Sword & Shield feels like it was yesterday, but the calendar disagrees. Shining Fates, Battle Styles, Chilling Reign, Evolving Skies and Celebrations have all crossed the five-year mark, and Fusion Strike gets there on November 12. Back then, The Pokémon Company was running the printers harder than ever to catch up with pandemic-era demand, and the loudest voices in the hobby were sure all that supply would bury prices for good. Booster boxes that people now treat like blue-chip stocks were selling on eBay for $84 to $110 in November 2021.
Fast forward to the end of 2026 and the hype never left. It wobbled, it corrected, it had a few rough quarters, but Pokémon is in full swing in the current Mega Evolution era. So let's do what almost nobody does and actually check the receipts: what these six sets cost five years ago, what they cost today, and which top five cards are carrying each one.
Fusion Strike (November 2021): The Gengar Premium
Fusion Strike was the giant 264-card set that closed out 2021, and at launch it was more of a players' set than a collector darling. Booster boxes were selling around $109.99 that November against a $143.64 MSRP, and Elite Trainer Boxes went for about $52.75. Today the booster box carries a TCGplayer market price of $976.42, close to nine times its 2021 street price, and the Mew ETB sits at $337.61.
The chase is one card deep at the top. The Gengar VMAX alternate art (271/264) leads at $1,032.52, followed by Espeon VMAX alt art (270/264) at $340.99, Mew VMAX alt art (269/264) at $234.23, Mew V alt art (251/264) at $99.57 and the rainbow Mew VMAX (268/264) at $92.25. Here's the fun part: that one Gengar is now worth more than a sealed box of the set it comes from. At launch the same card was around $182.
25th Anniversary Celebrations (October 2021): The Nostalgia Machine
Celebrations never had a booster box, so the Elite Trainer Box is the benchmark. It hit shelves October 8, 2021 at $49.99, and the Pokémon Center version with three extra Celebrations packs sold for $64.99. Today the standard ETB sits around $434 on TCGplayer and the Pokémon Center ETB around $574, roughly eight to nine times retail. Single Celebrations packs, which only hold four cards, now trade near $42 each.
The chase list is pure nostalgia, and most of it comes from the Classic Collection reprints. The Base Set Charizard reprint leads at $133.81, followed by Umbreon Star at $73.91. The main set's gold Mew secret rare (25/25) takes third, trading in a $62 to $71 band depending on the tracker. M Rayquaza EX ($33.48) and Shining Magikarp ($29.99) round out the top five. Fittingly, a set built on the past is still powered by Charizard.
Evolving Skies (August 2021): The Modern Grail
This is the set the five-year-hold crowd brings up first, and the math explains why. An Evolving Skies booster box sold for about $110 on eBay in November 2021, and the ETB for about $39. Today the box carries a TCGplayer market price of roughly $2,180 to $2,215, around 20 times its 2021 street price. The two ETBs trade at $462.23 and $552.57, more than ten times what holders paid. Even a single loose pack runs about $43, which is more than a quarter of what a full box cost five years ago.
The top five is a who's-who of the alt-art era. Umbreon VMAX alt art (215/203), the card collectors call "Moonbreon," leads at roughly $2,240 to $2,300. Rayquaza VMAX alt art (218/203) follows at $1,241.76, then Rayquaza V alt art (194/203) at $465.41 and Dragonite V alt art (192/203) at about $460. Fifth place is a photo finish: Umbreon V alt art, Leafeon VMAX alt art and Sylveon VMAX alt art are all trading between about $365 and $375. One Moonbreon is now worth about the same as a sealed box, which makes every opening a coin flip with a very expensive coin.
Chilling Reign (June 2021): The Quiet Compounder
Chilling Reign was printed in volume and was famously easy to find, which is exactly why it makes such a good case study. Boxes were selling around $99 in late 2021, with the Ice Rider Calyrex ETB near $42 and the Shadow Rider ETB near $32. Today the box sits at $459.59, about 4.6 times its 2021 price, and the ETBs trade at $142.00 (Ice Rider) and $150.92 (Shadow Rider). The Shadow Rider ETB, the cheaper of the two back then, has nearly quintupled.
Blaziken VMAX alt art (201/198) is the clear king at roughly $379 to $382. Galarian Moltres V alt art (177/198) follows at about $229 to $234, then the gold Snorlax secret rare (224/198) at $142.02. Galarian Slowking V alt art (179/198) at $116.30 and Zeraora V alt art (166/198) at $94.39 close out the top five. No single card dominates the way Moonbreon does, which is why the box has climbed steadily instead of exploding.
Battle Styles (March 2021): The Underdog That Still Tripled
Battle Styles is the set nobody bragged about holding, and it still paid. Boxes were changing hands for about $84 in November 2021, and the Urshifu ETBs for about $36. Today the box sits at $286.70 on TCGplayer, roughly 3.4 times its 2021 price, and both the Single Strike and Rapid Strike ETBs trade around $133, close to 3.7 times what they cost back then.
The top of the list is a one-dinosaur show. Tyranitar V alt art (155/163) leads at roughly $225 to $238, about three times the next card down. Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX alt art (170/163) follows at about $77, then Empoleon V alt art (146/163) at $63.57, Mimikyu V alt art (148/163) at $46.95 and Single Strike Urshifu VMAX alt art (168/163) at $30.30. Even the set nobody chased beat a savings account by a mile.
Shining Fates (February 2021): The Charizard Tax
Shining Fates was a special set with no booster box, built around a Shiny Vault of shiny Pokémon. The ETB launched at $49.99 with ten packs and an Eevee VMAX promo. Today it trades around $148 to $149, roughly three times retail, and loose packs sit near $15. That makes it the slowest grower of the group, but it also started from a full retail price rather than the discounted street prices the other sets saw in late 2021.
This set is Charizard and then everybody else. The shiny Charizard VMAX (SV107/SV122) leads at about $110, which is down sharply from its early-2021 frenzy, when copies were trading for hundreds. The rest of the top five is a cluster of Shiny Vault favorites: Morpeko (SV44) at $22.72, Suicune (SV22) at $17.24, Galarian Ponyta (SV47) at $17.13 and Yamper (SV39) at $17.04. The lesson is a useful one: a set with a single chase that peaked at launch tends to drift, while the sealed product keeps climbing anyway.
Alt Arts vs. Illustration Rares: How Today's Chase Stacks Up
Scarlet & Violet changed the chase. Sword & Shield hid its best art in two slots, the full alternate art V and the alternate art secret VMAX. Scarlet & Violet spread it out, adding Illustration Rares for regular Pokémon and Special Illustration Rares for ex cards and Supporters, and the Mega Evolution era has kept that structure while adding gold Mega Hyper Rares on top. More art per set is great for binders, but it also splits demand across more cards.
The price gap shows it, even when you stack Moonbreon against the very best of both newer eras. Across all of Scarlet & Violet, the top Special Illustration Rare is Prismatic Evolutions' Umbreon ex at roughly $1,020 to $1,200 raw, followed by Paldean Fates' Mew ex at about $835 to $855. After that the drop is steep: Sylveon ex from Prismatic Evolutions sits near $380 to $390, Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex from Destined Rivals near $335 to $400, and the 151 Charizard ex near $295 to $335. The Mega Evolution era, now about a year old, has produced its own heavy hitters faster than Scarlet & Violet did. Ascended Heroes' Mega Gengar ex leads at roughly $735 to $810, its Pikachu ex SIR runs about $640 to $760, Phantasmal Flames' Mega Charizard X ex trades near $600 to $640, and Ascended Heroes' Mega Dragonite ex sits around $445 to $455. The base Mega Evolution set's best SIRs, Mega Gardevoir ex and Mega Lucario ex, are closer to $165 to $180.
Put those numbers next to the roughly $2,240 Moonbreon and the scale of Sword & Shield's best set becomes clear. Moonbreon is worth about twice the most valuable SIR ever printed and about three times the Mega era's top card. The typical SIR is a different story entirely: across the roughly 230 SIRs tracked so far, the median raw value is only about $31 to $33, and only around 40 of them are worth $100 or more. Here's the stat that surprised me most: Evolving Skies alone has seven cards trading at $365 or more, which is about as many as the entire Scarlet & Violet and Mega Evolution SIR catalog combined. More art per set has made modern Pokémon more fun to open, but it has also spread collector money across far more cards than the Sword & Shield alt-art era ever did.
Sealed tells the same story from the other direction. A Mega Evolution booster box already costs about $294 on TCGplayer, and Phantasmal Flames is near $390, so modern boxes are starting life where 2021 boxes needed years to reach. Put another way, a brand-new Mega Evolution box costs about the same today as a five-year-old Battle Styles box, and roughly three and a half times what that Battle Styles box cost in 2021. That higher starting line raises the bar for what a five-year hold has to deliver.
The Receipt: What Patience Actually Paid
Here's the number that sums it up. If you had bought one booster box each of Battle Styles, Chilling Reign, Evolving Skies and Fusion Strike in November 2021, you would have spent about $403. Those same four boxes are worth roughly $3,940 today, close to ten times the money. More than half of that comes from Evolving Skies alone, and that matters: the best returns came from sets with a deep bench of beloved alt arts, not from the set with the most hype on release day.
The other takeaway is that even the "boring" sets worked. Battle Styles and Chilling Reign were printed heavily and dismissed at the time, and they still returned three to five times their money. Nobody needed perfect timing; they needed to buy at street price and leave the shrink wrap alone. That's the real secret of the five-year hold. It isn't complicated, it's just uncomfortable, and that is exactly why so few people do it.
But past performance is not always a guide to future results, and five years has changed a lot. Inflation has pushed up what everything costs, from MSRP to shipping to grading, so part of any "gain" is simply the dollar buying less than it used to. The collector base is bigger, more people are holding sealed on purpose, and the market reacts faster than it did in 2021. Most importantly, the buy-in price decides the return. Evolving Skies turned $110 into about $2,200 because people were buying it near retail. Scarlet & Violet and Mega Evolution sets now carry stronger single chases early on, like Mega Gengar ex and Mega Charizard X ex, and those chases push sealed prices up fast. That's great for anyone who bought on release day, but it makes the same kind of return much harder to repeat. To match Evolving Skies' roughly 20x, a $294 Mega Evolution box would need to reach about $5,900, and a $390 Phantasmal Flames box would need about $7,800.
Links and Sources
Sealed products (TCGplayer)
Fusion Strike: Booster Box · Mew ETB
Evolving Skies: Booster Box · Glaceon/Vaporeon/Sylveon/Espeon ETB · Flareon/Jolteon/Umbreon/Leafeon ETB
Chilling Reign: Booster Box · Ice Rider ETB · Shadow Rider ETB
Battle Styles: Booster Box · Single Strike ETB · Rapid Strike ETB
Celebrations and Shining Fates ETBs: Celebrations search · Shining Fates search
Mega Era: Phantasmal Flames Booster Box
Chase cards (TCGplayer)
Fusion Strike: Gengar VMAX 271 · Espeon VMAX 270 · Mew VMAX 269 · full set search
Evolving Skies: Umbreon VMAX 215 · Rayquaza VMAX 218 · Rayquaza V 194 · Dragonite V 192 · Umbreon V 189 · Leafeon VMAX 205 · Sylveon VMAX 212
Chilling Reign: Blaziken VMAX 201 · Galarian Moltres V 177 · full set search
Battle Styles: Tyranitar V 155 · Rapid Strike Urshifu VMAX 170 · full set search
Shining Fates: Charizard VMAX SV107 · Morpeko SV44 · Suicune SV22 · Galarian Ponyta SV47 · Yamper SV39
Celebrations: Charizard (Classic Collection) · Umbreon Star · Mew 25/25 · M Rayquaza EX · Shining Magikarp
Sources and price checks
Pitt PokeResearch set pages (TCGplayer market prices, Oct 25–26, 2026; also Fusion Strike , Chilling Reign , Battle Styles )
PokeScreener Evolving Skies and Fusion Strike (second price check)
TCG Stacked Chilling Reign and Battle Styles price guides
Pokémon Wizard Shiny Vault and Classic Collection pages; sealed listing
Cardlines Fusion Strike review, Nov 21, 2021 (2021 eBay sold prices for boxes and ETBs)
Marriland Shining Fates ETB review and Slickdeals Celebrations ETB listing (retail prices)
Ripdex Special Illustration Rare guide , Cardrake Mega Evolution set and Pitt PokeResearch Mega Evolution
CardTrack Special Illustration Rare rankings (second check on SIR raw values, Oct 26, 2026)
Current prices are TCGplayer market prices for Near Mint English product as of Oct 25–26, 2026, and move daily. Where two trackers differed, the article gives the range.