Reddit Roundup Pokémon TCG Reddit: The 30th Market Refused to Crash and Lv.X Cards Took Off

Each week we read the busiest Pokémon TCG corners of Reddit and put verified Catchinary price data next to the conversation. Last week r/PokemonInvesting was telling everyone to dump their 30th Celebration singles. This week of September 27, 2026 the same sub spent most of its time pointing out that the crash never showed up: sealed is still selling well over retail, the chase Mew finally has a real market price, and the older-card talk was all about Diamond and Pearl era Lv.X cards.

Key takeaways

• The busiest r/PokemonInvesting thread of the week, at 331 comments, pushed back on the "scalpers are cooked" posts. Commenters said 30th elite trainer boxes sell regularly for $160 or more.
• The Green RGB Mew now has a real market read on Catchinary: $3,574.75, against $3,599.00 two days earlier. Blue and Red still have listings only.
• r/PokemonTCG's most-commented thread was a family statement asking resellers to stop pumping the Jirachi ex special illustration rare. It reads $117.70 on Catchinary, nowhere near the $20,000 listings.
• Lv.X cards from the Diamond and Pearl era kept running. The Rayquaza C Lv.X DP47 promo reads $471.25 raw, and one PSA 9 was listed at $25,000.
• A sub-$1 Melmetal promo went to a $26 high in two weeks, and one commenter posted the TCGplayer sales data showing exactly how.
• Prismatic Evolutions Moonbreon slipped from $1,480.32 last week to $1,384.05, the only one of last week's three benchmark cards to move.

"Scalpers are cooked" met the actual 30th market

Seven days ago the loudest advice on r/PokemonInvesting was to sell 30th Celebration singles before they fell. This week a thread titled simply "The actual 30th Market" collected 331 comments, the most of any r/PokemonInvesting post this week, and most of them were aimed at the people saying resellers had been burned. The top reply, at 120 upvotes, did the maths out loud: buy an elite trainer box at £50, sell it for £140. Another said they had been hunting for a cheap box all week and could not find one under $160. A third guessed that $10 a pack is where the floor ends up.

r/PokemonTCG, meanwhile, was enjoying the set. A post arguing every set should have 30th Celebration pull rates took 1,608 upvotes, and its top comment at 784 said early Scarlet and Violet felt the same way and was the most fun they had opening packs. "Opened a 30th etb and it only had 8 packs?!?" hit 2,037 upvotes, mostly on the strength of one reply claiming the missing pack had an RGB Mew in it. On r/PokemonInvesting, a person weighing one Pokémon Center elite trainer box against three regular ones was told, almost unanimously, to keep the Pokémon Center box. It is the only limited product in the set.

The price data now backs the sealed crowd on the single that matters most. Last week the RGB Mew had nothing but asking prices. Today the Green RGB Mew carries a TCGplayer market of $3,574.75 on Catchinary, barely changed from $3,599.00 on September 25. The Blue and Red versions still only have listings, with the cheapest Red asking $5,999.00. Further down the set, the Mew ex special illustration rare went from $147.42 to $154.79 over the same two days. The full list lives on our 30th Celebration set page.

Threads: "The actual 30th Market" · "Let's be honest, having the pullrates of the 30th anniversary set on all sets would be more enjoyable and reduce scalping" · "Opened a 30th etb and it only had 8 packs?!?" · "Pokémon Center ETB vs 3 Normal ETBS"

The Jirachi ex pump, and the family that asked it to stop

The most-commented thread on r/PokemonTCG this week, at 3,695 upvotes and 366 comments, was a statement from the family of Avery the Poké Kid. The context comment, at 1,110 upvotes, laid it out. The 30th Celebration Jirachi ex special illustration rare was the last card Avery pulled on camera before he died. Resellers then started calling it "Avery's Jirachi," attached thin promises to donate part of the sale to charity, and listed copies for as much as $20,000. The top comment, at 2,020 upvotes, was one sentence about how scummy people can be, and nobody in the thread disagreed.

The price data is the useful part here. The Jirachi ex special illustration rare reads $117.70 market on Catchinary, up from $116.18 on September 25. That puts it in line with the set's other big special illustration rares, with the Mew ex at $154.79. One commenter said it was the only card they wanted from the set and was annoyed to see it over $100. It is, but only just, and the $20,000 listings did not produce sales anywhere near that. If you want the card, buy it at the market price from a normal seller and ignore anything with a story attached.

Threads: "A statement from the family of Avery the Poké Kid regarding inflated sales of the Jirachi ex SAR from 30th Celebration"

Lv.X cards had a quiet, expensive week

A 46-comment thread on r/PokemonInvesting opened with a person asking what was going on with a Lv.X card they owned, after seeing a PSA 9 copy listed at $25,000. The most useful answer came from someone who collects the era. The kids who played Diamond and Pearl are grown up with adult money now, the cards are low population, they are hard to grade, and quality control in that period was not kind. They also added the caveat that a listing at $25,000 is only an asking price. Another reply named the card they had been watching, the DP47 Rayquaza promo, and said it was skyrocketing too.

On Catchinary the Rayquaza C Lv.X DP47 promo reads $471.25 raw, and the Great Encounters Palkia Lv.X reads $215.36. The weekly Top Sales thread drew a single sharp question in its comments, asking who was paying $200,000 for a Palkia Lv.X. Here is a comparison that did not come up in any thread. 30th Celebration's Classic Collection reprinted that exact Palkia, and the Classic Collection Palkia Lv.X reads $14.53. Same Pokémon, same name, and the original is worth roughly fifteen times as much. Whatever is driving Lv.X prices lives in the original print and the slab.

Gold Stars were the other half of the mid-era conversation. In a thread about investing regrets, one commenter said they sold PSA 9 copies of the Gold Star Rayquaza and Gyarados last June for $31,000 combined and figured both were worth about five times that now. For raw copies, Catchinary has the Deoxys Rayquaza Gold Star at $2,500.99 and the Holon Phantoms Gyarados Gold Star at $1,333.56, up from $1,200.00 when we quoted it last week.

Threads: "Does anyone know what is going on with this card?" · "Top Sales (Sep 14th - 20th, 2026)" · "What is your major regret in your Pokemon investing journey so far?"

The Simplified Chinese Pikachu bet

Three separate r/PokemonInvesting posts this week were about the same thing: the Simplified Chinese exclusive Pikachu promos. One poster bought five graded sets and titled it "These will be grails." It drew 201 comments, a lot of them skeptical. Another showed a large stack of slabs with the caption that they would either be the biggest fool or wish they had bought more. One reply on that one, at 12 upvotes, summed up the skeptics by describing the purchase as a large pile of Chinese Pikachu slabs posted to Reddit to help pump them up.

The bull case, from a third thread called "Some people just don't get it," was that region-exclusive Pikachu, Gengar and Eeveelution cards have historically done well, that Simplified Chinese has produced some of the more original products of recent years, and that these stay a hold as long as they stay exclusive. A reply on the five-sets thread mentioned a population around 8,000 against a very large potential audience. Catchinary prices English cards only, so we have no number to put against these. The honest read is that this is a thesis with very little sales history behind it, and the people holding it are also the people posting about it.

Threads: "Just bought 5 sets. These will be grails." · "Putting my Money where my mouth is" · "Some people just don't get it… Chinese Simplified Exclusive Pikachus are a legit play."

How a 67-cent Melmetal became a $26 card

The best single comment of the week sat under a 104-upvote post that just asked "What's going on here," about a stamped Melmetal promo whose price had jumped. A commenter who had been buying the card for a binder page did the work. From August 2 to September 3, 115 copies sold on TCGplayer at about 3.6 a day, for an average of $0.72. On September 4, 43 sold. On September 5, 107 sold. Over the next 14 days, 87 more sold at an average of $10.07, with a high of $26.

Their read was that something, possibly a bot watching cheap low-population cards for bursts of activity, bought out every copy under $10. The card then showed up at the top of weekly gainer lists, which pulled in more buyers, which kept it there. The thread mostly called it a penny stock. The lesson travels well past Melmetal: a 10x move on a card with a few hundred total sales says more about who is buying this week than about the card. Our market terminal shows the price history on any card so you can see whether a jump has any volume behind it before you chase it.

Threads: "What's going on here"

What the settled cards did this week

Last week we quoted three cards priced by months of real sales. One of them moved. The Prismatic Evolutions Umbreon ex went from $1,480.32 to $1,384.05, a drop of about 6.5 percent in a week when a lot of money was going into a brand new set. The rest of the Prismatic Evolutions Eeveelution special illustration rares look like this on Catchinary today: the Sylveon ex at $514.88 and the Espeon ex at $313.06.

That set came up on r/PokemonInvesting too, in a post showing what the poster believed was the first all-PSA 10 sequential set of the Prismatic Evolutions Eeveelutions. One reply added a detail worth knowing if you buy graded copies: they put the card they called Sunbreon at around a 6,000 PSA 10 population against roughly 20,000 for Moonbreon, with a gem rate near 30 percent. If those counts are right, Moonbreon's price comes from demand, since PSA 10 copies of it are far from scarce.

Threads: "1st all GEM MT 10 Prismatic Evolutions [PRE] Eeveelutions sequential set ?"

Away from the spreadsheet

The best-looking card of the week, going by r/PokemonTCG, was a Magikarp. A post titled "Words cannot describe how beautiful this card is…" took 3,962 upvotes for the Shinji Kanda illustration rare from 30th Celebration's Classic Collection. One commenter passed on a story they heard at a card show, that the art references the old tale of a carp climbing a waterfall and becoming a dragon. Plenty of others had only just noticed the Gyarados in the background. The Classic Collection Magikarp reads $107.21 on Catchinary, up from $105.40 two days earlier.

r/pkmntcgcollections was its usual self. A page of Electabuzz cards led with 602 upvotes under the title "I enjoy electabuzz," and a finished Houndoom grandmaster set did 415, with the poster saying the final card was the most expensive one they had ever cracked out of a slab to put in a binder. Someone paid $5 for a find at a community garage sale. Over on r/PokemonInvesting, a person who found two shrink-wrapped stacks of cards learned from the comments that they were the Blackout and Brushfire theme decks from the Base Set era, worth a few hundred dollars each with the box. They then found the box, which they had been using as a child to store marbles.

r/PokemonTCGDeals was quiet this week, with nothing new in its top posts. If you are shopping, the set pages list current market prices for every card, and the card database covers any single you want to check before paying for it.

Threads: "Words cannot describe how beautiful this card is…" · "I enjoy electabuzz" · "My chase card finally obtained!" · "Random packs of cards in clear wrap."

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