Delta Reign Brings Mega Rayquaza November 6, While the Darkrai Chase Keeps Falling

It's time for our weekly rendition of new releases: The Latest JP set release is out and trading, and we finally got confirmation of Mega Rayquaza! Let's get into the numbers.

A Consistent Bleed for Mega Darkrai

Mega Darkrai ex was supposed to be the card that carried Pitch Black. In Japan, where the set has been out for almost a month as Abyss Eye, the headline Special Art Rare (SAR) keeps losing ground.

We have watched it slide the whole way down. It traded around $587 when we first ran the numbers in early June, $523 a week later, and sits near $444 today. That's roughly a quarter of its value gone in two weeks, with no English product on shelves yet to slow it.

Abyss Eye Top Of The Board7-day change

1

Mega Darkrai ex (SAR)

▼-8%$483$444

2

Abyss Eye Booster Box

▼-14%$128$110

3

Gwynn (SAR)

▼-9%$77$70

4

Morpeko ex (SAR)

▼-14%$67$58

5

Mega Zeraora ex (SAR)

▼-7%$59$55

6

Mega Chandelure ex (SAR)

▼-5%$37$35

The booster box is sliding right alongside the singles. Supply is the reason. Abyss Eye printed deep, the rip videos have run their course, and the singles that poured out of those boxes are still looking for buyers.

Even The Grail Is Softening

The one card that looked immune is the Mega Darkrai ex Mega Ultra Rare (MUR), the hardest pull in the set at roughly one per 45 boxes. Its standing asks still read around $1,200, near where they sat at launch.

The sales say something else. A near-mint Japanese copy sold on eBay for $700 in early June, marked down from an $800 ask. When the rarest card in the set clears at little more than half its asking price, those $1,200 listings are wishful thinking.

The mid-board was always going to bleed. The tell now is that even the top end has started to.

Pitch Black is the English version of this set, and it lands July 17, with prereleases July 4 through 12. A Japanese print never sets the English price outright. Supply, timing, and the buyer base all shift when a set crosses the Pacific, so this points a direction without pricing it.

But the Japanese print is the only live preview we get, and right now it says the launch hype cooled well before English ships. The question into July 17 is simple: where does that SAR find a floor? Whatever level it holds is what English buyers anchor to on day one. Follow it on the Abyss Eye set page as the sales come in.

We're watching where it lands, not calling a bottom. Darkrai is a name people have wanted in a marquee slot for years, and that pull can set a floor fast once English demand shows up. It can also keep grinding lower if demand stays as thin as the last few sales suggest. Two more weeks of Japanese sales will tell us which.

Rayquaza Is Next, And The Fall Is Loaded

The reason we keep one eye on the Japanese print all year just got a much bigger subject. Pokemon confirmed the next Mega Evolution set, and the cover card is Mega Rayquaza ex.

English buyers get it as Delta Reign on November 6. Japan gets the same set first, as Storm Emeralda, on July 31.

Mega Rayquaza ex from the reveal footage. Cards are still in development.

This one carries weight the recent sets don't. "Emerald" points straight at Pokemon Emerald, the 2004 game whose box mascot was Rayquaza, so the set sits on more than twenty years of nostalgia. The last Mega Rayquaza the game printed is a decade-old grail. Rayquaza is one of the few names that pulls lapsed collectors back to the table, and a modern ex of it is exactly that kind of card.

Here's why that matters past one set. Every Mega release this year has run the same arc: launch hype, a flood of singles, then the long bleed you're watching on Abyss Eye right now. Rayquaza might be the first character with enough pull to break it. A set people buy to keep, instead of to rip and flip, holds differently. We won't know until it drops, but it's the first release in a while with a real shot at it.

And it lands in a crowded back half. Three big English drops inside four months: Pitch Black on July 17, the all-foil 30th Anniversary set on September 16, and Delta Reign on November 6. Two of the three run entirely on nostalgia, the 30th on three decades of reprints and Delta Reign on Rayquaza, and they bracket the holiday window when buying peaks. That's a wall of demand stacked into the fall. It's also a wall of fresh supply, and the same question hangs over all of it: does the nostalgia soak up the print run, or does it bleed like everything before it.

Storm Emeralda starts trading in Japan at the end of July, more than three months ahead of the English boxes. That August tape is our first read on whether Rayquaza is built different.

That leaves the rest of the year with two things to watch. Up close, the Mega Darkrai SAR keeps falling, and July 17 decides where Pitch Black anchors against it. Further out, the question is whether Rayquaza is the release that finally holds instead of bleeds. Japan starts answering that one in about six weeks.