Chaos Rising: the most expensive Pokémon cards

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Chaos Rising is the fourth expansion in the Mega Evolution series, released on 22 May 2026. Almost three months after launch the prices have settled, which makes this picture far more reliable than the ones published during release week.

The set revolves entirely around Mega Greninja ex, and a single figure explains how this market works: the common print of Mega Greninja ex (#022) sells for €0.92, while its Special Illustration Rare (#116) is worth €199.64. Same creature, 217 times the price.

We ran all 122 cards in the set through the DarkDex pricing engine and ranked them by value: real prices for singles in Near Mint condition, updated to 12 August 2026. Graded copies are excluded, because a slabbed card is a different market.

In short. Value in Chaos Rising is extremely concentrated: Mega Greninja ex Special Illustration Rare (#116) at €199.64 and its Gold Secret Rare (#122) at €120.64 are together worth more than sixty per cent of the set. The third card, Cinccino ex (#119), is already down at €28.90. Prices as of 12 August 2026.

The ranking: the 10 most expensive cards

1Mega Greninja exSpecial Illustration Rare · #116€199.64

2Mega Greninja exGold Secret Rare · #122€120.64

3Cinccino exSpecial Illustration Rare · #119€28.90

4Mega Dragalge exSpecial Illustration Rare · #118€27.39

5Mega Floette exSpecial Illustration Rare · #117€20.27

6AZ's TranquilitySpecial Illustration Rare · #120€15.11

7Roxie's PerformanceSpecial Illustration Rare · #121€10.00

8Mega Greninja exFull Art · #100€9.05

9FrogadierIllustration Rare · #089€5.00

10FroakieIllustration Rare · #088€4.90

Ten rows, and it is worth pointing out where the set thins out: only the top eight cards are above €9, while the last two in the table, the full-art Frogadier and Froakie, are already around €5. From the eleventh down you enter a sea of cards under €4, where a most-expensive ranking stops answering the question.

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 the value sits so high up

Seven of the eight cards in the ranking are Special Illustration Rare or Gold Secret Rare, the full-art and gold treatments. This is the typical shape of a Mega Evolution expansion: the set prints few chase cards and makes them very hard to pull, so value piles up there instead of spreading out.

Two Trainer cards make the list, AZ's Tranquility (#120) at €15.11 and Roxie's Performance (#121) at €10. That always happens: full-art Trainers are worth more than common creatures, because fewer are printed and because competitive players actually need them.

The many versions of Mega Greninja ex

Mega Greninja ex exists in four different prints inside the same set, and it is the textbook case for why a Pokémon's name tells you nothing about price:

• base print (#022): €0.92, the one that comes out of ordinary packs
• Full Art (#100): €9.05, the eighth card in the ranking
• Gold Secret Rare (#122): €120.64
• Special Illustration Rare (#116): €199.64, the most expensive card in the set

That is a 217x spread from first to last. The value is not in the creature, it is in the print: collector number, rarity and finish. This is exactly why eyeballing a collection's worth does not work, and why DarkDex keeps the price of every single variant separate instead of lumping them under one name.

It is not a one-off. Mega Dragalge ex runs from €0.11 for the base print to €27.39 for the Special Illustration Rare, a 249x gap, and Mega Floette ex does the same thing with a 184x spread.

What it costs to complete Chaos Rising

This is the question nobody asks before starting, and the answer is almost always surprising.

Buying every card in the set at the lowest Near Mint price, one by one, costs roughly €507. But that number alone is misleading, because it is distributed terribly:

• the top three cards alone cost €349, which is 69% of the total
• the set's median card is €0.11: half the set costs about as much as a stick of gum
• 89 of 122 cards, 73% of the set, are under one euro

In plain terms: the "almost complete" set costs a little over €150, and everything else is three cards. That is why completing a set is nearly always cheaper through singles than through packs. A Chaos Rising Booster Box costs €148.99 and guarantees you none of the three cards that actually carry the value.

Worth saying clearly: this is a theoretical floor. These are minimums from different sellers, shipping excluded, and it only counts cards with at least one listing. In practice you will spend more. As an order of magnitude, though, it is honest, and far more useful than a guess.

The variants that stay out of the ranking

Chaos Rising also has special reverse holo prints, which the market treats as separate expansions. They are not in this ranking, which covers the set's standard prints: mixing them in would produce a table with the same card repeated at different prices, which confuses more than it helps.

Where Chaos Rising sits in the series

We ran all six sets in the Mega Evolution series through the pricing engine, so this comparison rests on numbers rather than impressions. It is the context that is always missing when you look at one ranking in isolation:

Read that way, Chaos Rising is the second cheapest set to complete in the series, just behind Perfect Order. But it is also one of the most concentrated: 69% of the value sits in three cards, more than Ascended Heroes and Mega Evolution, which are both under 50%, and less only than Phantasmal Flames, which reaches 91%.

For collectors that means something specific: the set closes almost entirely for very little, and the difference is made by the two Mega Greninja ex at the top. If the goal is a full binder, Chaos Rising is among the most affordable in the block. If the goal is the chase cards, that is where all the money goes, and there are no shortcuts.

Singles or packs?

It depends on what you are actually after, and it is worth being honest about the difference. Packs are bought for the fun of opening them: the expected value of a box is almost always below the price of the box, and it is worth spending only if the opening itself is part of the enjoyment. Singles are for when you want a specific card or the complete set, because you pay market price and know exactly what arrives.

On Chaos Rising the maths is stark: €148.99 for a Booster Box against €507 for the whole set in singles, of which €349 is the top three cards. For the price of one box you can buy roughly 90% of the set, chase cards excluded.

Heads up. Card prices move constantly, and chase cards are the most volatile of all: the figures in this article capture the market on 12 August 2026.

How to keep track of the value

On DarkDex you add your Chaos Rising cards to your collection and the market value updates itself, with price history and a running portfolio total. It works with any language and any condition, not just English cards.

The same ranking exists for every other set in the Mega Evolution series: Pitch Black, Perfect Order, Ascended Heroes (the richest set in the block), Phantasmal Flames and Mega Evolution, the expansion that opened the series.