How it works

For every booster box we track, Worth Ripping answers one question: if you buy this box and open it, are the cards inside worth more than you paid?

The short version

1. We look up today's Cardmarket price for every card in the set, and for a sealed booster display.
2. We work out what you'd keep after selling: a marketplace fee, a cost for each card you sell, and bulk prices for cheap cards.
3. We combine that with the pull rates: how often each kind of card turns up.
4. We open 100,000 virtual boxes to see the spread: how often a box loses money, what a typical box is worth, and what a lucky one brings in.

Prices

Card and box prices come from Cardmarket's price guide, which Cardmarket publishes every day for anyone to use. For each card and each sealed booster box we use Cardmarket's trend price, or the average sale price of the last days when there's no trend price yet.

The price guide doesn't say which rarity a card is, so we take that from a card database: Scryfall for Magic, TCGdex for Pokémon, YGOPRODeck for Yu-Gi-Oh!, Lorcast for Lorcana, OPTCG API for One Piece and DigimonCard.io for Digimon. For games where we can't tell a card's rarity yet, a box shows its price but no verdict until we can.

For Union Arena, Grand Archive and Palworld, box and card prices come from TCGplayer, the main US marketplace, and are shown in US dollars.

Around a release, prices come from pre-orders and the first listings. They move a lot in those weeks, so check the date on each set page.

Each set page also shows the lowest listing and how the box price has moved, one point per day since live prices started. The box pictures are real photos of each box, from the publisher or from the product catalogues of TCGplayer and CardNexus; a box whose photo isn't out yet shows its game's artwork.

Selling costs

A card is only worth its price if you sell it, and selling costs money. By default we assume:

• a marketplace fee of 5% of the sale price,
• €0.25 for every card you sell, for postage, sleeves and your time,
• cards worth less than €1.00 aren't worth listing, so they go to bulk at €0.01 each.

You can change all of these on any set page. Your numbers stay in your browser.

Pull rates

Pull rates say how often each kind of card shows up. Publishers rarely publish them, so every rate on the site says where it comes from:

• Official: stated by the publisher.
• Published estimate: from someone who opened and counted packs. We link the source.
• Published range: the source only gives a lower and an upper limit.
• Our assumption: there's no data yet. We keep these to a minimum and give them a wide range.
• Estimate: nobody has measured this box yet, so we use the rates of boxes with the same pack layout and widen the range. These boxes say "Estimated odds".

Each rate also has a likely range. A rate counted from 50 packs is much less certain than one counted from 5,000, and the range shows that.

The simulation

An average hides the most important thing about a box: a big part of the value often sits in a few rare cards. So we open 100,000 virtual boxes, slot by slot, with a random card of the right rarity in every slot. That gives:

• Boxes that lose money: the share of boxes worth less than the box price.
• Bad, typical and good box: the boxes at the 10th, 50th and 90th percentile.
• Chance of a big pull: how often a box has at least one card of a rare type.

To see how much the pull rates matter, we also redo the math for 200 alternative sets of pull rates, drawn from their likely ranges. The spread of those results is the "likely between" range next to each verdict.

The verdict

• Rip it: after selling costs, the cards are worth at least 10% more than the box, and fewer than half of boxes lose money.
• Toss-up: anything in between, and boxes that only beat their price on average because of rare big pulls.
• Keep it sealed: the cards are worth at least 10% less than the box. Buying the singles you want is cheaper.

What we don't count

• Shipping and import costs when you buy the box.
• Card condition. We price cards as near mint, and pulls aren't always perfect.
• Grading, and how long it takes to sell everything.
• Price drops after release. Each set page shows what happens if card prices fall.
• Keeping a box sealed as an investment. That's a different bet.

Changes

• 14 October 2026: every game and every booster box added, old and new: 22 games and about 900 boxes. Boxes without measured pull rates are marked as estimates.
• 14 October 2026: One Piece Card Game added, with OP-17 and OP-16.
• 13 October 2026: first version, with Riftbound Radiance and Vendetta.