Talking ’bout Boxes
Porg Depot has been tracking singles for a bit now. (You can find the latest on Showcase and Legendary singles in our pricing section.)
One thing that we get asked about with relative frequency is price of boxes.
Box Price Tracking – TCGPlayer
So far pricing for boxes in the US market is about what we expected to see. Mostly flat so far, with a dip in Shadows of the Galaxy boxes at one point. Somebody may have been just offloading some of those and pricing them to move. They’ve actually been on an upswing in recent days. Spark of Rebellion boxes are trending ever so slightly upwards as well.
Jump to Lightspeed is currently just in pre-order mode, but the price has been steadily declining as sellers aim to get their sales numbers up even prior to launch. This is anecdotally the same thing we’ve seen with the prior three sets and is not shocking.
Box Price Tracking – Card Market
Across the Atlantic in Europe, things are even more stable. Basically nothing has changed all that much in the first eleven days of tracking on this.
Notably, there is enough data for the Jump to Lightspeed Carbonite boxes to even show a move up by a bit. Will be very interesting to see if this continues on Card Market and even starts to be an uptrend in TCGPlayer as well.
Expected Value (EV)
Knowing the box prices is just part of the story. What is the value that you can get out of a box and is it worth it to open those packs?
From Wikipedia, “In probability theory, the expected value is a generalization of the weighted average. Informally, the expected value is the mean of the possible values a random variable can take, weighted by the probability of those outcomes.”
In terms of a collectible card game it is the approximation of the value of cards that you would open in a given pack, box, or case of sealed product. If the expected value is greater than the cost, then it is “worth it” to open that product.
Keep in mind that the EV is a range due to the numerous variables that go into figuring that out. Typical EV would not come down to a specific number but rather a range of values within a calculated deviation from the mean.
Don’t worry though, Porg Depot has put together a Box Expected Value Calculator. This tool grabs data from TCGPlayer once per day and based on the market prices of cards figures out an approximate range for which you could expect the value of a box to be in.