Pitch Black Lands July 17. The Japanese Print Is Already Trading
Mega Darkrai ex headlines the next set. Its Japanese twin has been out since May, so we already know where the money is going.
By Chase Society Desk
A Long Time Coming
Darkrai has been one of the most requested Pokemon in the game for years, and the card game never gave it a real moment. That changes July 17, when Pitch Black arrives with Mega Darkrai ex as the face of the set.
The headline card is a Special Art Rare illustrated by Akira Egawa, the most decorated illustrator of the current era. We wrote about why that matters last week, check it out HERE.
About the Set
Pitch Black runs on the same Pokemon Legends: Z-A engine as the last few releases, but the mood flips hard. The theme is darkness, nightmares, and the void, anchored by a new Shadow Energy that shields benched Darkness Pokemon from all damage. Mega Darkrai ex sits at the center of it.
What's inside the packs:
- Total Count: 118 cards
- Mega Evolution ex: 4 total
- Mega Darkrai ex
- Mega Chandelure ex
- Mega Zeraora ex
- Mega Excadrill ex
- Headline chase: Mega Darkrai ex Special Art Rare
- Other top SARs: Gwynn, Morpeko ex
- Ultra-premium: a Mega Darkrai ex Mega Ultra Rare sits above the SAR as the rarest pull in the set
- Reported pull rates (from the Japanese release, best estimates so far):
- SAR: roughly 1 in every 3.4 booster boxes
- MUR: roughly 1 in every 45 booster boxes
So the real question: what's already trading?
The Japanese version of this set, Abyss Eye, has been out since May 22, which means we already have a read on what demand could look like for Pitch Black.
According to our data, the Japanese print is already trading like this raw. The Mega Darkrai ex SAR leads at around $587, with Gwynn ($186), Morpeko ex ($105), Mega Chandelure ex ($99), and Mega Zeraora ex ($77) rounding out the chase. Track the full set on our Abyss Eye set page.
The sealed booster box is trading around $136, with Mega Darkrai doing almost all the heavy lifting up top.
English prices will not map one to one off the Japanese print. Different supply, different release window, different buyer base. But the Japanese market tells us where demand concentrates, and right now it's concentrating almost entirely on one card: The Mega Darkrai ex SAR is doing the same job here that Mega Greninja did for Chaos Rising: it's the card the whole set will be measured against.
We will be watching that SAR as the proxy for how Pitch Black performs out of the gate.