Crystal Lugia Reprint Price Opened at $251, and Fezandipiti ex Jumped 32% in a Week

Pokemon 30th Celebration went on sale worldwide on Tuesday, and the most expensive card in it is a Crystal Lugia reprint that sellers had listed at $1,300 two days earlier. It sells for about $251 now. Nobody had bought one at the presale ask, which is why the real price only showed up once boxes were open. The week's biggest price gain went somewhere much quieter, to a $4 support card that is up in both of its printings at once.

What's hot: Crystal Lugia (30th Celebration Classic Collection #149/147)

The 30 card Classic Collection inside 30th Celebration reprints one card from nearly every era, and card 149/147 is the Crystal Lugia originally printed in Aquapolis in 2003. It is the same Naoyo Kimura art, the same Poke-BODY named Crystal Type, and the copyright line still reads 2002. The only visible difference is the Pikachu 30 stamp sitting in the bottom left of the art box and a new foil treatment over the top.

Our snapshot of TCGplayer caught this card before and after it went on sale, and the two halves do not look like the same product. On September 14 the only listings were presale asks at $1,300.00, with no market price at all because not one copy had sold. On the 15th and 16th the asks eased to $1,260.98, still with nothing behind them. Then the set actually arrived, real copies changed hands, and the market price printed $250.86 on the 17th and $251.05 on the 18th.

That is the whole Classic Collection this week, not just the Lugia. Charizard asked $499.00 in presale and sells for $179.07. Magikarp asked $590.00 and sells for $138.30. Gengar Prime, the card we wrote about last week when TPCi published the English images, asked $1,100.00 and sells for $97.29. Presale asks on a set nobody has opened are a seller's guess, and this set guessed four to eleven times high.

The board underneath the Lugia is real, which matters more than the headline number. A scan of the live listings on Thursday found 42 listings, 40 of them near mint English, 41 copies in total, and no foreign prints trying to pass. The cheapest delivered copy was $225.00, with the next two at $227.00 and $227.35. Forty sellers deep is not one person holding a price up, so $251 is a price you can actually transact at in either direction. The cheapest ask has also moved down each day we have looked, from $258.99 on Wednesday to $234.99 on Thursday.

The 2003 original is the more interesting card, and it is one of the genuinely expensive cards in the hobby. PriceCharting had the Aquapolis Crystal Lugia at $2,783.31 ungraded on Thursday, with a Grade 9 at $18,249.12 and a PSA 10 at $79,584.25. Its raw price climbed all year, from $1,796.93 in April to $3,450 in August, and September reads $2,783.31, so it is roughly 19% off the August figure. Its PSA 10 barely moved over the same stretch, $81,130 in August against $79,584.25 now. Reprint pressure lands on the raw copy first and the slab last, the same order we saw with Gengar Prime and the same mechanism we laid out in our piece on whether reprints hurt the original's value.

The flipper's angle on the reprint is to wait. The set is three days old, there is no PSA population and no PSA 10 sold comp for a card this new, and so there is nothing to price a grading decision against. If you already pulled one, launch week has never been the good half of the sell or hold question in the year we have been tracking sets. On the original, nothing about a 2026 stamped reprint changes what a 2003 Aquapolis secret rare is, and the graded copies are behaving exactly like that.

One caveat on calling this the hot card. Lugia turned up in only two thread titles across the subreddits we sweep on Wednesday, and one of those was an eBay promotion rather than a real discussion. The set as a whole was the loudest thing we track, at 18 mentions on release day against a trailing average of four. We picked the Lugia because it is the top card of that set and the one people are asking price questions about.

Biggest gainer: Fezandipiti ex (Ascended Heroes #142/217)

While the new set took all the attention, the biggest clean price gain we measured this week belongs to a Double Rare you can buy for the price of a sandwich. Fezandipiti ex 142/217 from Ascended Heroes went from $3.33 last Wednesday to $4.41 on Thursday, up 32.4%. Its cheapest ask went from $2.75 to $2.88 and its middle ask from $3.82 to $4.09 over the same days, so all three numbers agree, and the live board shows 193 near mint English listings covering 460 copies with a cheapest delivered copy at $4.45. That is about as liquid as a card gets.

What makes this one worth writing up is that the other printing did the same thing. Fezandipiti ex first appeared in Shrouded Fable as 038/064, and that copy went from $3.30 to $3.96 across the identical week, up 20.0%. When two separate printings of a card move the same direction at once, the thing being bought is the card, not the scarcity of one particular print run. We learned that the hard way on the Unfair Stamp, where we called a promo printing lower on a calendar date and the ordinary set printing went up anyway, which told us we had been testing the wrong thing.

Fezandipiti ex is a support card rather than a deck. Its ability, Flip the Script, draws you three cards once per turn if any of your Pokemon were knocked out during your opponent's last turn, so losing a Pokemon still gets you something. Limitless lists it in 12,677 decklists. The other card that punishes a knockout, the Unfair Stamp, also rose this week, from $14.50 to $17.62, which is 21.5%. Two halves of the same package moving together reads like players adding that package, though we could not tie it to a single tournament result and nobody was talking about it, since Fezandipiti appeared in zero thread titles across our subreddit sweeps on Tuesday or Wednesday.

The rest of Ascended Heroes went the other way. Across the same window the set was 29 products up, 71 down and 5 flat, with Medicham 241/217 falling 34.3%, Togekiss 235/217 down 31.0%, the Mega Gengar ex 269/217 sliding from $55.05 to $47.45 and the Elite Trainer Box from $163.12 to $144.26. Fezandipiti ex was the largest gainer in a set that is mostly falling, three weeks after release, while the boxes are still being opened.

The flipper's angle here is to buy the right printing rather than the card. Ascended Heroes came out on August 28 and is still pouring onto the market, so that printing has fresh supply arriving every day, while Shrouded Fable is done printing. Today the newer, more plentiful copy is the more expensive one at $4.41 against $3.96, and that is the wrong way around for two versions of a card that play identically.

Scoring the Pitch Black call

Back on June 22 we predicted that the chase card from Pitch Black would be meaningfully cheaper raw about eight weeks after its July 17 launch, and that review came due today. Pitch Black's chase is the Mega Darkrai ex 116 Special Illustration Rare, and its ungraded price ran $289.73 in July, $225.18 in August and $193.31 in September, so it is 33.3% cheaper than its launch month. The call lands correct. It is also the fourth new set chase card in a row to walk this path, so we are going to stop treating it as a finding and start treating it as the default, which is what our piece on why new set chase cards drop in month two already says.

The graded copy is the part we would have got wrong. Over the same stretch the Mega Darkrai PSA 10 went $1,494.34 in July up to $1,663.81 in August before falling to $1,333.95 now. A July graded comp used to plan a submission would have been describing a market that no longer exists.

What we are calling, and when we will grade it

Two predictions, stated plainly so we can be publicly wrong about them later.

On the Crystal Lugia reprint, we expect the TCGplayer market price to be below $251.05 on November 17, and the cheapest delivered near mint copy to be under the $225.00 it sits at today. We are not naming the level it lands at, because every time we have named a floor on a card in its launch wave the card has gone through it. We are wrong if the market price is at or above $251.05 on that date.

On Fezandipiti ex, we expect the Ascended Heroes printing to be below $4.41 on October 20, and the Shrouded Fable printing to be the more expensive of the two by then, a reversal of today's order. We are wrong if the Ascended Heroes copy holds at or above $4.41, or if it is still the pricier printing.

The one thing to do this week takes two minutes. If you are looking at anything from 30th Celebration, open the actual listing board before you look at the quoted price and count how many sellers are on it. The Lugia has 40 and the price it shows is real. Yesterday we watched the 30th Celebration Mew ex go from an $1,808 presale ask to a $157.94 market price in a day, and it reads $155.58 today. Flipr's price screens exist to show you which of those two you are looking at.

Graded cards are speculative and illiquid, and none of this is investment advice.