Gladion's Final Battle Price Is Flat at $32.72 Before Worlds, and the Thwackey 115 Promo Jumped 32%

Pokemon put out its official Pokemon TCG power rankings this week ahead of the World Championships, which run August 28 to 30 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Festival Lead, a deck built around Dipplin and Thwackey, landed at number two, above N's Zoroark ex and above every Mega Evolution deck in the format. Pokemon credited one new card for the jump, Gladion's Final Battle from Pitch Black. Collectors have spent the week looking that card up and its price has barely moved. The four year old Thwackey promo the deck needs four copies of is up 32%.

What's hot: Gladion's Final Battle price before Worlds (Pitch Black #118)

Gladion's Final Battle is a Supporter from Pitch Black, the Mega Darkrai ex set that came out on July 17. You can only play it when it is the last card in your hand, and for that turn every attacker you have without a Rule Box hits for 80 more damage. Dipplin does 20 damage for each Pokemon on your Bench, so a full Bench plus this card puts a one prize attacker at 180 damage, which takes down most Pokemon ex in two swings. Pokemon's own writeup said the card was built for Dipplin and Thwackey, and that Thwackey makes the last card in your hand requirement much easier to hit.

The Special Illustration Rare, card 118 of 084, is selling for around $32.72 on TCGplayer as of August 22. Two weeks ago on August 8 it was $31.28, so a week of being named the reason a deck jumped to number two has moved it about a dollar. PriceCharting has the raw card lower at $29.17. The versions people actually sleeve up are cheap, with the plain uncommon close to bulk and the Ultra Rare, card 108, going for roughly $3.56, down from $4.37 on August 8.

The graded grid on PriceCharting today reads $48.78 for a Grade 9, $54.00 for a Grade 9.5 and $178.25 for a PSA 10, and that last number deserves a warning label. PSA has graded exactly one copy of this card so far and it came back a 9, so there are no PSA 10 sales holding up the figure.

Pitch Black is five weeks old and people are still cracking boxes, which sell for about $176.55. Every new set we have written about has behaved the same way in months one and two, and we laid out the pattern in why new set chase cards drop in month two. The second thing worth noticing is the gap between the two price sources. TCGplayer market sits about 12% above PriceCharting's blended raw price, and when a card is still pouring out of fresh packs, that gap tends to close by the TCGplayer number falling rather than the other number rising. We got that backwards on Darkrai VSTAR in June and it cost us a call.

So here is our prediction on Gladion's Final Battle, and we will grade ourselves on it either way. We expect the Special Illustration Rare to be cheaper on TCGplayer on October 21 than the $32.72 it is at today, because one weekend of Worlds attention does not outrun five more weeks of people opening Pitch Black. If it is flat or higher on that date, we were wrong. We would also leave it raw for now. Sending a card to PSA when nobody has sold a PSA 10 of it means guessing at your own exit price.

Biggest gainer: the Thwackey 115 promo price is up 32%

Thwackey, card 115 in the Scarlet and Violet Black Star Promos, went from $10.46 on August 15 to $13.84 on August 22. Go back to August 8 and it was $10.22, so the whole run is about 35% over two weeks. It is the biggest seven day move on our tracker that also survived our sanity check, meaning the market price, the cheapest listing and the middle listing all moved the same way instead of one number wandering off alone.

This is the holo promo from the Twilight Masquerade Build and Battle boxes, and it is a different product from the plain common in the set. Both carry the same Boom Boom Groove ability, which lets you search your deck for any card once per turn as long as your Active Pokemon has Festival Lead. The set version is close to worthless. The promo is foil, players want a full playset of four, and Build and Battle boxes for a set that came out in May 2024 are not being printed again.

The buying showed up in the market price well before it showed up in the listings. The cheapest copy went from $9.02 to $9.40 over those two weeks while the market price ran 35%, which is what it looks like when buyers clear out the underpriced copies and the sellers left standing have not raised their asks yet. If you want one to play with, the bottom of the listings is still where to look.

PriceCharting has raw Thwackey at $11.38 with a Grade 9 at $45.00 and a PSA 10 at $162.41. A PSA 10 being worth roughly fourteen times a raw copy sounds like free money and almost never is. PSA's numbers say why: across the staff stamped version, 163 copies have been graded and only 46 came back 10s, while 94 of them landed on a 9. A gem rate near 28% is the market pricing in bad odds, which is the same trap we pulled apart in why a huge PSA 10 multiplier is usually a trap.

There is a second wrinkle. PSA tracks this card as two different things, a staff stamped prerelease copy and a plain prerelease copy, and the plain one you are buying at $13.84 has only 24 copies graded with a single PSA 10 among them. The $162.41 figure is built mostly on the other version, so do not plan a submission around it. What is genuinely unusual here is the Grade 9 at $45.00, which covers a $79.99 Regular submission and a raw copy without needing the 10 at all. On most cards we grade, missing the 10 is what sinks the trade, and we put real numbers on that in the PSA 9 tax.

Our call on Thwackey is a prediction too. We expect the raw promo to be cheaper on TCGplayer on October 6 than the $13.84 it is at today. Players buy playsets in the two weeks before a major event and stop buying the day it ends, and Festival Lead has to actually finish well in San Francisco for the demand to hold. If Thwackey is at or above $13.84 on October 6, we were wrong and the fixed supply mattered more than the tournament did. Anyone sitting on spare copies should be listing them this week rather than next.

What both moves are telling you

The two cards came out of the same news and went opposite directions. The expensive collector version of the card everyone wrote about did essentially nothing, while the $10 promo the deck needs four copies of ran 32%. Tournament news does that repeatedly. Money moves into the cards players are forced to physically own before an event, and the artwork everyone screenshots gets looked up rather than bought.

Last week we flagged a Prize Pack Charizard VMAX that jumped 81% with one copy for sale, and the useful habit is the same one: check what is being bought, not what is being talked about. Worlds runs August 28 to 30, and the practical move is to watch which decks make the top cut, then price their promos and staples on Monday morning. We track those weekly moves inside Flipr so you are not scrolling sold listings by hand, but the Monday after a major event is worth doing manually either way, because that is when the buying and the selling both happen at once.

Both of the calls above are logged and we will score them publicly when the dates come, right or wrong. Graded cards are speculative and thinly traded, so treat everything here as our read on the data and not as a promise about anyone's money.