What is pack EV — and why 1.0x is not break-even

Expected value is the average outcome of a repeated bet. For a mystery pack it answers one question: if you ripped this pack over and over, what would the average card be worth? It is arithmetic, not prophecy — and the most costly mistake buyers make is not misunderstanding the arithmetic, but misreading where break-even falls on it.

How is pack EV calculated?

PullValue indexes every pull Courtyard publishes to its public feed — 129,035 of them across 197 packs and 21,316 distinct graded cards since 12 July 2026. For each pack we take the fair market value attached to every card it has produced and average them. That average is the pack's expected value.

With one important adjustment: recent pulls count for more. A pack's pool changes as people rip it — chase cards leave and are not always replaced — so a card pulled two months ago is weaker evidence about tonight's pool than one pulled this morning. We apply exponential time-weighting with a seven-day half-life, which is documented in full on the methodology page. The result is what we call calibrated EV, shown beside the unweighted lifetime average on every pack page.

The EV ratio, and why 1.0 is not break-even

Divide a pack's EV by its price and you get the EV ratio. A $99 pack with a $108 EV shows 1.09x. The instinct is immediate and wrong: above 1.0 must be profitable, below 1.0 must be a loss, and 1.0 is the line.

It is wrong because FMV is not money. You cannot sell a card into the platform at its catalogue value. Courtyard's instant buyback pays a measured 84.6% of FMV — a flat rule we verified across 33,980 recorded offers, covered in detail in the buyback guide. So the real break-even point is not 1.0. It is 1 ÷ 0.846 = 1.18x.

The gap between those two marks is where most mystery pack money quietly goes. A pack sitting at exactly 1.00x looks like a fair coin toss and is in fact a 15.4% fee per rip. Nothing deceptive has occurred — the EV is accurate, the FMV is accurate — but the number a buyer naturally compares against price is measured in a currency they cannot spend.

The arithmetic, step by step

Take that $99 pack with a $108 EV and follow the money to the end rather than stopping at the headline:

It reads as +9% and returns −7.7%. That sixteen-point swing is not variance, not bad luck, and not a fee anyone hid — it is the difference between two units of measurement, applied to the same pack, on the same evening.

What the catalogue actually looks like

Applying that correction across every Courtyard pack with a known price and at least thirty indexed pulls gives an unsentimental picture.

Four packs out of forty-six currently return more in cash than they cost. The average priced pack sits at 0.884 — about 88 cents back per dollar. That is a house edge in the ordinary sense, comparable to a well-run casino game and considerably better than a lottery ticket, and it is the honest baseline against which any individual pack should be judged.

It also means the interesting question is never “are mystery packs +EV?” — mostly they are not — but which ones are, right now, and for how long. Pools restock, prices change and FMV estimates move, so packs genuinely do cross above the line. Our scanner exists to find those crossings.

Why sample size decides whether any of this means anything

An EV computed from twelve pulls is not a measurement; it is a rumour with a decimal point. Because pack value distributions have long tails, a single unusual card can move a small sample's average by fifty percent or more, and there is no way to tell from the number alone whether that happened.

PullValue therefore refuses to issue a verdict below five indexed pulls, marks anything between five and twenty-nine as a provisional early read, and publishes the sample size beside every figure. Pokémon Starter Pack carries 6,087 pulls behind its numbers; a pack with forty is telling you far less, and should be read that way. We also publish a median and hit rate alongside every EV, because a single average — however well sampled — cannot describe a top-heavy pool.

The short version worth remembering: EV is measured in catalogue value, your wallet is measured in cash, and the exchange rate between them is 0.846. Apply it before you compare anything to a price.