The Spike Report · Pokémon | Edition 08

Data cutoff: Sunday, 11 October 2026, end of day. Distributed: Tuesday, 13 October 2026. Source: JustTCG.

Two things, and only one of them shows up in the prices.

Louisville. Almost 3,000 players walked into a Regional on Saturday, which makes it the biggest room Pokémon has put together in weeks. Joseph Ugarte won it, beating Andrew Figueras in the finals — his fourth Regional title and his second this season. Recife ran the Friday before with another thousand-odd players. Dragapult, which won Worlds in August and has not stopped since, is sitting on 35.79% of the format. A third of every deck you’d sit across from is the same deck.

None of that moved a single price on this week’s board. We’ll come back to why, because it’s the most interesting thing in the edition.

Delta Reign. On 6 November, three and a half weeks from now, Mega Evolution—Delta Reign arrives as the final main expansion of the Mega Evolution era, with Mega Rayquaza ex on the front of it.

That one is in the prices. It’s in almost all of them.

Mega Evolution is the worst era we track this week. Median card -5.25%, worse than last week’s -3.61%, with 87% of its cards falling.

Here’s the thing: it’s not mysterious. There’s a new Mega Evolution set coming, it’s the last one, and everybody knows both halves of that sentence. So the current Mega Evo chase cards are getting sold into the announcement by people who’d rather hold the new thing, and the people who might have bought them are waiting three weeks to see what Delta Reign looks like.

You can watch it happen card by card:

The sets under a year old are down 18.85% over thirty days on a median. Every single one of them is a Mega Evolution or late Scarlet & Violet set. This is the oldest pattern in collecting and it doesn’t need a clever name: nobody wants this year’s cards when next year’s are at the printer.

If you’re holding Mega Evo singles, nothing here tells you what to do. But it’s worth knowing that the thing pressing on your cards has a date on it, and the date is 6 November.

Now the Louisville question.

N’s Zoroark is a top-five deck. 7.51% of the format, people are winning with it, you will see it at your locals this weekend. And N’s Zoroark ex (185) — the Journey Together Special Illustration Rare, the pretty one — is number two on our board at -14.0%, down to $35.90.

A top-five deck and its chase art card falling off a cliff in the same week. That’s not a contradiction. It’s two different markets that happen to share a Pokémon.

The person building N’s Zoroark for Louisville bought the playable copy for a few dollars. The person who wanted the $36 Special Illustration Rare wanted it because it’s gorgeous, and that desire doesn’t care what Ugarte did on Saturday. Tournament results move playables. They mostly don’t move art.

The reverse holds too, and it’s why Dragapult owning a third of the format shows up nowhere in our numbers. We track the five highest-priced cards in each set. Dragapult’s tournament staples aren’t in that bracket, so a deck that dominates the game is invisible to a report that watches chase cards.

Worth saying out loud, because we’ve implied the connection before and it isn’t there: when we tell you a card fell 14%, we are telling you about collectors, not about the metagame. Those two groups overlap in the Venn diagram and diverge in the wallet.

Four Rayquazas, four completely different stories:

Make of that what you will. We mostly find it funny that the one green card we can confidently say went up this week is a $10.78 Crown Zenith VMAX.

Figures are chase tier, $10 and up, sets at least ninety days old.

Scarlet & Violet at 94% declining is the widest we’ve ever recorded for any era in any edition. Sixty of its sixty-four measured cards fell. That’s not a trend, that’s a tide.

Mega Evolution’s median got meaningfully worse while slightly fewer of its cards fell — so the ones that are falling are falling harder.

XY and Sun & Moon are the two calm rows, and we’re not going to write you a paragraph about why, because we did that last week and the week before and both times it unwound in seven days. More on that below.

The part that actually holds up.

32 of the 33 cards in the one-to-two-year bucket went down. Meanwhile the over-eight-year group is flat on the week and up on the month.

Old cards are holding. New cards are bleeding. The correlation between how old a set is and how it did this week now sits at +0.514, the strongest we’ve measured, and it has climbed every single week we’ve published it: +0.424, then +0.445, now this.

That’s the one thing in this report we’d actually stand behind if you stopped us in a card shop. Everything else we’ve told you about which era is worst has had a shelf life of about a week.

Set notes. Destined Rivals is the worst set with a full lineup — -6.70% on an average, all five cards down, and it put two of them on our board. Obsidian Flames technically reads worse at -6.93%, but it has two measured cards and one of them is Gloom, so take that with salt. Journey Together is -6.18% on an average and only -1.31% on a median, which is just our two board entries doing all the damage.

One warning. Celestial Storm shows +5.07%, best in our data, and you should ignore that number. Two of its five cards are held out this week, including that +21.3% Rayquaza GX. Without them the set is +0.46%. Same story for Lost Thunder (+1.34% becomes +0.17%) and XY base (+2.12% becomes -0.34%). From this edition on we’ll print both figures wherever the gap is worth more than a point.

The whole board: median card -0.615% across 294 cards, against -0.327% last week. 61% declining. Four cards in the entire universe rose 5% or more — the fewest we’ve ever counted — and thirty-three fell by that much.

Standing section. We write down what we claimed and settle it the following week, win or lose.

We floated retiring one of our artifact filters because it had never fired. It fired six days later, on that +21.3% Rayquaza GX. Had we taken our own advice, that card would be sitting at the top of today’s board on the strength of one price change. The filter stays, and we were wrong for the usual reason — we read four quiet weeks as proof a rule was useless instead of proof the thing it catches is rare.

We asked whether the step dates on our held-out cards were clustering for a reason. They clustered again, so we tested it properly: seventeen rare events scattered across seven days produce a cluster this big about 55% of the time by chance. The feed is healthy — 36% to 50% of our universe reprices every single day, no gaps. So: coincidence, confirmed, boring. Our favourite kind of answer.

We said Rayquaza VMAX (101) was sitting just under our price floor. It crossed. It’s ninth on the board. Nothing changed about the card; it passed a line we drew.

Last week’s three Early Signal cards, one week on. Mega Charizard Y ex -8.3% and still going. Lillie’s Clefairy ex 0.0% — eleven straight down days when we printed it, then it just stopped. Shining Mew +0.2%, which is the stall we said was most likely. Running record for that section: six cards, three kept going, one turned around, two went flat. Six isn’t a sample. It’s just the only honest way to find out.

And last week’s entire board, seven days later. All ten slowed down or reversed.

Ten for ten. Not one of last week’s movers was still moving that fast, and three had stopped or turned around entirely. We’ll keep printing this table until it stops being true, because if you’re using our board to decide anything, this is the table that tells you how much to trust it.

Short version, because it’s about our plumbing and you came here for cards.

Venusaur EX (141 Full Art) ranked seventh this morning at +9.6% and shouldn’t have been on the board at all. It sat at $102.62 for a fortnight, moved once — on the cutoff day itself — and printed the same number the next day. One price change in thirty days.

Our rule since edition three: a move carried by one day has to be confirmed by a later price change. Venusaur’s wasn’t. But our code looked for two quiet days after a jump, and a jump on the final day of the window can’t supply two days, so the check quietly passed a card it should have caught. Blastoise EX from the same set did the same thing on the same day.

Fixed. The rule didn’t change, the code now actually applies it at the edge of the window. We re-ran editions five, six and seven and no published board changes — it holds one extra card in each week, none of which made a board. Venusaur and Blastoise are both on the review list as of today.

One list. Gainers and decliners ranked together by the size of the move.

Seven day window, 4 to 11 October 2026. Prices are ungraded Near Mint. 98 of 350 tracked cards qualified and 81 cleared the guard. No qualifying card was pulled off the board by the review rule this week.

One gainer in ten, and it is a $10.78 card. That is the thinnest top of the board we have published. Four cards in the whole universe rose 5% or more.

Context for each of the ten. Where the shape of the week matters, the daily closing price is printed, Sunday to Sunday.