30th Celebration Illustration Rares Fell 21% in a Week

Sellers holding 30th Celebration Illustration Rares cut their asking prices again over the past week, and this time almost all of them did it at once. Of the 14 Illustration Rares in the set with a readable price on both September 22 and September 29, 13 got cheaper, and the average drop was 20.9 percent. Chandelure 137/128 went from $7.05 to $4.63. Maushold 146/128 went from $25.91 to $17.04. We track daily prices across roughly 3,000 modern Pokemon products along with what collectors are posting about, and this is the clearest one-way move the 30th Celebration has made since it launched on September 16.

Thirteen of 30th Celebration's fourteen Illustration Rares got cheaper

Here is the week in full for the cards that moved most, using the TCGplayer sales average on each date:

Card	Sept 22	Sept 29	Change
Chandelure 137/128	$7.05	$4.63	down 34.3%
Maushold 146/128	$25.91	$17.04	down 34.2%
Galarian Meowth 141/128	$16.51	$11.73	down 29.0%
Alolan Meowth 139/128	$14.97	$10.88	down 27.3%
Hisuian Zorua 145/128	$11.85	$8.98	down 24.2%
Moltres 130/128	$12.98	$9.80	down 24.5%
Articuno 132/128	$14.98	$12.17	down 18.8%

Only one Illustration Rare in the set rose at all, Drifloon 136/128, and it went up $0.35 on a $7 card.

The part that makes this credible rather than noisy is that the cheapest listing fell too. On 10 of the 13 decliners, the asking floor and the midpoint of the stack dropped right along with the average. A single card can look like it moved when one unusual sale drags the average around, but when the bottom of the listing stack comes down with it, somebody genuinely lowered their price and it stuck.

The listing stacks are deep, which is what makes the drop real

A falling price on a card with four sellers means nothing. These are not that. Alolan Meowth 139/128 currently has 195 sellers listing 275 copies, with the cheapest genuine English copy delivering for $11.45. Zapdos 133/128 has 250 sellers listing 284 copies at a $9.07 floor. Those are crowded, liquid boards, and they are marking down together.

Compare the sales average to that floor and the two agree closely, which is the other thing worth checking before believing a price. Alolan Meowth averages $10.88 against an $11.45 floor. When the average sits miles above what you can actually go and buy, the average is the thing that is wrong, and here it is not.

The Special Illustration Rares are doing the same thing more slowly: 9 of the 10 with comparable prices fell, for an average of 6.9 percent. The one exception is Jirachi ex 155/128, and we went through why it bounced in this week's roundup of what actually moved.

None of this should surprise anyone who has watched a set get past its first month. TCGplayer opened 3,000 English packs and published the rates on September 23: one Special Illustration Rare every 21 packs and one Illustration Rare every 5, the friendliest chase rates of the modern era. A set that generous makes a lot of chase cards and the prices come down to meet them. We wrote up that whole pattern in why new-set chase cards drop in month two, and 30th Celebration is running it close to schedule.

The Crystal Lugia went the other way, and we do not think it holds

The one 30th Celebration card that ran this week came out of the Classic Collection subset. Lugia 149/147, the Crystal Type Lugia reprinted from Aquapolis, went from a $238 asking floor on September 22 to $350 today, with the sales average moving $246.78 to $389.31. We covered this card when it first found a real price at $251 after sellers had presold it at $1,300, so it has now given back most of that gap in eleven days.

Worth being careful with the numbers. The $389 figure is an average of sales, not a price you can pay. When we pulled the live listings on Tuesday afternoon, the cheapest genuine English copy delivered for $315.00, and there were 68 sellers holding 68 copies between them. Almost nobody has two. A board that thin moves a long way on a handful of buyers, in either direction.

The chatter around it is not bullish either. Lugia came up in five Reddit threads this week across r/PokeInvesting and r/PokemonTCG, which was the strongest attention signal in the whole sweep of 329 posts and still only about twice its normal rate. Two of those threads are people worrying rather than buying. One asks outright whether Lugia 30th prices will tank with more product coming. Another posts a PSA 10 selling on eBay for $4,650 and asks whether that is concerning. We have not verified that sale and are not treating it as a comp, but the mood is the useful part.

So here is our call, and we will grade it either way. We expect the cheapest genuine English Crystal Lugia 149/147 on TCGplayer to deliver for less than $315.00 on October 27. More sealed 30th Celebration product lands on October 2 and October 30, every box that gets opened makes more Classic Collection cards at a measured rate of one every 10 packs, and 68 copies is not much standing supply to push against. If the floor is above $315 on the review date we were wrong, and we will say so in the column that week. The honest counter is that Lugia is the set's marquee vintage reprint on an anniversary release, and that is a demand shape we have never measured.

McDonald's is printing Pokemon cards again in November

PokeBeach reported on Sunday that McDonald's will run a Happy Meal Pokemon TCG promotion in the United States from November 5 through December 9, with 15 cards in the usual four-card packs on confetti holofoil. The site calls the information preliminary and subject to change, and neither McDonald's nor Pokemon has confirmed it, so read it as one outlet's reporting rather than an announcement.

We checked whether the news moved any older McDonald's promos and it did not. The 2023 McDonald's Pikachu showed up on our gainers list at plus 20.8 percent, which looks like a reaction until you open it. Its asking floor went from $3.55 to $3.56 over those five days and its midpoint from $9.25 to $9.30. The entire move sits in the sales average and nowhere else, which means nothing got more expensive to buy. That is worth remembering any time a headline and a green percentage land in the same week.

Where our September 7 Elite Trainer Box call stands

On September 7 we said the 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box would fall below $184.74 once the September 16 street date put retail copies in sellers' hands, and we laid out the reasoning then. That call comes due tomorrow, and it is working. The cheapest genuine English box delivers for $168.49 today, down 8.8 percent. More to the point, the supply arrived exactly as described: 32 sellers holding 908 copies on September 7, against 228 sellers holding 1,239 copies now.

One warning if you go and check that yourself. The first 20 listings on the box's page are junk: empty boxes, opened boxes, a coin and dice lot, and six Chinese and Korean booster boxes filed under the English box's page. The first real sealed English box is listing number 21.

The tracker surfaces candidates and we publish what the numbers say, which is not the same thing as investment advice. Sealed product and graded cards are speculative and can be slow to sell. Every price above came from TCGplayer listings and our own daily price readings pulled on September 29.