Mega Lucario ex SIR Price Climbs on Tournament Results, and Lillie's Clefairy ex Jumped 16%

The Chaos Rising format had two big questions going into the first weekend of tournaments: is the new Mega Lucario ex deck as strong as the previews said, and is there a real answer to it? Both questions got answered the same weekend, and both answers ended up at the top of the price movers list. Last week we flagged the chase Trainer SIRs from Chaos Rising as the early breakout. This week the money moved from set hype to tournament results, and that shift tells you where to look next.

What's hot: Mega Lucario ex SIR (Mega Evolution #179)

The card collectors actually chased this week is the original Mega Lucario ex SIR from the first English Mega Evolution set, not anything from Chaos Rising. It is illustrated by Atsushi Furusawa and printed at roughly 1 per 700 packs. Chaos Rising added the support cards and matchups that made the Mega Lucario deck viable in tournaments, and the SIR is the prestige version everyone playing the deck wants on display.

The spike showed up on all three platforms we check. TCGPlayer's market price sits at $234.58 as of May 31, up from the low $200s through most of May. PriceCharting has the ungraded price at $202.50 and the PSA 9 at $225.75. The PSA 10 reads $537.79. Sales volume on eBay roughly doubled from the week before, and days of steady buying drained the big TCGPlayer storefronts, pulling raw asking prices from $190 to above $230 in under five days. Two kinds of buyers showed up at once: players upgrading their deck to the SIR, and speculators trying to get in ahead of the wave of grading they expect.

The cause is concrete, not a mood. Tournament results from the first weekend confirmed that the deck hits as hard in practice as the previews promised, with Mega Brave doing 270 damage on a 340 HP body. Once a card proves itself in competition, its premium printings gain a lasting demand floor. The me1-179 SIR is now the version of the meta card to own, with no equivalent in Chaos Rising, which is a big part of why the price moved on the older print rather than something from the new set.

The grading math here is genuinely close. At $202 raw plus $25 in grading, a PSA 9 sale at $225 (about $196 net after eBay fees) leaves you roughly $30 underwater per card. The whole bet lives on landing the 10 at $537. Hitting a 10 on 35% of submissions makes the whole exercise profitable, but barely, so inspect hard before you ship anything. The centering and corner check on Mega era full arts matters more here than on a $40 holo where a 9 still earns. If you already own a clean copy, grade it. If you are buying at over $200 retail and you are not sure about the centering, walk away. On this card the gap between a PSA 9 and a PSA 10 is the entire trade, and you do not want to ship a borderline copy and find out three months later.

Biggest gainer: Lillie's Clefairy ex SIR (Ascended Heroes #280)

The Naoki Saito SIR from Ascended Heroes crossed $200 this week, hitting $215.08 ungraded on PriceCharting as of May 31. Three weeks ago the same card sat around $185 on the same data feed. That is roughly a 16% climb, with most of it landing in the last seven days, and the reason is exactly the one you would guess: this is the counter card to Mega Lucario, and the tournament weekend forced everyone to figure out that matchup.

The matchup itself is clean. Mega Lucario ex is a Fighting type with the standard Psychic weakness, and Lillie's Clefairy ex hits exactly that hole with Full Moon Rondo at double damage from weakness. The Fairy Zone Ability also makes Dragon types weak to Psychic, which extends the coverage beyond the Lucario matchup. After Gardevoir ex rotated, there was a real question about whether the new format would even have a Psychic answer. Clefairy showed up as that answer, and demand for the SIR followed within days.

The graded prices climb faster than the raw. PriceCharting has the PSA 9 at $230 and the PSA 9.5 at $375. The PSA 10 sits at $690, which works out to about three times a 9 and about 1.8 times a 9.5. A PSA 10 also pays about 3.2 times the raw price, unusually strong for a 2026 SIR this early in its life, and it reflects how few graded copies exist so far (the set is newer than its Lucario partner). If you are picking a grading company for resale, this is the kind of card where PSA's price premium is worth more than CGC's faster turnaround, because the PSA 10 prices are where the actual ceiling lives.

Expect the demand to hold for at least one more tournament cycle, with one specific risk. Demand for a counter card lives and dies with the meta. If the next round of events shows the field adapting around Lucario rather than playing into it, the Clefairy premium evaporates inside a week. Sales are healthy right now, twelve to eighteen a day on eBay, well above the noise, but watch for that count to thin first. The early warning is how many copies sell, not the price.

This is a card to grade and sell, not one to hold. Buy clean copies under $220 raw, grade the cleanest, sell the PSA 10s while the prices are strong, and skip the 9s entirely. The PSA 9 at $230 is roughly break even after the $25 grading fee and the eBay cut, and you would have done just as well selling the raw copy. If you graded today and got a 10 back in a month, you would be selling into a market that is either still hot or just starting to cool as the meta moves. Either way, do not let the slab age in your inventory waiting for more upside.

What both moves tell you about this week's market

One weekend of tournament results moved two different $200 cards at the same time. The hot card is up about 12% from the week before, and the gainer is up 16% over three weeks, and that difference tracks how sure the buyers are. They are slightly more confident that Lucario is the deck than that Clefairy is the answer.

The concrete action: if you flipped Chaos Rising chase cards last week per last week's post, this week's lesson is that the next move is the older prints that suddenly matter in the new meta, not another new set chase. Pull every Mega Lucario ex SIR you own out of your binder right now and recheck the centering. If a copy is clean, run the numbers in Flipr's profit calculator with the PSA 10 at $537 and the PSA 9 at $225, and you will see how much an honest read of the condition matters. If the answer comes back positive, ship it this week. The window where the meta and the price both agree is the smallest one the year gives you.

If you want a default place to sell once a slab comes back, the PSA 10 marketplace ranking is still the right answer. For a SIR slab worth $500 or more, eBay still nets the cleanest dollar despite the fees, mostly because the audience is wider and the search demand sits there. Just do not wait, because meta windows close faster than collector windows.