Pokemon TCG Destined Rivals Set Guide: 244 Cards, Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex and Live Prices

Pokémon TCG: Scarlet & Violet—Destined Rivals released May 30, 2025 with 244 cards: 182 main set plus 62 secret rares numbered 183 to 244. The era's tenth and last main expansion holds two records at once — its most expensive booster box at CA$760.30, and its only set index below 100. The face card, Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex 231/182, is quoted at CA$755.98.

The era's dearest box and its only index below 100

Those two facts look contradictory and are not. The Quaza set index measures the three-month direction of a set's sealed products, equal-weighted from base 100. Destined Rivals reads 96.17, down 3.8%, while the other fifteen sets sit between 100.42 and 138.58. Its box is meanwhile the highest of the ten with one, against Paldea Evolved's CA$702.68 in second. A high level and a soft slope are different measurements.

The sourced picture is a set heavily demanded rather than heavily printed. Pokémon Center preorders opened March 24, 2025 and sold out in one to two hours with one to two million people queued at a one-per-person limit — 67 days before release, the shortest preorder gap of the era, where every earlier set ran 71 to 98 days. PokeInsider on December 6, 2025 described a set that skipped the post-launch decline entirely, boxes at US$350–410 against a US$161.64 MSRP.

The softness is real but uneven. Across thirteen tracked products the seven-day move to July 25, 2026 is −2.5%, the era's third-weakest week and its widest range: the Elite Trainer Box fell 15.2% while Misty's Psyduck 193/182 rose 9.6%, the largest single-product gain anywhere in the era.

Two Mewtwos, and why the number is part of the name

Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex 231/182 and Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex 240/182 are both real cards in this set, with identical printed text. 231/182 is the Special Illustration Rare by Iwamoto05 at CA$755.98; 240/182 is the gold etched Hyper Rare by aky CG Works at CA$87.66. That is an 8.6× spread between two cards of one name, plus two further printings: the Ultra Rare 213/182 and the Double Rare 081/182 at US$1.60.

The inversion repeats, so it is a property of the set, not an accident. Cynthia's Garchomp ex is US$264.97 at 232/182 and US$30.21 at 241/182; Ethan's Ho-Oh ex US$177.38 at 230/182 and US$27.88 at 239/182. Here the Special Illustration Rare is the chase and the gold is not.

The whole gold tier totals US$155.42, including the two Stadium golds Jamming Tower 243 and Levincia 244 at US$8.60 each, against US$1,414.78 for the eleven Special Illustration Rares. Misty's Psyduck 193/182, an Illustration Rare of a non-ex Pokémon, trades above every gold at US$74.78.

The twelve chase cards

Filterable by rarity. Prices are TCGplayer market prices in USD, July 25, 2026: rolling averages of completed sales.

All (12)Special Illustration Rare (7)Hyper Rare (3)Illustration Rare (2)

The main-set Double Rares are worth cents — Cynthia's Garchomp ex 104/182 at US$0.84 — so the value sits in the 62 secrets.

A 244-card set built on possessive names

Journey Together brought Trainer's Pokémon back; Destined Rivals built an expansion on them. 147 of its 244 cards carry a possessive name, 106 in the main set, against 54 and 38 in the set before it. 90 of the 160 main-set Pokémon cards, 56%, belong to a named Trainer, against 22% in Journey Together. Eight owners feature rather than four — Team Rocket, Ethan, Cynthia, Arven, Misty, Marnie, Steven, the Emcee — and 83 cards relate to Team Rocket.

The mechanic is a naming rule with no rule box. The owner's name is part of the printed name, so a deck may run four Meowth and four Team Rocket's Meowth, and evolution is owner-locked. The hinge is that "Team Rocket" counts as an owner exactly as a person does, so one line of text can address 46 main-set Pokémon at once. Team Rocket's Energy 182/182 is the clearest case: the set's only Special Energy, attachable only to a Team Rocket's Pokémon and discarded if it strays. Note that Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex 081/182 and its three reprints cannot attack unless four or more Team Rocket's Pokémon are in play — a condition that switches off, not a permanent restriction — and the prize rule is unchanged at two.

The main set is 85 Commons, 62 Uncommons, 18 Rares and 17 Double Rares, ten of the Double Rares Trainer's Pokémon ex. The 62 secrets are 23 Illustration Rares, 22 Ultra Rares, 11 Special Illustration Rares and 6 golds — double Journey Together's 31, but sixth in the era behind Paldean Fates at 154, White Flare at 87, Black Bolt and Paldea Evolved at 86 each, and Paradox Rift at 84.

139 illustrators are credited across the 244 cards. aky CG Works drew six, covering both headline Pokémon at three rarities each, every printing bar the Special Illustration Rare. Those eleven are by eleven different hands, among them AKIRA EGAWA on Team Rocket's Moltres ex 229/182. Mitsuhiro Arita, illustrator of the 1996 Base Set Charizard, has two here. The eight Trainer full arts include all four Johto Rocket executives.

Every product, with live CAD prices

Quaza Track carries five Destined Rivals sealed products, repriced daily in CAD. Full history: the Destined Rivals tracker page.

All dates 2025; the Build & Battle Box was a prerelease distribution. *No MSRP could be confirmed, so the cell reads N/A rather than an estimate, including for the Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Box. †PHD Games solicitation, single-source. There is no Enhanced Booster Display Box and no box topper here; that was a Journey Together experiment. Also absent: Booster Bundle Display, Mini Tins, Super-Premium, Poster and Binder Collections.

The Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Box has all but caught the booster box, CA$756.23 against CA$760.30, though the USD market prices behind them cost US$48.78 a pack in the eleven-pack box against US$14.99 in the 36-pack display. At US$539.49 the box is 234% over its US$161.64 MSRP, and PriceCharting's ungraded US$473.34 the same day reads 2.9×.

The most-graded English set of the era

GemTracker's PSA population report, data-dated July 23, 2026, gives Destined Rivals a PSA population of 374,631 — more than any other English Scarlet & Violet expansion, ahead of Prismatic Evolutions at 359,777 and Journey Together at 230,013. It also held first place in GemRate's monthly most-graded PSA table in August and September 2025.

Per card: Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex 231/182 has 26,318 PSA-graded copies with 15,048 PSA 10s; Cynthia's Garchomp ex 232/182 16,953 with 10,127; Ethan's Ho-Oh ex 230/182 15,312 with 8,859; the gold Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex 240/182, a different card, 11,156 with 6,762. BGS is far smaller: 1,825 graded copies of 231/182, 376 of them BGS 10.

No official pull rates exist for this set in any region. TCGplayer's Authentication Center published measured rates from over 8,000 packs on May 30, 2025 with 95% confidence intervals: Double Rare 19.83% of packs, Illustration Rare 8.29%, Ultra Rare 6.39%, Special Illustration Rare 1.06% (1 in 94), Hyper Rare 0.67%. Those are statistically indistinguishable from Journey Together's. What changed is the denominator: with eleven Special Illustration Rares instead of six, a named one is roughly 1 in 1,033 packs against 1 in 518.

On format, the 2026 rotation dropped regulation mark G, effective in person April 10, 2026. Destined Rivals was not among the expansions removed, and 242 of its 244 cards remain Standard-legal. The exceptions are both Judge, the Uncommon 167/182 and its Ultra Rare full art 222/182 — a widely played Supporter, not an obscure Common.

Release timeline

• Aug 18–19, 2024A Team Rocket set teased at the World Championships closing ceremony.
• Feb 18–19, 2025Booster pack artwork leaks on gamescom latam ticket passes, pulled the next day.
• Mar 24, 2025TPCi media alert; preorders open and sell out in one to two hours, 67 days out.
• May 16, 2025Both Rival Battle Decks release, two weeks before street date.
• May 17–25, 2025Two prerelease weekends.
• May 30, 2025Destined Rivals releases: 244 cards.
• Sep 26, 2025Mega Evolution replaces Scarlet & Violet as the current block.
• Nov 28, 2025Team Rocket's Moltres ex Ultra-Premium: three stamped printings.
• Jul 25, 2026Quaza Track: box CA$760.30, index 96.17, seven-day −2.5%.

The Japanese sources were Glory of Team Rocket, the Hot Wind Arena subset and the two ex Starter Sets. Either side of it in the era: Journey Together before, and the twin special sets Black Bolt and White Flare after. All sixteen are priced live on the Quaza Track price tracker.

Frequently asked questions