Black Bolt: the most expensive Pokémon cards

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Black Bolt came out on 18 July 2025 alongside its twin White Flare, and together they introduced a structure the Scarlet and Violet block had never used: nearly every card that matters is a full-page illustration, and the same creature exists both as an eleven-cent ordinary version and as an illustrated one that can be worth a hundred euros.

The extreme case is Seismitoad: the base print (#021) costs 0.11 €, the illustrated one (#105) costs 105.64 €. Nine hundred and sixty times, for a Pokémon nobody plays.

We ran every card in the set through the DarkDex pricing engine and sorted by value. These are real single-card prices, Near Mint, the lowest available across sellers, updated on 21 August 2026. Graded copies are excluded: a slabbed card follows a separate market.

In short. Black Bolt costs 1,678 € to complete, the second highest figure in the block, with just 171 cards. Leading, Victini (#171) at 290.00 €, then Zekrom EX (#172) at 259.64 € and the second version of Zekrom EX (#166) at 178.64 €. Prices as of 21 August 2026.

The ranking: the 20 most expensive cards

This is the full ranking down to 15 euros: every card in the set worth more than that.

1VictiniBlack White Rare · #171€290.00

2Zekrom EXBlack White Rare · #172€259.64

3Zekrom EXSpecial Illustration Rare · #166€178.64

4SeismitoadIllustration Rare · #105€105.64

5EelektrossIllustration Rare · #115€65.59

6AmoongussIllustration Rare · #096€57.84

7Kyurem exSpecial Illustration Rare · #165€48.64

8KrookodileIllustration Rare · #137€39.52

9N's PlanSpecial Illustration Rare · #170€37.52

10SnivyIllustration Rare · #087€37.42

11VolcaronaIllustration Rare · #100€30.91

12Serperior exSpecial Illustration Rare · #164€28.30

13LandorusIllustration Rare · #131€25.77

14HaxorusIllustration Rare · #147€25.40

15Genesect exSpecial Illustration Rare · #169€25.29

16ScolipedeIllustration Rare · #134€21.39

17EelektrikIllustration Rare · #114€19.27

18Meloetta exSpecial Illustration Rare · #167€19.27

19ConkeldurrIllustration Rare · #127€18.27

20EscavalierIllustration Rare · #138€15.21

Twenty rows, and the twentieth is still at 15.21 €. In Journey Together, released four months earlier, the twentieth card costs 1.13. That is the difference between a set with a tail of commons and a set that effectively has none.

These are the cards people buy boxes for. Add them to your collection on DarkDex and track their value day by day, without redoing the maths every time the market moves.

Why we excluded the 2,000 € Fraxure

The first card the pricing engine returns for Black Bolt is not the Victini: it is a Fraxure (#146) at 2,000.64 €. We left it out of the ranking, and it is worth explaining why.

That price has two listings behind it. A price with two sellers is not a market price: it is what two people decided to ask, and nobody has paid it yet. The rule we apply is fixed and holds for every set: if the top card costs more than four times the next one and has fewer than five listings, it drops out of the ranking.

The Victini, for comparison, has seventeen sellers at 290 €, and the cards below it have between ten and thirty. Those are prices somebody actually pays.

Which is the rarest card in Black Bolt?

The rarest card in Black Bolt is Zekrom EX (#172), the last numbered card in the set. It is a Black White Rare, the new rarity debuting in these two sets, and it is worth 259.64 €.

As in White Flare, the rarest card is also the second most expensive: ahead of it sits only Victini (#171) at 290.00 €, the other Black White Rare. In the other six sets of the block the last numbered card is a gold trainer worth a few euros, here it is one of the two chase cards.

Pull rates are not published, so there is no official answer, and price remains the only measurable indicator.

The chase cards of Black Bolt

There are four chase cards:

1. Victini (#171), Black White Rare: 290.00 €
2. Zekrom EX (#172), Black White Rare: 259.64 €
3. Zekrom EX (#166), Special Illustration Rare: 178.64 €
4. Seismitoad (#105), Illustration Rare: 105.64 €

The top three together are worth 728 €, 43% of the set. The fourth is the signature of these two sets: a Seismitoad that is useless in play and worth more than any chase card in Journey Together, Paradox Rift or Twilight Masquerade.

Add them to your collection on DarkDex and follow the value day by day.

The set where a Snivy is worth thirty-seven euros

Same creature, different prints, inside the same set:

• Seismitoad: #105 at 105.64 €, #021 at 0.11 € (960 times)
• Eelektross: #115 at 65.59 €, #032 at 0.11 € (596 times)
• Amoonguss: #096 at 57.84 €, #011 at 0.11 €
• Krookodile: #137 at 39.52 €, #059 at 0.11 €
• Snivy: #087 at 37.42 €, #001 at 0.11 € (340 times)

Snivy is the first card in the set, a basic starter that in any other expansion would be worth eleven cents. Here its illustrated version is worth thirty-seven euros.

Which is why estimating a collection by eye is impossible on these two sets: two cards with the same name printed on them can be worth 0.11 € and 105 €, and the only thing telling them apart is the number at the bottom. DarkDex keeps the price of every single variant separate for exactly this reason.

The twin: Black Bolt or White Flare?

The two sets came out on the same day, hold the same number of cards and share the same structure. Completing Black Bolt costs 1,678 €, completing White Flare costs 1,613: a 4% difference, inside the market noise.

At the top of both sits a Victini, the same illustration split into two variants, one per set: 290.00 € here, 300.64 € in the twin. Below that, Black Bolt is the Zekrom set and White Flare the Reshiram one, and the two legendaries are worth almost identical money.

On the numbers they are the same set. Choosing between them is an aesthetic decision, not an economic one.

How much it costs to complete Black Bolt

Buying every card in the set at the lowest Near Mint listing, one by one, takes around 1,678 €:

• the top three cards cost 728 €, which is 43% of the total
• the top ten reach 1,120 €, or 67%
• the median card is 0.11 €
• 92 cards out of 171, 54% of the set, sit below one euro

Translated: without the top ten cards the set still costs 557 €, and that is the number that explains everything. In Journey Together the same figure is 55 €, ten times less. Black Bolt has no cheap half to start from.

Worth saying that this is a theoretical floor: minimums from different sellers, shipping excluded, counting only the 171 cards that have at least one listing, Fraxure excluded.

Where Black Bolt sits in the Scarlet and Violet block

We ran eight sets of the Scarlet and Violet block through the pricing engine, so the comparison can be made on numbers rather than impressions:

The "cards" column counts the cards in the set with at least one Near Mint listing, not the number printed on the back of the pack.

Black Bolt has the fewest cards in the group and the second highest cost to complete. The average price per card is 9.81 €, against 7.19 € for Destined Rivals and 1.91 € for Journey Together.

Put another way: Destined Rivals is expensive because it has five expensive cards, Black Bolt is expensive because it has no throwaway cards.

Singles or packs?

Black Bolt has no traditional Booster Box: it sells as a Booster Bundle at 42.64 € and an Elite Trainer Box at 60.64 €. Those prices are modest relative to the value of the singles, because the odds of pulling one of the two Black White Rares are tiny.

1,678 € buys the whole set in singles. The same money buys twenty-seven Elite Trainer Boxes, with no guarantees at all. Packs are opened for fun, sets are completed with singles: on Black Bolt that holds more than anywhere else.

Heads up. Card prices move constantly, and chase cards are the most volatile of all: the numbers in this article are a snapshot of the market on 21 August 2026.

How to keep an eye on the value

On DarkDex you add your Black Bolt cards to your collection and the market value updates itself, with price history and your portfolio total always in view. It works with any language and any condition, not just English cards.

The same ranking exists for the other sets in the block: White Flare (the twin), Destined Rivals, Surging Sparks, Twilight Masquerade, Journey Together, Paradox Rift and Paldea Evolved.