Skip to content

Sealed product & breaks

Booster Box EV Calculator

Add the hits a box can produce, how often each appears and what it sells for, and this returns the expected value per box and per pack — then compares it against what the sealed box costs and what you would keep after marketplace fees. Most boxes lose money when opened, and the tool exists to show you by how much.

The box

$
$

Commons, uncommons and low-end rares, realistically sellable.

%

The hits — add a row for each card or tier you are counting

Rate is packs per hit — enter 36 for a card that appears about once a box, 720 for one that appears once in twenty boxes.

— expected value per box, after fees

Where the expected value comes from.
Card or tier One per Value Expected per box Chance of at least one Share of EV

How box EV is calculated

per hit: expected copies per box = packs per box ÷ packs per hit contribution = expected copies × net value after fees box EV = Σ contributions + (bulk per pack × packs) verdict = box EV − box price

The subtraction at the end is the whole exercise. Sealed product is priced by a manufacturer and a distribution chain that both know the pull rates, and the price is set so that the average box loses. When a box's EV exceeds its price it is normally because the set contains a chase card whose price is spiking — which is exactly when the box price is about to move too.

Expected value is not what you will get

EV is the average over an unlimited number of boxes. Open one box and you get a single draw from a very lopsided distribution: most boxes land well below the average, and a small number land far above it. A box with $150 of EV where $90 of that comes from a 1-in-8-boxes chase card is, seven times out of eight, a $60 box.

The chance of at least one column exists for this reason. Read it before the EV column. If your EV depends on a hit with a 12% chance of appearing, the EV is a description of a lottery, not a forecast of your afternoon.

Costs that quietly eat the return

  • Marketplace fees. A $300 pull nets about $260 on eBay. Applied across every hit, fees typically remove 10–15% of gross EV.
  • Postage and packaging on each single you sell, which on low-value cards can exceed the card.
  • Bulk that never sells. The commons from a box have a theoretical value and a practical one. Most people never sell them, so the honest bulk figure is often close to zero.
  • Time. Listing forty singles individually is a real cost that never appears in an EV calculation.
  • Price decay. Singles from a new set fall hard in the weeks after release as supply floods in. EV computed at release prices overstates what you will realise a month later.
The sealed alternative. Compare box EV against what the sealed box itself will be worth later. Sealed product from sets with a strong reputation has historically appreciated, and holding requires no listing, no fees and no postage. Opening converts a single liquid asset into forty illiquid ones.

Getting the pull rates right

Printed odds where they exist, community-tracked data where they do not. Two cautions: odds quoted per box are not the same as odds per pack, and a rate quoted for a group of cards has to be divided by the size of that group before it applies to the one you want. A "1 in 36 packs for an alt art" across a 20-card alt-art subset is 1 in 720 for your specific card.

Questions people ask about this

Is opening a booster box worth it?

On average, no. Sealed product is priced by people who know the pull rates, and the expected value of the contents is normally below the box price once marketplace fees and unsold bulk are accounted for. Boxes are worth opening when you want the cards, enjoy the opening, or are building a set — none of which are financial reasons, and all of which are legitimate ones.

What is EV in trading cards?

Expected value: the average worth of a box's contents across an unlimited number of boxes, calculated as the sum of each hit's value multiplied by how often it appears. It says nothing about a single box. A box whose EV is carried by a rare chase card will, most of the time, deliver far less than its EV.

Should I sell a box sealed or open it?

Compare EV after fees against the sealed price. Opening wins only when EV clearly exceeds the sealed price by enough to cover the listing effort — and it converts one easy sale into dozens of hard ones. Sealed boxes from well-regarded sets have also historically held value better than the singles inside them, because opened supply only ever increases.

Why is my box EV lower than what people quote online?

Most published EV figures use gross market prices with no fees, no postage, and full credit for bulk that nobody actually sells. Subtract 13% for fees, a few dollars per sale for shipping, and set bulk to what you would truly realise, and the same box typically loses 20–30% of its quoted EV.

Where these numbers come from

Rates on this page were last checked against the published price lists on . Grading companies change fees and pause tiers without notice — confirm the total on the submission form before you pay.

  • Expected value, computed from your own inputs — no pull-rate database is bundled — printed odds vary by product and region, so the numbers have to be yours