N's Zoroark ex Price Is Climbing After NAIC and Darkrai VSTAR Just Hit $117

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. The card collectors actually went out and bought this week was N's Zoroark ex, the answer people reach for when one deck takes over a format. The week's other story is Darkrai VSTAR from Crown Zenith, an alt art from 2023 that has climbed so steadily for so long that nobody made a headline out of it until it passed $100.

N's Zoroark ex (Journey Together #185) is the card that beats Dragapult

When one deck eats 48% of a championship field, every competitive player asks the same question: 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 pick in the room. A format this full of Dragapult rewards exactly what Zoroark does: trade favorably, swing tempo, and punish the math everyone else is locked into. That is why search and watchlist activity on the card jumped this week even though Dragapult won more matches. Collectors chase the card that beats what is everywhere, not the card everyone already owns.

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 copy 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 price reads $48.09. Those two numbers sitting that close together is a good sign. It means the price is real and easy to sell into, not a thin spike propped up by two optimistic listings.

Be honest about what this move is. It is a demand story tied to a tournament result, not a supply squeeze. Journey Together is a 2025 set that is still being opened, so nothing here is scarce. What you are buying is the bet that N's Zoroark stays the format's main Dragapult answer through the next few months of regionals.

Flipper's angle: this is one of the rare weeks where the grading math is 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. A PSA 9 sells for basically what a clean raw copy already does, so a 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. What changes the picture is the 10. Hit one and you net somewhere near $140 after fees against the $52 you would get selling raw today, which 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 surface and no texture, and cards like that come back a 10 far more often than the vintage cards we cover. If you pull a clean copy, this is a genuine candidate to grade rather than a card to sell raw by default. Source carefully, check the corners under good light, and only submit copies you would bet on.

Darkrai VSTAR (Crown Zenith Galarian Gallery #GG50) climbed to $117

The biggest move on our list this week was the Galarian Gallery Darkrai VSTAR alt art from Crown Zenith, and it is notable precisely because it has been so quiet. The TCGPlayer holofoil market now reads $117.36 with the floor at $100, and PriceCharting's lagging ungraded figure 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 driver 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 piece of art that also happens to have a real competitive history in Lost Zone toolbox decks. When a card is both a beloved alt art and a former meta staple, collectors finishing the set and collectors buying back their nostalgia are bidding on the same copies.

Can it keep going? This is the opposite of the hype pulses we usually warn about. There is no single announcement 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 climb measured in months, not a pop measured in days, so if you are buying today you are buying into strength, not getting in early. Watch what actually sells on eBay. As long as clean copies keep selling above $100 with steady daily volume, the climb is holding. If listings start stacking up unsold, that is your signal the subset has gotten ahead of itself.

Flipper's angle: the graded prices tell 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 fewer raw copies earn a 10 than the clean modern surface suggests. 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 difference between selling venues is real money.

What both moves say about this week's market

A 2025 tournament counter and a 2023 alt art running out of sealed supply could not be more different, but they agree 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 makes the grading decision the same every time: you are betting on the 10 or you are not grading at all. What separates this week from last is what a 10 pays. 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 is to keep the two plays separate in your head. N's Zoroark ex depends on the competitive meta holding, so move while NAIC attention is fresh and only grade clean copies. Darkrai VSTAR is a supply story that does not care about any calendar, so it rewards patience over urgency. Run both through Flipr's profit calculator with the live prices, 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 and the other is a slow grind, and knowing which is which is the whole job.