Darkrai Lv.X Is Trending Again as Pitch Black Drops and a nagimiso Sawk Jumped 40%. Here's Why.

A brand-new set always steals the headlines, but the sharper money this week is hiding on both edges of it. Pokemon TCG: Pitch Black, the English Mega Darkrai ex expansion, releases July 17, and last week we flagged Darkrai GX as the card trending ahead of that launch. Now the set is here, and the demand it created didn't stop at the new chase rares. It reached all the way back to 2008, to the card that made Darkrai a competitive name in the first place. Meanwhile, completely unrelated to any of it, a single Fighting-type illustration rare ripped 40% on nothing but the artist's name.

What's hot: Darkrai Lv.X (Great Encounters #104)

The most-searched vintage Darkrai this week is not a promo or a modern reprint. It's the original Darkrai Lv.X from 2008's Great Encounters, the 104/106 holo with the Dark Shadow Poke-Body and the Endless Darkness attack that defined a whole era of Diamond and Pearl format decks. When a new player sees Mega Darkrai ex splashed across every Pitch Black preview and asks what the original Darkrai card looked like, the trail leads straight to this Lv.X. That is the exact pattern that lifted Ash-Greninja when Mega Greninja launched, and it is repeating here almost beat for beat.

PriceCharting has the raw ungraded copy at $52.53 as of this week, which is where clean loose copies are actually changing hands. The catalyst is the Pitch Black launch itself. The English set adapts Japan's Abyss Eye expansion from May, runs 120 cards, and is headlined by the Mega Darkrai ex Special Illustration Rare from Akira Egawa. None of that is subtle marketing. It is a full retail push built around Darkrai, and it is dragging attention onto every card the character has ever appeared on. There is no reprint risk on a 2008 Lv.X and no tournament angle keeping it honest, so this is a pure demand story with fixed supply, which is the cleanest kind of nostalgia trade to read.

Flipper's angle: respect how brutal the grading math is here before you get excited. The PriceCharting graded ladder reads Grade 9 at $961, Grade 9.5 at $1,058, and PSA 10 at $9,222 off a $52 raw copy. That is a raw-to-PSA-10 multiple north of 175x, and it exists for a reason. Lv.X cards from this era have a mirror-holo surface and dark borders that show every scratch and every speck of edge whitening, and almost nobody in 2008 treated a Darkrai Lv.X like a future grail. The PSA 10 population is thin precisely because gem copies barely survived, which is exactly the kind of pop-report read that separates a real flip from a trap. This is the textbook case where the entire trade lives in the gap between a 9 and a 10, because a 9 clears roughly a grand and a 10 clears nine times that. If you own a copy that has been sleeved since childhood and looks flawless under a loupe, this is a grade-and-find-out card and the window to submit is now while search interest is peaking. If you are buying a raw copy at $52 to flip a slab, understand you are buying a lottery ticket. Note there is also a DP Black Star Promo Darkrai Lv.X floating around, so confirm you are looking at the 104/106 Great Encounters print and not the promo before you pay a set-card price.

Biggest gainer: Sawk (White Flare #130)

The cleanest pure-price move this week has nothing to do with Darkrai. It's the Sawk illustration rare from 2025's White Flare, and it jumped roughly 40% over the past seven days. TCGPlayer market sits at $16.65 as of July 16, up from just under $12 a week earlier, which was enough to land it among the biggest seven-day movers on the price trackers. That is a small-base move in absolute dollars, a few bucks per card, but the percentage is real and the order flow behind it is worth understanding.

The catalyst is one word: nagimiso. This Sawk is illustrated by nagimiso, one of the most collected artists in the modern game, and the card is a genuinely striking full-art piece of Sawk mid-strike against a watercolor mountain range. There is no meta angle here at all. Sawk's Rising Chop only does damage against Pokemon ex, which makes it a dead card competitively, so every dollar of this move is art-driven collector demand. White Flare came out in July 2025, so the pack-fresh supply has thinned over the past year, and when an illustrator's fanbase decides to chase a specific card, a thin float moves fast. A $12 card only needs a handful of motivated buyers to move 40%, and that is what happened this week.

Is it sustainable? The graded picture is where it gets interesting. PriceCharting has the raw at $12, the Grade 9 at $23, and the PSA 10 at $221, which is roughly a 13x raw-to-PSA-10 multiple off the current market price. That spread is the whole reason to care about a cheap card. But modern illustration rares carry their own grading hazards: holo lines across the flat art, off-center cuts, and edge nicks from pack-fresh handling, and the PSA 10 population on a card this new grows quickly, which caps the ceiling over time. This is a case where the pre-grade read matters more than the comp, because a mid-grade result on a $16 card barely clears your fees.

Flipper's angle: for almost everyone this is a raw flip, not a grading play. Buy clean copies while the market is still catching up to the move, sell raw into the nagimiso demand while it's hot, and only submit a copy that is genuinely pristine with sharp corners and clean centering. Art-demand spikes on cheap cards are real but they cool fast once the float refills, so treat the current price as a window, not a new floor.

What both moves tell you about this week's market

These two cards sit at opposite ends of the market and both are moving for reasons that have nothing to do with playability. The Darkrai Lv.X is a 2008 grail waking up because a major launch put its character back in the spotlight, and the Sawk is a year-old common-Pokemon art card ripping purely because the right illustrator's name is on it. Neither move shows up in a deck list. Both show up in search trends and order flow.

The concrete action this week is to pull two specific piles. First, any Diamond and Pearl era holo Lv.X cards, and specifically a Great Encounters Darkrai, because the Pitch Black launch has that whole corner of the market moving and the sharpest interest is happening right now. Second, any nagimiso illustration rares sitting raw in a binder, because art-artist demand is the quiet force lifting cards like this Sawk. Run the real graded comps through Flipr before you decide whether to ship a slab or sell raw. On the Darkrai, the honest answer for most copies is grade only if it is flawless. On the Sawk, the honest answer for almost everyone is sell raw and let someone else chase the 10.