Umbreon ex Special Illustration Rare

Here we are. The all new Moonbreon. The one card to rule them all. This utterly beautiful piece of art, shrunk down and printed on a playing card, has an at-the-time-of-writing market price of…$1,590

It began selling at over $1,630, so you could consider this quite a bargain! Over the first week the set’s been “on sale,” it’s wavered between $1,540 and $1,590, and it’s very hard to know in which direction it will travel.

I desperately hope that all the other cards in this set will soon plunge in prices, as TPCi gets some more stock out there and weakens the hands of the scalpers. But this card, I dunno.

Umbreon causes a brain disease doctors call “Dumbassitis,” and that previous Moonbreon from 2021’s Evolving Skies is now at $1,700. It was once considered extraordinarily expensive at $400, but stuck there, growing to around $500 at the start of 2024. Then slowly that number climbed over the year, faster and faster, up to $800 by October, and then rocketing up when everything went to shit with the announcement of Prismatic Evolutions.

Given this, and given this new Umbreon is so spectacularly stunning, and that it can even let you win a game just by discarding its energy, I wonder if it might hold this bonkers value for a while. And you know what? I kinda like that. The rest being so expensive is miserable, making it impossible for regular folks to collect the set, and just drives scalping. But having one card be this incredible thing to pull out of a pack? That’s kind of fun, right?