Destined Rivals: the most expensive Pokémon cards

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Destined Rivals came out on 30 May 2025 and it is the set that brought Team Rocket back into the Pokémon Trading Card Game after more than twenty years. A year on, that decision reads better in the prices than in any review.

One number explains the whole set: Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex exists in four different prints, and the plain one (#081) costs 0.28 € while its Special Illustration Rare (#231) is worth 629.64 €. Same creature, 2,248 times the price.

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. Destined Rivals is the most expensive set of the Scarlet and Violet block we measured: completing it costs 1,755 €. Leading the ranking, Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex (#231) at 629.64 €, then Team Rocket's Moltres ex (#229) at 220.64 € and Ethan's Ho-Oh ex (#230) at 180.64 €. The top three alone are 59% of the set. Prices as of 21 August 2026.

The ranking: the 20 most expensive cards

This is the full ranking down to 10 euros: every card in the set worth more than that.

1Team Rocket's Mewtwo exSpecial Illustration Rare · #231€629.64

2Team Rocket's Moltres exSpecial Illustration Rare · #229€220.64

3Ethan's Ho-Oh exSpecial Illustration Rare · #230€180.64

4Cynthia's Garchomp exSpecial Illustration Rare · #232€170.64

5Team Rocket's Nidoking exSpecial Illustration Rare · #233€103.38

6Team Rocket's Crobat exSpecial Illustration Rare · #234€62.67

7Team Rocket's Mewtwo exHyper Rare · #240€42.14

8Team Rocket's GiovanniSpecial Illustration Rare · #238€30.78

9Ethan's AdventureSpecial Illustration Rare · #236€27.98

10Team Rocket's ArianaSpecial Illustration Rare · #237€24.89

11Misty's PsyduckIllustration Rare · #193€20.27

12Arven's Mabosstiff exSpecial Illustration Rare · #235€20.27

13Yanmega exSpecial Illustration Rare · #228€19.98

14Ethan's Ho-Oh exHyper Rare · #239€18.00

15Cynthia's Garchomp exHyper Rare · #241€15.41

16Team Rocket's Crobat exHyper Rare · #242€14.09

17Team Rocket's MeowthIllustration Rare · #203€12.87

18Jamming TowerHyper Rare · #243€12.00

19Misty's LaprasIllustration Rare · #194€10.15

20Team Rocket's Mewtwo exUltra Rare · #213€10.12

Twenty rows, and the twentieth is still at 10.12 €: Destined Rivals has a wide head, not a single peak. From the twenty-first down you drop below ten euros and the 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.

Which is the rarest card in Destined Rivals?

The rarest card in Destined Rivals is Levincia (#244), the last numbered card in the set, a gold Hyper Rare. It is worth 8.41 €.

The most expensive is something else entirely: Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex Special Illustration Rare (#231) at 629.64 €, seventy-five times as much. It is the clearest proof that declared rarity does not make the price: what makes it is how many people want that specific card. A gold trainer card is chased by people completing the set, a Team Rocket Mewtwo is chased by anyone who played Pokémon in the nineties.

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

The chase cards of Destined Rivals

There are five chase cards, and four out of five are historic characters:

1. Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex (#231), Special Illustration Rare: 629.64 €
2. Team Rocket's Moltres ex (#229), Special Illustration Rare: 220.64 €
3. Ethan's Ho-Oh ex (#230), Special Illustration Rare: 180.64 €
4. Cynthia's Garchomp ex (#232), Special Illustration Rare: 170.64 €
5. Team Rocket's Nidoking ex (#233), Special Illustration Rare: 103.38 €

The real gap is between first and second: 629 € down to 220 €, almost a third. Below the top five the set drops fast, and from sixth place on nothing clears 65 €.

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

Why Team Rocket is worth this much

The top ten holds seven Team Rocket cards and two of Ethan's. That is not an accident: Destined Rivals is built on a block of characters people met as children, and nostalgia is the one thing the market never prices in advance.

The most useful comparison is with the cards in the same set featuring recent characters. Arven's Mabosstiff ex (#235), same rarity and same theoretical print run as the chase cards, sits at 20.27 €: thirty-one times less than the Mewtwo. The difference is not the print, it is who is on it.

There is a counterexample worth noting too. Misty's Psyduck (#193), which is "only" an Illustration Rare and not a Special, sits at 20.27 €, ahead of several Special Illustration Rares in the same set. Artwork that lands beats a higher rarity tier.

The versions of Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex

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

• base print (#081): 0.28 €, the one that comes out of ordinary packs
• Ultra Rare full art (#213): 10.12 €, twentieth in the ranking
• gold Hyper Rare (#240): 42.14 €, seventh in the ranking
• Special Illustration Rare (#231): 629.64 €, the most expensive in the set

From first to last there are 2,248 times the difference. Value does not live in the creature, it lives in the print: collector number, rarity and finish. Which is exactly why estimating a collection by eye does not work, and why DarkDex keeps the price of every single variant separate instead of lumping them under one name.

It is not an isolated case: Team Rocket's Moltres ex goes from 0.11 € for the base print to 220.64 € for the Special Illustration Rare, roughly two thousand times, and Ethan's Ho-Oh ex makes the same jump with a 1,642x gap.

How much it costs to complete Destined Rivals

Buying every card in the set at the lowest Near Mint listing, one by one, takes around 1,755 €. The figure alone says little, because it is distributed terribly:

• the top three cards cost 1,031 €, which is 59% of the total
• the top ten reach 1,493 €, or 85%
• the median card is 0.11 €: half the set costs about as much as a stick of gum
• 194 cards out of 244, 80% of the set, sit below one euro

Translated: without the top ten cards the set costs about 262 €, and all the rest of the spend is three cards. Which is why completing a collection almost always works out cheaper with singles than with packs.

Worth saying that this is a theoretical floor: these are minimums from different sellers, shipping excluded, and it only counts the 244 cards that have at least one listing. In practice you spend more, but as an order of magnitude it is honest.

The variants left out of the ranking

Destined Rivals also has reverse holo prints, which the market treats separately. They are not in this ranking, which covers the standard prints of the set: mixing them in would give you a table with the same card repeated at different prices, more confusing than useful.

Where Destined Rivals 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.

Read that way, Destined Rivals is the most expensive set to complete in the group, and it manages that with fewer cards than Paldea Evolved or Paradox Rift. It is not a big set: it is a concentrated one, where five illustrations are worth as much as everything else combined.

The comparison that clarifies best is with Paradox Rift: same order of magnitude in card count, but there the top three are 26% of the set and here they are 59%. Two opposite ways of distributing value, and they completely change what is worth buying.

Singles or packs?

It depends on what you are after, and it is worth being honest about the difference. You buy packs for the fun of opening them: the expected value of a box is almost always below the price of the box, and it is money well spent only if the opening itself is the point. You buy singles when the goal is a specific card or the complete set, because you pay market price and you know exactly what arrives.

On Destined Rivals the maths is stark: 205.64 € for a Booster Box against 1,755 € for the whole set in singles, of which 1,031 € is the top three cards. For the price of one box, buying singles from the cheapest up, you take home 95% of the cards in the set. The Elite Trainer Box sits at 90.64 € and remains the cheapest way into the set if you are not going after the chase cards.

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 Destined Rivals 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: Surging Sparks, Twilight Masquerade, Journey Together, White Flare, Black Bolt, Paradox Rift and Paldea Evolved, the set that opened the series.