Courtyard Pokémon packs, ranked by what they actually return

Pokémon is where most of Courtyard happens. Of the 35,075 pulls we have indexed, 24,526 came from 46 Pokémon packs — roughly two-thirds of the entire feed. That volume is enough to answer a question the product pages cannot: which tier is actually worth buying?

The answer is consistent, and it runs backwards to intuition.

The cheap packs are the worst value, by a distance

Sorted by cash-out ratio, the Pokémon catalogue produces an almost monotonic relationship with price — in the direction buyers least expect. The four best packs cost $249 to $999. The worst cost $15 to $50.

Pokémon Platinum Pack is the only Pokémon pack currently above break-even, at 1.034x across 58 indexed pulls with a 43.1% hit rate. Pokémon Basic Pack sits at 0.603x — you recover about 60 cents of cash per dollar, which is the worst rate anywhere in our tracked catalogue, Pokémon or otherwise.

The gap between them is 43 percentage points of expected return, on the same platform, in the same category, on the same evening.

Why the cheap tiers run worse

We can observe the pattern with confidence and can only reason about the cause, so it is worth separating those. What the data shows is that low-priced packs carry lower hit rates as well as lower ratios: Pokémon Basic Pack beats its price on just 15.9% of rips, against 43.1% for Pokémon Platinum Pack. The cheap packs are not merely thinner — they miss more often too.

A plausible mechanism, which we cannot verify from the public feed: a flat operating cost per pull — grading, custody, fulfilment — eats a much larger share of a $15 pack than a $500 one. That would produce exactly this shape without anyone designing it. Treat that as a reasonable explanation rather than a measured fact; the pattern is measured, the reason is not.

The best-sampled pack in the index

Pokémon Starter Pack carries 6,087 indexed pulls — by far the largest sample we hold on any pack, and enough that its numbers are about as settled as anything on this site gets. It returns 0.875x with a 25.7% hit rate and a $21.90 median against a $25 price.

That is a fair verdict rather than a damning one: a modest slice on the dollar for real chase odds and a genuinely graded card. It is entertainment at a knowable price, which is a perfectly rational purchase — provided you know the price.

What you actually pull: mostly sealed boosters

There is a gap between how Pokémon packs are marketed and what the feed shows coming out of them. The single most frequently pulled item across our entire index is a sealed Scarlet & Violet Destined Rivals booster pack — appearing 333 times at an average value of $11.40. Japanese Sun & Moon Full Metal Wall boosters appear 99 times at $14.40; Shining Fates 44 times at $18.60.

Those are not graded slabs. They are modern sealed product, and they make up a large share of the low-value end of every Pokémon pack's distribution. It explains the shape of the numbers above: a $15 pack is mostly paying out a single modern booster worth about ten dollars, which is why its median sits at $9.00 and its hit rate at 15.9%.

This matters for two practical reasons. First, sealed boosters have a public retail price, so unlike a graded slab you can check the FMV against a shop yourself — a useful sanity test on Courtyard's valuations. Second, they behave differently on exit: a $11 booster is nowhere near the redemption threshold, so in practice it is an instant-sell outcome at 84.6%, whatever you intended when you bought the pack.

Where Pokémon sits against the rest of the catalogue

At 0.867x the category runs slightly ahead of the catalogue average, and it is far from the worst place to spend.

Two things in that figure deserve caution rather than excitement. D.C. Comic leads at 1.048x from a single pack and 94 pulls — a real measurement, but one pack is a data point, not a category, and it is dimmed above for that reason. Marvel Comic sits last at 0.683x from four packs and 37 pulls, which is too thin to call either. The categories you can actually lean on are Pokémon and Football, where the sample runs to thousands.

How to buy Pokémon packs on this evidence

Skip the entry tier. Basic and Pro sit at the bottom of the ranking and the cheap price is not the bargain it looks like — it is the worst rate in the catalogue attached to the smallest ticket.

Starter is the honest default. Enormous sample, average economics, real odds. If you want to rip Pokémon without studying anything, this is the one that will not surprise you.

The high tiers are where the value is, and the variance with it. Platinum at $500 is the only pack above break-even, but a $500 ticket with a $453 median means a typical rip still lands short. Ratio and comfort are different questions — see why average EV lies.

Check the ratio, not the tier name. “Spicy”, “Ultra” and “Mythic” describe marketing, not economics: Ultra Pack (0.969x) and Ultra Spicy (0.938x) differ by three points despite near-identical names and prices. Every pack's live figure is on its category page, and these numbers move as pools deplete and restock — this article is a snapshot dated 18 September 2026, the rankings are not.