discount for buying in bulk. Conversely, a booster bundle (which, confusingly, is just a box with 6 packs in it) retails for $30, and usually stays right around that price. That’s a price-per-pack of $5 — no discount, but no upcharge.
Elite Trainer Boxes, despite their widespread appeal, aren’t actually a great deal by that metric. At MSRP, they have a price-per-pack of $5.56, which is above the standard. If we give them the same grace as the booster box and evaluate them at $45, it’s still $5 per pack. That’s not bad, but when you compare it to a booster box, do you really want to buy 9 packs for $45 when you could buy 36 for $110?
There are two problems with this value analysis. Problem #1: It ignores the other contents of the ETB. The reason an ETB has a higher relative price point is that it includes extra items that a booster box doesn’t. The sleeves, dice, damage counters, booklet, and even the box are all theoretically adding value to the product. In practice, not all of this is useful to an experienced player, but things like dice and sleeves are helpful for beginners. I get the most use out of the dividers and the storage box, but I know collectors particularly like the player’s guide because it includes a complete list of cards in the set. There’s no real agreed-upon value for all of the non-booster pack contents of an ETB, but I would place it somewhere in the $10–15 range, based on various eBay listings and my own opinion. If we call it $10 and use $45 as our ETB price, our price-per-pack comes down to $3.89. That makes an ETB a pretty solid deal, if you have a use for the extras.
Problem #2: We’re assuming these booster packs have an inherent consistent value. In reality, what you’re getting can vary wildly. It’s no secret that opening a pack of Pokémon cards is essentially gambling. You’re probably not going to get anything of value, but you could pull a $100 card. Maybe even a $200 card, depending on the set. For this article, I opened up an ETB of Shrouded Fable, the last set to release before the 2024 Pokémon World Championships. The most expensive card in that set is either Gold Earthen Vessel or Special Illustration Rare Fezandipiti ex, which are both currently hovering around $60–65. At launch, the most expensive card was Special Illustration Rare Cassiopeia, which was listed at $200 before dropping considerably to $50 over the past few months. Despite that, the vast majority of cards in the set are worth anywhere from $0.01–0.10. When you buy a Shrouded Fable booster pack, you effectively sign a contract that you’re giving up $5 for a chance to get $60, while accepting the much larger chance of getting $1. The more packs you open, the higher your chances of pulling one of the more expensive “chase” cards. It’s like the lottery, if lottery tickets had pretty art and could be used as game pieces.
That last difference is a big one. The Pokémon Trading Card Game is, after all, a trading card game. Every set introduces new cards that you can add to your deck in your journey be the very best. So what happens to our value analysis if we think of our ETB as a board game expansion pack like Catan: Cities & Knights?
After opening up my 9 booster packs, I separated the “playable” cards from all the others. I started by separating all the Trainer cards (the cards with gray text boxes on the right in the above picture) — these are cards that can help boost a deck of any type, so I considered them all playable (although, of course, some are better than others). For the Pokémon, I pooled together every card that is either included in a known functional deck, or that has an ability that’s unique enough to keep around. For example: Kyurem (6th column) is a staple inclusion in Regidrago VSTAR, which is currently the most popular deck. Genesect (5th column), on the other hand, isn’t known for being in any specific deck, but its “ACE Nullifier” ability has potential to be useful in any Control-style build. I also included all my “hits,” which are the shinier, more collector-oriented cards in the bottom row. Most of these happened to be playable, but I think I would include them in this value analysis either way. Within the board game comparison, these would be the premium-but-not-necessary accessories you can sometimes find in expansion packs. Within reality, they make for good trade fodder to bring to your local card shop.
Once I knew what I had, I needed to find out what it was worth. I started by making a spreadsheet with every card I was including, and then I plugged all of those cards into a TCGPlayer order. (If you don’t know, TCGPlayer is the most popular online marketplace for ordering individual cards.) When I added all 40 playable cards and hits I had gotten from my packs alongside the ETB promo card, I got this:
$12 of cards and $7 for shipping. That’s not a lot! If we add in $15 for the dice and whatnot (which we’ll just say is $10 for the items and $5 for shipping), then we’re up to $35. The only thing not included here are code cards. Each ETB (and each booster pack inside it) includes a unique code card that can be redeemed for items in Pokémon’s online client, Pokémon Trading Card Game Live. These are only worth a couple of cents each, but most websites that sell codes either enforce an order minimum or charge for shipping, which TCGPlayer does. After trying two different websites, I came up with about $4 to order 9 pack codes and 1 ETB code online and probably $1–2 to buy them in person.
All of that brings us to $39 shipped, or $24 from a local card store. So what does that mean? In this case, it means that I exchanged $45 for $24 of product. Or at least, it kind of means that. The truth is, I would never open up TCGPlayer and place an order for these 41 cards specifically, nor would I search eBay for “ETB minus the packs” with any intention of actually buying something. The final factor of this value analysis is, in my opinion, the experience of opening the product, and the uncertainty of what will be in it. I didn’t buy this ETB thinking “I sure hope I get exactly $45 of value in cards and accessories from this.” I bought it thinking “Oh cool, a new set. Looks fun!” I guess I knew it was possible I could pull a bunch of high-dollar cards and sell or trade them for a profit, but that certainly wasn’t my goal. My goal, as a competitor and general fan of the Pokémon brand, was to have the experience of opening up an ETB and maybe score a few cards I needed in the process. With that in mind, I got exactly what I paid for.
Despite the title of this article, I’m not going to tell you how you should spend your money. I’d much rather help you make an educated decision on your own. If you’re just interested in packs, you may have other more cost-efficient options. If you collect full sets or promos, an ETB is a pretty easy sell. If you only want cards to play with, you should definitely just order singles. And if you’re somewhere in the middle, like me — do whatever you want, as long as it makes you happy.
-ZH
This was my first TCG-related article, and I had a lot of fun making it. Card costs are constantly in flux, so the numbers given here may not be accurate by the time you read this. Special thanks to Maya Whitaker for helping me with the photography for this article. If you want to hear more about my experiences competing in the Pokemon TCG, you can follow me here, here, and here.
