An Unbroken Bonds booster pack costs about $66 in our July 2026 price snapshot and returns roughly $22 of expected value — a -67% margin, or about $44 of expected loss per rip. That's the whole verdict in one line: this is a singles set now. People keep paying pack prices anyway, because Unbroken Bonds is where Reshiram & Charizard-GX lives, and seven years on the entire product line is priced like a shrine to one rainbow card.
What Unbroken Bonds is, and why 2019 mattered
Unbroken Bonds released May 3, 2019, the tenth main expansion of the Sun & Moon era and the second big swing of the Tag Team GX experiment that Team Up had kicked off a few months earlier. Tag Teams were the era's power spike — two Pokémon on one card, huge HP, huge attacks — and this set delivered the pairing that defined the format: Reshiram & Charizard-GX, the engine of "Reshizard" decks that sat at the top of competitive play for the next two years.
It's a big set, 214 cards before secret rares, and it was a four-dollar pack at retail when it launched. That was the last stretch of the pre-boom market. When 2020–21 hit and everything with a Charizard on it repriced, Unbroken Bonds got dragged up with the icons, and it never came back down. Sealed from this window now trades on scarcity and nostalgia, not on what's inside the packs — the same dynamic that turned its era-mate Hidden Fates into furniture-priced product.
The chase: one Charizard and its court
Our snapshot tracks sealed prices and pack EV for this set rather than a full singles board, so no per-card price table here — but the chase hierarchy is well established and hasn't moved much in years:
- Reshiram & Charizard-GX (rainbow rare) — the set's crown and one of the boom era's poster cards. A three-figure card raw for most of its life, with high grades commanding several times that.
- Reshiram & Charizard-GX (full art and regular) — the playable versions, still the most-wanted non-secret cards in the set.
- Gengar & Mimikyu-GX (rainbow and full art) — the spooky Tag Team that built its own collector following.
- Lucario & Melmetal-GX and Greninja & Zoroark-GX — second-tier Tag Teams with real full-art demand.
- Dedenne-GX (full art / rainbow) — the little draw engine that sat in nearly every competitive deck of the era.
- Welder (full art) — the most-played supporter of its format, and the rare trainer card that carries genuine value.
That's a top-heavy board. The snapshot's $21.64 of pack EV is mostly a thin slice of these cards plus a long tail of dollar holos — which is exactly the shape that makes ripping ugly.
Pull rates: what the odds actually look like
No official odds exist, so the Worth the Rip calculator models Unbroken Bonds on community estimates for the standard Sun & Moon pack structure. Per pack, the hit slot breaks down roughly as:
- Plain holo rare (no hit): ~90.5%
- Full art ultra rare: ~6.5%
- Rainbow rare: ~2%
- Gold secret: ~1%
A separate rare slot lands a GX about 11% of the time. Add it up and you're looking at something like one full-art-or-better pull per 10–11 packs — call it three or four real hits in a 36-pack box. Rainbows run about 1 in 50 packs, and that 2% is spread across the whole secret-rare board, so the specific rainbow Charizard is a genuine long shot even inside a full box. At $66 a pack, one expected rainbow of any kind costs you about $3,300 in packs. If the mechanics of hit slots and expected value are new to you, how pull rates work walks through the math.
Sealed products: the box costs more per pack
Unbroken Bonds sealed pricing has a quirk worth seeing plainly, as of our July 2026 snapshot:
| Product | Price | EV | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Booster Pack | $66.06 | $21.64 | -67% |
| Booster Box (36 packs) | $2,463.78 | ~$779 | -68% |
Run the per-pack math on the box: about $68.40 each. The booster box is more expensive per pack than loose packs. There's no bulk discount because nobody buys a $2,464 vintage-adjacent box to rip it — the box is the collectible, and sealed-box buyers pay a premium for the intact shrink. The Elite Trainer Box doesn't even show a reliable TCGplayer market price right now; vintage sealed at this age trades thin and jumpy. You can run the live numbers for this set to see where the board sits today.
Verdict: buy the Charizard, not the lottery ticket
Three honest lanes:
- Want the cards? Buy singles. Every chase card in this set is a known quantity on the open market, and at -67% per pack you are paying a roughly $44 fee per rip to avoid just purchasing the thing you want.
- Holding sealed? A closed-era set with the format-defining Charizard is a defensible long hold — but you're buying in at post-boom prices, not discovering anything. Slow, uneven appreciation is the realistic case.
- Ripping for fun? It's a great era to open and a terrible price to open it at. Price the nostalgia honestly: about $44 of expected loss per pack, before the near-certainty that your rainbow — if you ever hit one — isn't the Charizard.
FAQ
What is the rarest card in Unbroken Bonds?
The rainbow rare Reshiram & Charizard-GX is the set's headline secret rare and its most valuable card. Community estimates put rainbows at roughly 2% of packs, split across all of the set's secret-rare targets.
Is an Unbroken Bonds booster box worth buying in 2026?
Not to rip. At about $2,464 for roughly $779 of expected value — and a higher per-pack cost than loose packs — the box only makes sense as a sealed hold you never open.
What were Unbroken Bonds packs worth at release?
About $4 at retail in May 2019. The move to $66 happened during the 2020–21 boom and stuck because the set sits in a closed era with an icon card and no new supply.