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December 22nd - December 28th, 2025

📋 TLDR

📰 TCG News: Pokémon TCG Reveals New Munikis Zero Set Featuring Mega Zygarde, Pull Rates from “Start Deck 100 Battle Collection” Revealed, Mario & Luigi Pikachu Box ‘Bitcoin Pizza’ Story

🔢 Card Market Highlights: Diamond & Pearl Stormfront Booster Box Sells for $19.6k, PSA 9 Lenticular Deoxys Sells for $3.7k, PSA 9 1999 Tropical Mega Battle Phone Card Promo Sells for $7.3k

😴 Potential Sleepers: Pokémon GO - Dragonite V #49

🏆 Card of the Week: This Simisear card (right) is featured in English Crown Zenith as GG37/GG70 and in Japanese VSTAR Universe as 214/172. It is illustrated by Nagano. Nagano is the anonymous Japanese illustrator and manga artist behind the wildly popular "Chiikawa" (Something Small and Cute) series (left). It’s really cool to see an artist's defined style applied to Pokémon.

📰 TCG News

Note: Some updates may touch on wider Pokémon news beyond the TCG.

🔵 Pokémon TCG Reveals New Munikis Zero Set Featuring Mega Zygarde

The next Japanese Pokémon TCG set, M3 Mega Expansion Pack: Nihil Zero, has been revealed as the first set of 2026, centered around Mega Zygarde ex and tying directly into Pokémon Legends: Z-A. The set launches in Japan on January 23, 2026, and brings Mega Evolutions back into focus, with Mega Zygarde ex as a high-HP Fighting-type attacker supported by a special Tool, Core Memory, that unlocks an additional powerful attack. (Source: Pokébeach)

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🔵 Pull Rates from “Start Deck 100 Battle Collection” Revealed

The Start Deck 100 Battle Collection in Japan includes 100 decks plus a secret 101st. A hidden variant of deck #001 contains a gold Mega Charizard Y ex that is so rare it did not appear in a 1,000-deck sample, while the secret 101st deck showed up only four times. Gold Mega Charizard Y ex sits at the top of the value hierarchy, followed by Pikachu ex (SIR), Lillie’s Clefairy ex (SIR), the three Starter Mega SIRs, and key full arts, with a mix of Illustration Rares filling out the middle and lower tiers.

The main caveat for collectors is that these decks can be weighed to identify hits, so secondary-market buyers risk ending up with filtered, low-value products even though the cards are expected to appear internationally in Ascended Heroes and related releases. (Source: Pokébeach)

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🔵 Mario & Luigi Pikachu Box ‘Bitcoin Pizza’ Moment

A longtime collector on r/PokémonInvesting shared receipts from 2016 showing they bought eight Mario & Luigi Pikachu Special Boxes for about $50 per set and quickly flipped most for $65 to $70 each, keeping one they later sold for around $400 while in college. With sealed pairs now in the $20k range and commenters likening the story to the “Bitcoin pizza” of Pokémon, the thread was a simple reminder that a quick flip early on can mean leaving a lot on the table later. (Source: Reddit)

📈 Card Trends

Source: Price data provided by TCGPlayer.com and chart visual provided by TCGMarketNews.com (which sources data from TCGPlayer).

Top Gains 🔼

Top Losses 🔽

🔢 Card Market Highlights

📦 Sealed Product Market Highlights

🔵 Diamond & Pearl Stormfront Booster Box Sells for $19.6k

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Booster box sales of Stormfront (released in 2008) have been very limited over the past couple of years, suggesting a certain degree of scarcity which is common with “modern vintage” boxes like these. One box sold for $8.1k in January this year. In 2024, multiple boxes sold in the $7k-$8k range. The Charizard evolution line of cards is a re-draw / tie back to the Base Set cards.

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🔵 B&W Emerging Powers Sells for ~$5k

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Emerging Powers was the next set to be released after the B&W Base Set and the first to consistently include QR code cards for use in the online version of the TCG. Booster box prices have been steadily rising since the beginning of the year. Some boxes sold in the $2.5k-$3.5k range through the first half of 2025 before hitting the $4k mark in August 2025. The general community consensus on Emerging Powers is mostly that it is characterized by a lack of solid chase cards.

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🔵 Reshiram & Charizard GX Figure Collection Box Sells for $700

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This figure collection box is built around one of the most popular tag team cards from Unbroken Bonds, the Reshiram & Charizard GX SM201 promo card. It also contains a Jumbo version of the same card along with a Reshiram/Charizard figure and four Sun & Moon era booster packs. There are 353 PSA 10 copies, and one of the most recent PSA 10 sales was for $4k this month.

Prices for this box were as low as $150-$250 from January to March this year.

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⭐ Singles & Graded Cards Highlights

🔵 PSA 9 Lenticular Deoxys Sells for $3.7k

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This Lenticular Deoxys card is the 3D Sky-Splitting Deoxys promo from the 2004 Japanese Movie Commemoration VS Pack: Sky-Splitting Deoxys, released alongside Destiny Deoxys and sold as a half deck through Pokémon Centers in Japan. It’s the first and only true lenticular image card in the Japanese TCG, and tilting it shifts Deoxys between different Formes (which also changes the illustrator for each artwork).

Each of the three forms that appear on the card when you tilt it were distributed as separate cards as well with the Attack Forme and Normal Forme included in the same VS half deck and the Defense Forme distributed in the second issue of Pokémon Wonderland magazine.

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🔵 Competition Prize Victini BWR #288/SV-P Sells for $605

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This Victini card is from a release of several thousand tournament prize copies handed out in Japan. It was initially thought to be a Japan-exclusive promo card (with a “PROMO” stamp in the bottom left) but was then reprinted for both English sets, Black Bolt and White Flare.

This card was released in May/June this year, and sealed ungraded copies like this one were selling at a peak of around $1,300. The English version has also come down in price.

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🔵 Pokémon Center Gentleman Pikachu Promo Sells for $350

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Gentleman Pikachu 210/SM-P is a 2018 Japanese promo given out at the Pokémon Center Tokyo DX grand opening in Nihonbashi to customers who purchased five booster packs. The card features Pikachu in Ivy League-style attire with a cane and includes the store logo stamp, tying it directly to that opening event.

There are many similar Pikachu promo cards featuring Pikachu in different outfits. By virtue of being Japanese-exclusive promos and because there are so many variations, they tend to continually increase in price over time without major dips or peaks (with exceptions of course). Similar near-mint condition sales of this card were around $230 in the middle of this year.
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🕰️ Vintage & Niche Market Highlights

🔵 Lot of 7 CoroCoro Comics Promo Cards Sells for $9.8k

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All seven of these glossy promos were released as glossy magazine inserts across multiple 1998 issues of CoroCoro Comics: Brock’s Onix came on a two-card sheet with Misty’s Staryu in the March 1998 issue (distributed February 15), Jynx was part of a three-card sheet with Cubone and Farfetch’d in the April 1998 issue (distributed March 15), and Erika’s Dratini was paired with Lt. Surge’s Electabuzz in the August 1998 issue (distributed July 15).

Brock’s Mankey, Erika’s Bulbasaur, Misty’s Tentacool, and Lt. Surge’s Jolteon then shared a four-card Gym Leader sheet in the December 1998 issue. There are fewer than 30 copies graded in a PSA 10 for each of these cards.
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🔵 Japanese Yamabuki City Gym Sabrina Theme Deck Sells for ~$1k

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The Japanese Yamabuki City Gym Sabrina theme deck is one of the Gym Leader preconstructed decks released alongside the Gym-era expansions in 1998–1999, focused entirely on Psychic types like Sabrina’s Gengar, Alakazam, and more. Prices for this theme deck have been as low as $250 since midyear (about a 300% increase).

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🔵 PSA 9 1999 Tropical Mega Battle Phone Card Promo Sells for $7.3k

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The 1999 Tropical Mega Battle Legendary Bird phone cards are Japanese telephone cards styled like TCG promos, awarded at Dugtrio Team Battle side events in 1998–1999, including the International Tropical Mega Battle in Hawaii as well as Japanese events like Kamex Mega Battle and Challenge Road.

At TMB, players filled a stamp “passport” by playing casual matches, and completing it earned a sealed envelope containing one of the three Legendary Bird phone cards. Graded copies are limited but have regularly sold in the $5k–$8k range across 2024 and 2025.

💎 Hidden Gem

Pokémon GO - Dragonite V #49

PSA 10 - 388 pop / 1024 total - $90 average

Ungraded - $3 average for near-mint condition

Pokémon GO is one of those sets that was overlooked for a lack of solid chase cards. It was also released between Astral Radiance (May 2022) and Lost Origin (September 2022) which of course were both popular sets with great chase cards. Pokémon GO has some great cards with underrated arts of popular Pokémon with this Dragonite card being one example.

📚 Educational Commentary – Collector’s Corner

Should I keep it sealed or open it?

The easiest way to answer that is to decide what you actually want from the product. If you care most about the opening experience, playable cards, or grading a specific chase, then you should treat the box like entertainment first and ignore the idea of “what if it is worth more sealed later.” In that case, the only real math is whether you are comfortable turning the current sealed value into lottery tickets for a few hits that might not show up.

On the other hand, if you enjoy having sealed items on display and you already own the key singles from the set, then keeping a box or ETB intact can make more sense, since its value is tied to long-term demand for the set and how hard sealed copies are to find in clean condition.

📜 Poké History

Before Base Set Charizard ever hit shelves, the very first Pokémon cards showed up as glossy promos tucked inside CoroCoro Comic. In October 1996, the magazine’s November issue included special Pikachu and Jigglypuff cards on a tear-out sheet, making them the earliest officially distributed Pokémon cards. From the December 15th report, an unpeeled sheet containing these promos sold for $10k. (Source: Pokumon)

Questions or feedback? Send a message to news@luckyeggreport.com 🥚.

Note: Sold listing links sometimes redirect to active listings after some time, but should still be discoverable by searching for the listings manually.

Chart Source: TCGPlayer, TCGMarketNews