Pokémon TCG Black Bolt: All 172 Cards, Chase Prices & Products

Pokémon TCG: Scarlet & Violet—Black Bolt released on 18 July 2025 with 172 cards: 86 main set and 86 secret rares numbered 087 to 172. It is half of a twin release — White Flare arrived the same day with a near-mirrored list of 173 — and the two closed the Scarlet & Violet era, which ended on 26 September 2025. Zekrom is the cover Pokémon and the ceiling is two Black White Rares: the Victini at 171/086 at CA$838.49 and the Zekrom ex at 172/086 at CA$828.50 on Quaza Track, 25 July 2026. Below: what belongs to this set rather than its twin, fifteen chase cards and twelve products.

What belongs to Black Bolt and what belongs to White Flare

Both released the same day and both number to /086, the easiest pair in the era to confuse. Black Bolt's list ends at 172/086; White Flare's runs to 173/086, because it carries one more Illustration Rare, 70 against 69. Every other rarity band is the same size, so that one card is the whole difference between the totals.

Both sets also hold a card at 166/086 — Zekrom ex here by danciao, Reshiram ex there by kawayoo. The Victini at 171/086 is Black Bolt's; its White Flare counterpart is numbered 172/086, and the two are separate prints of one 5ban Graphics illustration, told apart by the set symbol and the number. Otherwise the main sets share no Pokémon: 78 species each, zero overlap, union 156 — exactly the number introduced in Generation V. Victini is the one exception the official expansion page names, and it sits in only Black Bolt's main set, at 012/086.

The fifteen chase cards

Ordered by market price observed on 25 July 2026, illustrator on each. Filter by rarity, tap to zoom. Ten of the fifteen carry a quoted USD figure; four Special Illustration Rares and the Serperior ex Double Rare do not.

All (15)Black White Rare (2)Special Illustration Rare (7)Illustration Rare (5)Double Rare (1)

Every USD figure below is a market-price observation on the stated date, not a transaction: no individually dated sale could be sourced for any card here, with PriceCharting, TCGplayer, eBay and PSA all returning HTTP 403. Cardrake and CardCodex share a feed and count as one source.

Two entries carry more collector weight than their prices suggest: Excadrill ex 168/086 is by Mitsuhiro Arita, who drew the 1996 Base Set Charizard, and Volcarona 100/086 is by AKIRA EGAWA, who later drew the Mega Darkrai ex Special Illustration Rare in Pitch Black. Seismitoad 105/086 is the anomaly: an Illustration Rare quoted above every Special Illustration Rare with a quoted price except Zekrom ex 166/086.

How the 172 cards break down

The English list is not a straight translation of the Japanese one. Five Pokémon lines moved sides in localisation: Klink, Klang, Klinklang, Rufflet and Braviary came into English Black Bolt from the Japanese White Flare list, while Litwick, Lampent, Chandelure, Vullaby and Mandibuzz went the other way — Chandelure is a Black Bolt card in Japan and a White Flare card in English. Bulbapedia reads that as Black Bolt taking the Pokémon exclusive to Pokémon White, which is single-source; the swap itself is verified by enumeration.

The Japanese sets hold 174 cards each, 72 of them Art Rares. English Black Bolt has 69 Illustration Rares because three were cut and reissued as promos: Victini as SVP Black Star Promo 208 in the Unova Victini Illustration Collection, Thundurus as SVP 209 in the Elite Trainer Box, Reuniclus as SVP 212 in the Tech Sticker Collection. 72 minus 3 is 69. Across both sets 152 of the 156 Generation V Pokémon have an illustration-rare-or-better card in an expansion, and the four that do not are Thundurus and Reuniclus here and Tornadus and Gothitelle in White Flare — not Victini, whose Black White Rare covers it in both.

Two parallel holofoils run alongside the ordinary reverse, a Poké Ball etch and a Master Ball etch. Pokémon at Common, Uncommon and Rare come in all three; Trainers and Special Energy at Common and Uncommon come in the regular and Poké Ball versions only. There is no new game mechanic: Eelektrik 031/086 carries Dynamotor, the returning Black and White Ability the official overview highlights, and Prism Energy 086/086 is the on-theme reprint, first printed in Next Destinies in 2012.

Regulation marks are not uniform here, unlike its twin. 170 cards carry mark I; Antique Cover Fossil 080/086 carries H, and Professor's Research 085/086 carries G, rotated out by the 2026-27 Standard format on 10 April 2026. One card therefore carries a rotated mark. Because Professor's Research is a Trainer, a legal-marked print of the same card can stand in for it, so the deck slot survives. That allowance does not extend to Pokémon.

Every product, contents and MSRP

Twelve product lines carry Black Bolt packs: seven exclusive, five mixing packs from both halves of the pair. There is no 36-pack booster box — Black Bolt is a special expansion and none was ever sold — so the large format is the Booster Bundle Display, ten bundles and 60 packs. Prices are live below and on the Black Bolt tracker page; untracked rows read N/A.

The tracker files three shared items — Mini Tin Display, Victini Illustration Collection, Heavy Hitters Collection — under Black Bolt as a cataloguing choice; half the packs in each are White Flare, typically so in Heavy Hitters. *Arithmetic on case prices in PHD Games' 8 May 2025 distributor solicitation, not a published single-unit MSRP. †Single-source: the Pokémon Center box price, and the Heavy Hitters price and date, from a StockX record because Costco's page is bot-gated. ‡Distributor price for the eight-tin display. pokemon.com and pokemoncenter.com returned HTTP 403 throughout. Sometimes claimed but absent: no 36-pack booster box, no Build & Battle Box.

What the tracker shows

Black Bolt's Quaza set index reads 136.21 on 25 July 2026, up 36.2% over three months on a base of 100. Only White Flare is higher, at 138.58, the two highest readings in the 41-set catalogue against a Scarlet & Violet mean of 114.86. The correlation is with release recency, not card quality: these were the last sets before the era closed, and the sharpest re-rating falls after a set stops being the current release. The three Mega sets still shipping sit between 43.96 and 94.68.

The indexes are sealed-only: for all 41 sets the member count equals the sealed product count exactly. What re-rated upward is sealed product, not every Black Bolt card — raw singles across the era often went the other way, with Iono 269/193 from Paldea Evolved 54% below its launch month while that set's sealed box is up 128%. Week to week this set is quiet: 15 tracked products average +0.0% against an era-wide −0.90%.

Inside the set, scarcity is product-specific, not set-wide: cheapest to dearest is 19×, the shared Unova Victini Illustration Collection at CA$98.03 against the Booster Bundle Display at CA$1,872.80. The Display is the one Black Bolt item up more than 3% on the week, and against ten Booster Bundles bought separately at CA$1,146.60 it carries a 63% premium over its own contents, which is what happens when no 36-pack format competes.

At the top of the singles list the market is pricing the rarity slot, not the card: the two Black White Rares sit within 1.2% of each other in Canadian dollars, one an 80 HP Basic, the other a 230 HP Pokémon ex. A tier down, the Zekrom ex Special Illustration Rare at 166/086 trades at roughly 48% of the Black White Rare print of the same card — same attacks, same HP, the spread all in treatment and illustrator.

Release timeline

• May 6, 2025Announced internationally with a new Black White rare rarity and "over 170 cards in each set".
• Jun 6, 2025Japanese release, 174 cards.
• Jul 18, 2025English release. Wave 1: Elite Trainer Boxes, Binder Collection, Poster Collection, Mini Tins.
• Aug 1, 2025Wave 2: Tech Sticker Collection, Victini Illustration Collection.
• Aug 22, 2025Wave 3: Booster Bundle and its Display.
• Sep 26, 2025Mega Evolution releases; the Scarlet & Violet era closes.
• Apr 10, 20262026-27 Standard begins, rotating out regulation mark G.
• Jul 25, 2026Index 136.21; 15 tracked products average +0.0% on the week.

The rest of the Scarlet & Violet era

The other half of the release has its own products, chase list and one extra card: the White Flare set guide covers it. The set before is the Destined Rivals set guide, and what replaced the era is the Mega Evolution set guide.

Frequently asked questions