Storm Emeralda Week One: Which Chase Cards Held Value

Storm Emeralda's Mega Rayquaza ex Special Art Rare is worth more today than it was on release night, while the set's other early mover, Raikou ex, has given back almost 30% of its launch-day spike. One week after Japan's July 31 launch, the two cards that looked like twins on day one have split hard — and the pattern says something about which chase-card spikes are worth trusting.

What happened to Storm Emeralda prices in the first week?

Storm Emeralda (M6) launched in Japan on July 31, 2026, through lottery-only allocation, and its chase cards moved fast and unevenly: the Mega Rayquaza ex Special Art Rare (SAR, 110/076) is up about 4% from its release-night price, while Raikou ex SAR (108/076) and Zinnia's Trust SAR (112/076) are down roughly 28-29% over the same week, based on release-day figures from Samurai Sword Tokyo and SNKRDUNK compared against current PriceCharting listings.

Here's the day-1-to-day-6 scoreboard for the set's four most-traded chase cards:

Card	Rarity	Release night (Jul 31)	Now (Aug 6)	Change	Liquidity
Mega Rayquaza ex (113/076)	MUR	~$1,830	$1,500.00	-18%	Thin (1 sale/yr on PriceCharting)
Mega Rayquaza ex (110/076)	SAR	~$850	$881.80	+4%	Liquid (5 sales/day)
Raikou ex (108/076)	SAR	~$103	$73.70	-28%	Liquid (10 sales/day)
Zinnia's Trust (112/076)	SAR	~$61	$44.00	-29%	Liquid (5 sales/day)

Release-night prices are converted from yen at ¥163/USD, the rate Samurai Sword Tokyo used in its July 31 market report. Current prices are ungraded PriceCharting listings pulled August 6. If you're holding any of these cards, scanning them with Valusaur pulls live TCGplayer and Cardmarket data in one pass instead of checking each marketplace separately.

Which chase cards actually held their value?

The Mega Rayquaza ex SAR is the one card in Storm Emeralda's top tier trading above its release-night price, up from about ¥138,000 ($850) the evening of July 31 to $881.80 now, with PSA 10 copies listed around $3,423.68. It's also the most liquid high-end card in the set at five sales a day on PriceCharting, so that number reflects a real, actively traded market rather than one or two outlier sales. The card is illustrated by Kazuki Minami, winner of the 2024 Pokémon TCG Illustration Contest, and Samurai Sword Tokyo's release-day report flagged it as the card "rising during release day" while the Mega Ultra Rare (MUR) cooled — a pattern that has now held for a full week rather than reversing.

The MUR Mega Rayquaza ex, by contrast, is the card everyone assumes is the set's top hold, and on release night it was: it opened nearly ¥348,000 ($2,135) and settled around ¥298,000 ($1,830) by evening, according to both Samurai Sword Tokyo and SNKRDUNK's launch-day price guide. A week later, PriceCharting shows it at $1,500 ungraded — but tags that figure as coming from roughly one ungraded sale a year. A card this scarce (shops estimate the pull rate at 1 in 50-100 boxes) simply doesn't generate enough raw-card sales for a reliable week-one trend, so treat the $1,500 print as a data point, not a verdict. The safer read is the SAR: same set, same Mega Rayquaza ex, and enough sales volume to trust the number.

Why did Raikou ex give back its release-day spike?

Raikou ex SAR opened around ¥11,800-15,800 on release morning and rose more than 40% during the day itself to about ¥17,000 (~$103), driven by artwork attention on Japanese social media and demand from competitive players — but that intraday spike has now mostly reversed. PriceCharting lists it at $73.70 today, down about 28% from its release-night price, despite being the most liquid card tracked here at 10 sales a day.

That reversal is the actual lesson of Storm Emeralda's first week: the card that moved the most on launch day gave almost all of it back within a week, while the card that looked comparatively flat (the SAR Mega Rayquaza ex) kept climbing. Chasing the biggest single-day percentage gain in a new set is close to a coin flip; a card's role as the set's clear second-best chase card, next to the mascot's headline SAR, held up better than an artwork-driven pop.

Zinnia's Trust SAR followed a similar arc to Raikou ex without the initial spike — it opened around ¥10,000 (~$61) and sits at $44.00 now, a 29% pullback. Zinnia's Trust is Zinnia's first new printing in five years and ties directly into Mega Rayquaza's Hoenn backstory, but female-Supporter SARs in this era typically settle into their real price only after the launch-week premium burns off, and that appears to be exactly what's happening here.

Is the Storm Emeralda box cooling like past Mega Evolution sets?

Storm Emeralda booster boxes traded at ¥23,000-25,000 (~$141-153) on release day, down about 30% from a ¥36,000 pre-release speculative peak in early July, but still roughly double what any previous Mega Evolution-era set opened at (past M-series launches started around ¥11,000). Samurai Sword Tokyo's own tracking shows that pattern — pre-release peak, correction into launch, then a settling period — has held for every Mega Evolution set so far: Mega Symphonia and Abyss Eye both hit their highest sealed-box prices around launch, then stabilized in the ¥9,100-14,000 range once reprint supply worked through. We saw the same shape play out on the English side with Pitch Black's chase cards, which crashed hard in their first week after release before finding a floor.

Storm Emeralda's box hasn't been independently re-checked at the one-week mark the way its singles have, so it's too early to say whether ¥23,000-25,000 is the new floor or just a stop on the way down. What the card-level data already shows is that "release day price" and "one week later price" are two different numbers, sometimes in opposite directions on the same card list — which is exactly why entering at day-one prices on hype alone is the riskiest version of this trade.

What does this mean for Delta Reign in November?

These same cards reach English shelves as Delta Reign on November 6, 2026, and Japanese chase cards have historically traded at a 15-40% premium over their English-language counterparts once both versions exist side by side. The ranked order from Storm Emeralda's Japanese launch — Mega Rayquaza ex MUR at the top, its SAR as the more liquid second option, Raikou ex and Zinnia's Trust as the next tier — is a reasonable preview of which Delta Reign cards English collectors will chase hardest, even though the yen figures won't translate directly. Anyone deciding whether to import Storm Emeralda now or wait for Delta Reign should weigh that premium against the three-plus month wait; we broke down that specific math, box cost against card cost, in our Storm Emeralda import-vs-wait guide, published before this week's numbers were in. It's also worth revisiting our original Mega Rayquaza ex price outlook from before the set's cards were even fully revealed, to see how far the actual market has moved from the pre-launch guesswork.

If you're tracking a Storm Emeralda card you already own or are eyeing, checking both the Japanese and English price feeds side by side is the fastest way to see whether a card like this is actually holding or just had a loud opening weekend — that's the exact comparison Valusaur's price history view is built for, across all seven card regions in one scan.

FAQ

Did Storm Emeralda prices crash in the first week? Not evenly. The Mega Rayquaza ex SAR (110/076) is up about 4% from its release-night price, while Raikou ex SAR and Zinnia's Trust SAR are both down roughly 28-29% over the same week, based on Samurai Sword Tokyo's July 31 report compared to current PriceCharting listings.

What is the most valuable Storm Emeralda card right now? The Mega Ultra Rare Mega Rayquaza ex (113/076) remains the set's top card at $1,500-1,830 depending on the snapshot, though its ungraded sales volume is too thin for a confident week-one trend. The more liquid Mega Rayquaza ex SAR (110/076), at $881.80, is the more reliable read on where the set's headline card actually sits.

Why did Raikou ex's price fall after such a strong launch day? Raikou ex SAR rose more than 40% during release day itself on artwork buzz and competitive-player demand, but that kind of single-day spike is typically driven by a handful of early transactions rather than sustained demand. A week later it's down about 28% from that release-night price, even with the highest sales volume of the cards tracked here.

When can I buy these cards in English? Delta Reign, the English version of Storm Emeralda, releases worldwide on November 6, 2026, after September's 30th Celebration set. Japanese-language versions of these same cards are already on the secondary market now, typically at a 15-40% premium over what the English prints will likely cost once available.

Should I buy Storm Emeralda singles now or wait? If you want the SAR Mega Rayquaza ex specifically, the data so far says it isn't cooling — waiting hasn't paid off for that card yet. Raikou ex and Zinnia's Trust have already given back much of their launch-week premium, so patience has been the better play on those two.