Back in January of 2025, the hype surrounding the release of the Scarlet & Violet: Prismatic Evolutions set was unreal as scalpers at stores like this Costco sought to take advantage of FOMO among Pokémon collectors by purchasing Elite Trainer Boxes (ETBs) for MSRP and then immediately reselling them online for much higher prices. For the most part, these weren’t being bought up by people who actually collect Pokémon cards -- they never even open the ETBs and only held onto them for short periods of time.
One week after the official release of Prismatic Evolutions, a PSA Umbreon SIR sold for $5,432.
In January, ETBs were selling for nearly $280 on the secondary market (the MSRP was $49.99). The first PSA 10 copy of the biggest "chase" card in this set, the Umbreon Special Illustration Rare (SIR), sold for a whopping $5,432 on eBay on January 26, 2025, just a little over a week after the set was officially released:
In mid-February, as more and more PSA graded cards entered the market, the value of a PSA 10 of an Umbreon ex SIR had fallen to around $3,500. In other words, this card had lost about 35% of its value in just two weeks!
Since then, buying this card has been like catching a falling knife. By mid-April, a PSA 10 began to consistently sell for less than $3,000. And then twice during July 2025, two PSA 10 copies sold for $2,400 which were getting close to an all-time low ($2,200) for this grade.
Of course many collectors have simply been waiting until the supply of graded cards eventually caught up with demand. Six months later, could it finally be time to buy? Although the 30-day average sale of $2,524 is considerably lower than the one-year (or six month) average of $2,964, it is comparable to the 90-day average of $2,618. In other words, the pace at which a PSA 10 is losing value is slowing down quite a bit. To me, this suggests we could be approaching the bottom.
High-grade raw copies are currently selling in the $900 to $1000 range.
Will this $2,200 sale for a PSA 10 in May turn out to have been the bottom?
Back in mid-May, the PSA 10 below sold on eBay for an all-time low of $2,200. It appeared to be an outlier at the time, but PSA 10s have consistently sold for around $2,500 since then.
We won't know for awhile, but we may look back on this sale for $2,200 and learn that it turned out to be the bottom. Are you in the market for a PSA 10 copy of the Umbreon ex SIR? Are you waiting for prices to fall to $2,200 or would you consider buying at current price points?
