N's Zoroark ex Is the NAIC Counter Everyone's Buying and Darkrai VSTAR Quietly Hit $117. Here's Why.

The North America International Championships wrapped in New Orleans on Sunday, and the week after a major event is always when the market shows its hand. Last week we flagged Dragapult ex as the deck to beat heading into NAIC, and the field proved it right: Dragapult was nearly half the room. But the more interesting buy is not the favorite everyone already owns. It is the card people reach for when a format gets that lopsided. That is one half of this week. The other half is a three-year-old alt art that has been climbing so steadily nobody made a headline out of it, until it crossed a round number that is hard to ignore.

What's hot: N's Zoroark ex (Journey Together #185)

When one deck eats 48% of a championship field, the next question every competitive player asks is "what beats it." At NAIC, the answer that kept showing up was N's Zoroark ex, the second most-played archetype on Limitless at roughly 7.56% of the field and the clearest counter-meta pick in the room. A Dragapult-saturated format rewards exactly what Zoroark does: trade favorably, swing tempo, and punish the mirror-match math everyone else is locked into. That is why the search and watchlist activity on the card jumped this week even though Dragapult won more matches. Collectors do not chase the card that is everywhere. They chase the card that signals you know how to beat what is everywhere.

The playable copies are cheap, as they almost always are. The regular Double Rare from Journey Together trades around a dollar, which is what competitors actually sleeve up. The card carrying the attention is the Special Illustration Rare, #185, the full-art with N and his Zoroark sharing the frame. As of today the TCGPlayer holofoil market sits at $52.42 with the floor around $49, and PriceCharting's blended ungraded comp reads $48.09. Those two numbers being that close together is a good sign. It tells you the price is real and liquid, not a thin spike propped up by two optimistic listings.

Be honest about what this move is. This is a demand-and-attention story tied to a tournament result, not a supply shock. Journey Together is a 2025 set that is still being opened, so there is no scarcity squeeze here. What you are buying is the bet that N's Zoroark stays relevant as the format's premier Dragapult answer through the next few months of regionals.

Flipper's angle: this is one of the rare weeks where the grading math is actually better than the headline price suggests. PriceCharting has the PSA 10 at $180.06, the 9.5 at $55, and the PSA 9 at $49.64. Read that ladder. A PSA 9 sells for basically what a clean raw copy already does, so the 9 is a wash after the grading fee and the eBay cut, the same trap we keep flagging on the PSA 9 versus PSA 10 gap. The difference is the spread. On a 10 you net somewhere near $140 after fees against the $52 you would get selling raw today, so the upside on a hit is real money, not the thin $65 margin we saw on Dragapult's SIR last week. Better still, this is a 2025 SIR with a smooth, non-textured surface, which grades 10 far more often than the vintage cards we cover. If you pull a clean copy, this is a genuine grade-and-submit candidate rather than a sell-raw default. Source carefully, check the corners under good light, and only submit copies you would bet on.

Biggest gainer: Darkrai VSTAR (Crown Zenith Galarian Gallery #GG50)

The biggest move on the board this week was not a tournament card at all. It was the Galarian Gallery Darkrai VSTAR alt art from Crown Zenith, and the move is notable precisely because it has been so quiet. TCGPlayer holofoil market now reads $117.36 with the floor at $100, and PriceCharting's lagging ungraded comp sits at $95.22. Rewind to April and clean copies were changing hands closer to $65. That is roughly an 80% climb in about two months, with the line still pointing up rather than rolling over.

The catalyst is the whole Crown Zenith Galarian Gallery subset, not Darkrai alone. Crown Zenith sealed product has been drying up at retail for months, and as the boxes disappear the only way to get the alt arts is the singles market. That has lit a slow fire under the entire GG run, and Darkrai is one of the most recognizable faces in it: a clean, dark, high-contrast piece of art that also happens to be a card with a real competitive history in Lost Zone toolbox decks. When a card is both a beloved alt art and a former meta staple, set-completion demand and nostalgia demand stack on top of each other.

Is it sustainable? This is the opposite profile from the hype pulses we usually warn about. There is no single announcement here to fade, no streamer moment to wear off. It is a supply story playing out across a sealed product that is genuinely getting harder to find, and those tend to grind higher rather than spike and crash. The honest caveat is that this is a multi-week climb, not a one-week pop, so if you are buying today you are buying into strength, not getting in early. Watch eBay sold depth. As long as clean copies keep clearing at $100-plus with steady daily volume, the trend has legs. If listings start stacking up unsold, that is your signal the subset has gotten ahead of itself.

Flipper's angle: the grading ladder tells the same story as the hot card, with a sharper edge. PriceCharting has the PSA 10 at $369, the 9.5 at $140.78, and the PSA 9 at $114.02. The PSA 9 is once again sitting right at the raw market price, so a 9 is a wash and the entire bet is the 10. The hard part is that Crown Zenith Galarian Gallery alt arts are notorious for centering and edge issues straight out of the pack, so the PSA 10 rate on raw copies is lower than the clean modern surface would suggest. That makes the pop-report read matter: before you submit, be honest about whether your copy is actually 10 material or just nice, because the gap between a 9 and a 10 here is over $250. If you do hit a 10, know where the strongest PSA 10 buyers actually are before you ship, because on a $369 slab the spread between selling venues is real.

What both moves tell you about this week's market

The two cards could not be more different, a 2025 tournament counter and a 2023 sealed-supply alt art, but they rhyme on the one number that matters for flippers. On both N's Zoroark ex and Darkrai VSTAR, the PSA 9 sells at or below a clean raw copy, which means the grading decision is binary every time: you are betting on the 10 or you are not grading at all. The difference between this week and last is the spread on a hit. On these two cards the PSA 10 pays enough to justify submitting copies you genuinely believe in, whereas last week's thin margins argued for selling raw.

The concrete action: separate the two plays in your head. N's Zoroark ex is a momentum bet on the competitive meta holding, so move while NAIC attention is fresh and only grade clean copies. Darkrai VSTAR is a supply bet that does not care about any calendar, so it rewards patience over urgency. Run both through Flipr's profit calculator with the live comps, not the lagging blended ones, because the raw-versus-PSA-10 math is where the actual decision lives on each. One is a fast window. The other is a slow grind. Knowing which is which is the whole job.