Pokémon TCG Paradox Rift Set Guide: Cards, Products and Prices

Pokémon TCG: Scarlet & Violet—Paradox Rift released on November 3, 2023 with 266 cards: 182 in the main set plus 84 secret rares numbered 183 to 266. Its most valuable card is not one of its fifteen Special Illustration Rares — it is Groudon 199/182, an ordinary Illustration Rare, quoted at US$119.52 on TCGplayer on July 25, 2026, roughly twice the top Special Illustration Rare. Below: why rarity and price came apart here, the pull rates TCGplayer measured across 8,000-plus packs, every product with live CAD prices, and where the set settled.

Rarity and price came apart in this set

The ten most valuable cards in Paradox Rift contain no Ultra Rare and no Hyper Rare. By TCGplayer market price on July 25, 2026 the top fourteen are ten Illustration Rares and four Special Illustration Rares; the 34-card Illustration Rare block, 183 to 216, carries the set. Twenty-nine of those 34 beat the gold Roaring Moon ex 262/182 at US$6.79, and fifteen beat the set's most valuable gold, Garchomp ex 260/182 at US$16.27. The seven golds run US$2.12 to US$16.27, and only three of them clear US$5.

Groudon 199/182 sits at the top. Illustrated by Nurikabe, it is a Basic Fighting Groudon with 130 HP and a volcanic landscape filling the frame — not a Pokémon ex, not a Paradox Pokémon, unconnected to either mechanic. Its dated raw sales from July 21 to 24, 2026 ran US$100 to US$117.67 and its dated PSA 10 sales have a median of US$632. GemRate's July 25, 2026 read: 17,423 cards graded by PSA, 5,843 tens, a 33.5% gem rate.

The cards worth naming

Filterable by rarity, tap to zoom. IR is Illustration Rare, SIR Special Illustration Rare. Prices are TCGplayer market prices in USD observed July 25, 2026 — rolling aggregates of completed sales, not individual transactions. The table is the store-tracked singles plus the gallery rather than a strict top fourteen: Yveltal 205/182 at US$30.31 and Joltik 196/182 at US$28.28 belong to that fourteen and are not shown. A hundred and twenty illustrators are credited across the 266 cards, 5ban Graphics the most prolific at sixteen; Plusle 193/182 and Minun 194/182 are consecutive numbers by OKACHEKE, and Swablu 213/182 shares Jiro Sasumo with the Altaria ex it evolves into.

All (15)Illustration Rare (8)Special Illustration Rare (5)Hyper Rare (2)

The pull rates, and the top end this set tightened

No published odds from The Pokémon Company could be located for Paradox Rift, in any region. What exists is a measurement: TCGplayer's Authentication Center physically opened more than 8,000 packs and published observed rates with 95% confidence intervals on November 4, 2023. Observed frequencies from real openings, not official odds.

TCGplayer set those against Obsidian Flames, and the comparison is the story. The Special Illustration Rare rate fell from 3.13% to 2.11% and the Hyper Rare rate from 1.92% to 1.22%, each about two-thirds of what it was, while Double Rare rose from 13.61% to 15.57%. TCGplayer described the combined better-than-Rare rate as holding "just north of 30%"; the five tiers above sum to 33.24%. More hits, shallower ones — and this set carries more than twice as many Special Illustration Rares and Hyper Rares as Obsidian Flames, so each specific one is rarer again.

Paradox Rift has a real 36-pack booster box, so those per-pack rates convert to per-box expectations. Computed binomially over 36 packs, a sealed box averages 5.61 Double Rares, 2.77 Illustration Rares and 2.39 Ultra Rares, with a 53.6% chance of at least one Special Illustration Rare and 35.7% of at least one Hyper Rare. That is derived arithmetic on TCGplayer's measured rates, not something TCGplayer measured. The gold tier is both the rarest of the five at 1.22% and the cheapest on the shelf, so the rarest outcome in a box is not the valuable one.

Ancient, Future, and the ACE SPEC that is not here

Paradox Rift introduced the Ancient and Future categories, merged from the Japanese Ancient Roar and Future Flash sets that released together on October 27, 2023. They are categories, not rules: neither tag grants a game effect on its own, and every benefit comes from a card that names the category. Ancient cards carry a stony label over layered strata artwork and tend toward large single-hit damage; Future cards carry a technological label over a pixelated background and tend toward Abilities and attack riders.

The split is exactly symmetrical: eight Ancient and eight Future cards in the main set, seventeen printings each once secrets are counted, each side getting five Pokémon (two of them ex) plus a Tool, an Item and a Supporter. Ancient Booster Energy Capsule 159/182 gives its Ancient Pokémon +60 HP and immunity to Special Conditions; Future Booster Energy Capsule 164/182 removes Retreat Cost and adds 20 damage against the Active. One trap: Professor Turo's Scenario 171/182 never mentions Future in its text — a Future card by design, but it works on any of your Pokémon.

It also brought back Technical Machine cards — last printed in Rising Rivals in 2009, now Pokémon Tool cards — as Blindside, Devolution, Evolution and Turbo Energize at 176 to 179. Seven of the twenty Double Rares are Tera Pokémon ex, whose rule box prevents damage done to them by attacks while they sit on the Bench; damage counters from Abilities and Trainer effects still land. Garchomp ex is the only card printed at all four premium tiers: 038, 219, 245 and 260.

Every product, with live CAD prices

Quaza Track carries six Paradox Rift sealed products and reprices them daily in Canadian dollars, so these stay current after publication. Full history is on the Paradox Rift tracker page.

MSRPs are archived Pokémon Center list prices where the product was carried there — Pokémon Center is TPCi's own store, so its list price is the MSRP — and confirmed retailer or trade listings otherwise. None is estimated. †Retail sold one "Styles May Vary" Elite Trainer Box, so the two rows above are the tracker's variants of a single SKU; only the Pokémon Center boxes split by character. It listed at $49.99 at GameStop and Best Buy, and ICv2 gives the same figure for the identically structured 9-pack Paldean Fates box; a TPCi press-agency gift guide put it at $59.99, which is also the 11-pack Pokémon Center price and looks like an error there, unproven either way. *Not sourced: the European half display, which looks like a retailer split rather than a TPCi SKU; the Single Pack, Premium Checklane and Stage 1 Blisters; the Collector's Kit, a UK listing at £4.95 only; and the multi-unit cases, none derived by multiplying a unit price. The Stage 1 Blister has a second caveat: the merchandise index documents its contents while the price catalogue does not list it at all, and a missing price is not a missing product. Target sold the Elite Trainer Box at $43.99, under MSRP, which is why retailer prices do not substitute. Not made for this set: Premium Collection, Ultra-Premium Collection, Mini Tin, Mini Tin Display, Booster Bundle Display.

Where Paradox Rift settled in a closed era

The Scarlet & Violet era closed on September 26, 2025, when Mega Evolution replaced it as the current block, and sealed products from it have re-rated upward since. Paradox Rift's Quaza set index reads 119.00, up 19.0% over three months and fifth of the sixteen — the strongest of any 2023 set in the era, ahead of Obsidian Flames at 116.91 and far ahead of 151 at 100.42. The index covers sealed products only; raw singles went the other way.

The headline sealed number is the box. At CA$412.63 it is the cheapest of the ten 36-pack booster boxes tracked across the era, under Journey Together at CA$419.59 and Surging Sparks at CA$420.79, and 46% under Destined Rivals at CA$760.30. The two Elite Trainer Box arts are not priced alike either: Roaring Moon runs CA$217.16 against Iron Valiant's CA$195.70, and CA$301.35 against CA$267.47 in the Pokémon Center version. That gap is a secondary-market artefact — at retail the two arts were one "Styles May Vary" SKU at a single price, and only the Pokémon Center boxes were sold split by character.

Against sticker, the box has done the ordinary thing. It listed at US$161.64 and PriceCharting's July 2026 computed value is US$291.63, about 1.8 times MSRP; the Elite Trainer Box listed at US$49.99 and the Roaring Moon version computes to US$136.62, about 2.7 times. Measured instead from each product's own trough, the box has run 3.5 times, below Obsidian Flames and Twilight Masquerade at 4.0 each, and the Elite Trainer Boxes 4.8 times against 11.4 for Paldean Fates and 14.6 for 151. Trough months differ by product, so the ranking is more reliable than any single multiple. The set moved −0.8% over the seven days to July 25, 2026 against an era-wide −0.90%, and GemRate has it at 146,660 cards graded by PSA with 52,299 tens, a 35.66% gem rate.

On format, Paradox Rift is uniformly Regulation Mark G. The 2026-27 rotation, announced January 9, 2026, dropped that mark on Pokémon TCG Live on March 26 and at sanctioned tournaments on April 10, taking six sets with it: Scarlet & Violet base, Paldea Evolved, Obsidian Flames, 151, Paradox Rift and Paldean Fates, the first year of the series. Marks H, I, J and later stay legal, every Paradox Rift card is still legal in Expanded, and rotation says nothing about manufacturing.

Release timeline

• Aug 13, 2023Revealed at the 2023 World Championships closing ceremony, alongside the announcement that ACE SPEC would return in a later set.
• Oct 20, 2023Build & Battle Boxes reach prerelease retailers at $21.99.
• Oct 27, 2023Japanese Ancient Roar and Future Flash release, 95 cards each.
• Nov 3, 2023Paradox Rift releases in English: 266 cards, the $161.64 booster box, the $49.99 Elite Trainer Box, both Pokémon Center boxes, the bundle and the blisters.
• Nov 17, 2023Build & Battle Stadium, Roaring Moon ex Box and Iron Valiant ex Box; Thai and Indonesian releases follow on December 15.
• Jan 26, 2024Paldean Fates releases with the cards Paradox Rift did not localise.
• Mar 22, 2024Temporal Forces releases, bringing ACE SPEC back to English play.
• Apr 10, 2026Regulation Mark G rotates out of sanctioned play, the set's last day of Standard legality.
• Jul 25, 2026Quaza Track: booster box CA$412.63, index 119.00.

Either side of it: 151, the September 2023 special set, and Paldean Fates, where the leftover Ancient Roar and Future Flash cards ended up — a mechanical link too, since Paldean Fates' Iron Treads ex 066/091 discards Future Booster Energy Capsule, which exists only as Paradox Rift 164/182. Live prices for all sixteen sets are on the Quaza Track price tracker.

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