Ascended Heroes Tins Fell From $74 to $50 After Their August 28 Release

The three Ascended Heroes tins reached store shelves on Friday, and the cheapest Mega Feraligatr ex tin on TCGplayer went from $74.17 to $49.95 over the two days that followed. The Emboar tin did the same thing, sliding from $74.05 to $49.88, and the Meganium tin went from $74.29 to $51.89. We run a tracker that takes a daily price reading on about 3,000 modern Pokemon products, and it had these three tins flagged five days before any of that happened.

What the Ascended Heroes tins cost now

PokeBeach announced the tins back on June 18. Three of them, releasing August 28 at $21.99 each, with four Ascended Heroes booster packs inside and a foil promo of Mega Meganium ex, Mega Emboar ex or Mega Feraligatr ex. Those three promos first shipped in the Ascended Heroes Mega Boxes in January, so the card in the tin is a reprint rather than something new.

Here is what the boards looked like on August 23, five days before release, against what they look like this afternoon.

Tin	Cheapest delivered Aug 23	Today	Sellers then	Sellers now
Mega Feraligatr ex (702497)	$74.17	$49.95	8	48
Mega Emboar ex (702496)	$74.05	$49.88	8	53
Mega Meganium ex (702498)	$74.29	$51.89	9	51

That is roughly 33, 33 and 30 percent, and almost all of it happened after Friday morning. Keep it in perspective though: at $50 these tins still cost more than twice the $21.99 they were built to sell for.

Why the price fell the day the tins arrived

The reason is boring and it is the whole point. Before August 28 the product did not exist in anyone's hands, so the only people listing it were eight sellers taking preorders and asking whatever they liked. On release day the tins hit stores, everyone who picked them up off a shelf listed them, and the Feraligatr board went from 8 sellers to 48 with 180 copies on it. Forty more sellers arrived in a weekend and started undercutting each other.

One thing here is genuinely useful if you shop on TCGplayer. The market price barely noticed any of this. Our reading on the Feraligatr tin went $70.56 on August 23 to $68.43 today, about 3 percent, while the cheapest copy you could actually buy fell by a third. That number is a weighted average of recent sales, so it lags badly on a product that has only just started selling in volume. It is the same trap we wrote about in the difference between a real price gap and an illusion.

The Delta Reign Elite Trainer Box is doing it eleven weeks early

Last week we logged two preorder predictions and said we would grade both in public. One of them is moving faster than we expected.

Delta Reign does not release until November 6. On August 22 its Elite Trainer Box had five sellers on it and the cheapest delivered copy cost $199.40. Today there are 15 sellers, 378 copies, and the cheapest copy costs $139.44. That is 30 percent in seven days with the release still ten weeks away.

The daily path is smooth rather than jumpy, which is what makes us believe it. Our readings ran $200.00, $199.48, $177.46, $177.46, $163.65, $160.62, $157.33 and $144.19, and the cheapest listing fell alongside the average the whole way instead of one of them running off on its own. What happened is simply that ten more sellers showed up, and the five who were there on August 22 had all been sitting within twenty cents of each other.

The 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box has not moved at all

The other half of that pair has done nothing, and we are not going to bury it.

On August 22 the cheapest 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box cost $164.94 delivered. Today it costs $164.91. Three cents in seven days, on a set that releases September 16 and whose products have otherwise fallen almost without exception since we started watching on August 8.

The sellers moved the wrong way for our call, too. There were 25 of them a week ago and there are 20 today, with copies down from 1,089 to 1,060. Sellers left the board rather than arriving on it, which is the opposite of what happened to the tins. Four of them sit within three cents of each other at $164.91 to $164.94, then there is one copy at $169.99 and then the stack jumps to $190.09. Someone on r/PokeInvesting posted a thread this week titled "30th Anniversary Elite Trainer Boxes $164", which lands on that floor to the dollar.

We paired those two calls so that one of them could fail, and this is what a failing one looks like eleven days in. Preorder prices decaying toward release is a pattern we have watched work twice, not a law that covers every box in every set.

The one 30th Celebration product going up

Since August 8 we have compared this set against its own previous reading every day, and the count sits at 30 products down and 2 up. Both of the ups are the Ultra-Premium Collections.

The Night version's cheapest listing went from $531.07 to $599.99 in a single day while its average went $533.98 to $567.88. The Day version had been frozen at $400.00 for ten consecutive readings and then went to $589.99. Checked live this afternoon, Day has 15 sellers and 44 copies with a cheapest delivered price of $619.80, and Night has 7 sellers and 23 copies at $629.99.

We are not naming it as a pick, for two reasons. Seven sellers is below the eight we require before we will call anything, and 23 copies is thin enough that one seller clearing out moves the price on their own. More importantly we went looking for news behind the jump and did not find any. The dull explanation, that a few cheap preorder listings got bought during Worlds weekend and the next copies up were dearer, is still standing. The thing we are watching is the Ultra-Premium Collection case, which has not followed: it sits at $2,158.99 with its cheapest copy unchanged across six readings. When a product genuinely re-rates, the case version usually comes with it.

What we are watching, and what we will grade

Four predictions are live, and we will mark each one right or wrong here when its date arrives.

The Ascended Heroes tins were called on August 23 at $74.17, with the claim that the price would be lower two weeks after release. That resolves September 11 and is currently down about a third. Delta Reign's Elite Trainer Box was called on August 22 at $199.40 and resolves November 27; it sits at $139.44. The 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box was called the same day at $164.94 and resolves October 6; it sits at $164.91, which is not going our way.

The new one this week is the Ultra-Premium Collection. We expect the Night version's cheapest delivered copy to be below the $629.99 we measured today when we check again on September 12. If it is flat or higher, we were wrong and the jump was a real revaluation rather than a thin board being cleared out over a busy weekend.

We are deliberately not naming a target price on any of them. Three separate calls in our ledger got the direction right and the level wrong, so we now state the direction, the number we measured against, and what would make us wrong, and we stop there. Our tracker surfaces things to watch and nothing here is financial advice or a recommendation to buy anything. Sealed product before release is speculative, and the one thing we have demonstrated repeatedly is that preorder asks fall as the date gets closer.

For the singles that moved on their own reasons this week rather than on a release calendar, Thursday's roundup covered Mewtwo VSTAR and Charizard ex.

The practical version of all this: when a sealed product has not shipped yet, the price you see is an ask from someone who does not have it either. Look at how many people will be able to sell it to you the week it lands, because that is the number that decides what it costs in a month.