Destined Rivals' Mewtwo ex Fell $70.58 Raw, and a Slab Still Beats Selling It

Anyone who kept a raw Mewtwo ex #231 from Destined Rivals through the past month has paid for the privilege. Its TCGplayer market price was $366.81 on October 15 and $296.23 on November 13, and it got there without one bad day you could point at, just a long run of slightly worse ones. The card in the toploader hasn't changed at all; only the number beside it on TCGplayer has.

Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex #231

October 15

$366.81

November 13

$296.23

Move

-19.2%

Its worst day accounted for no more than 14% of the drop. Nobody really panics over a slow slide like that, because there's never a morning that forces the question. The graded market puts a very different number on the same card. A PSA 10 copy goes for $930.00, and of the 31,755 copies PSA has looked at, 58.2% came back a ten. Take the grading fee and eBay's cut off both sides, write off every copy that comes back below a 9 as if it were worth nothing, and a raw Mewtwo sent in is still worth $256.19 more than the same card sold as it is. That gap is wide enough that a month of slipping raw prices barely dents the case for the slab.

Destined Rivals had 12 cards that started the month at $20 or more, and all 12 were cheaper by the end of it, the typical one by 14.9%. Down among the cards under $1, prices mostly crept up, which is pleasant for anyone with a shoebox of commons and no help to anyone with money in the top of the set. One of every card in the set cost $1,442.29 on October 15 and $1,232.81 a month later, and most of the money lost came from just five cards. I'd half expected one of those five to have dropped in a single overnight markdown, but each of them slid as steadily as the Mewtwo did. Grading softens the blow on most of them. Of the 10 cards whose slabs we could put an expected value on, 7 still came out ahead of a raw sale after fees, but nothing else on that list gets close to the Mewtwo's margin.

Cynthia's Garchomp ex #232 is the second best case, a card that lost 17.3% to sit at $155.28 and still grades $60.83 ahead of a raw sale. Ethan's Ho-Oh ex #230, after a 12.5% fall to $123.28, is ahead by a thinner $27.89, which is real money but not the kind I'd build a submission around. Moltres ex #229 took the hardest percentage hit of the five biggest losers, 23.2%, and with the raw card down to $57.23 and a PSA 10 still at $259.99, grading comes out $43.44 ahead. Misty's Psyduck #193 is the odd one. PSA has handed a 10 to only 27.3% of the 30,889 copies it graded, the lowest rate on the list, and the Psyduck grades at a profit anyway because its tens sell for $340.00.

Where grading loses on this list, it mostly isn't on the hard cards. The easy ones lose. Only Ethan's Adventure #236, with 42.5% of its graded copies coming back a ten, loses the way you'd expect a tough card to. Crobat ex #234 gets a 10 on 62.9% of graded copies and is expected to finish $8.52 behind the raw card, on a card that also lost 18.9% this month, so its holders haven't been paid for waiting either. Cynthia's Garchomp ex #241, which gems 66.7% of the time, works out to $0.92 per copy sent in once the fees come out, since a ten of it brings $90.00 while the raw card already fetches $22.58. Those figures write off every sub-9 copy, so the real gap on both is smaller than it looks. I'd leave those two sleeved in the binder, and the Mewtwo #231 is the one card here I'd happily put in the mail.

Population: Destined Rivals, 244 English cards with a TCGplayer market price on both October 15, 2026 and November 13, 2026. Every move compares a card to itself on the same TCGplayer product, first day against last, before anything is ranked or summed; a set total is never compared across days. Prices are TCGplayer market prices for the flagship printing, read from our daily price file. Graded figures are sold medians from our graded comps, PSA population counts come from our daily registry snapshot, and the expected value counts the PSA 9 outcome as well as the PSA 10, net of the grading fee and selling costs. The expected value sits beside the raw price less the same eBay selling fee, so the two compare like with like. It counts copies that grade below a 9 at nothing and leaves out shipping to PSA and back. Angle: whether grading pays: PSA 10 and PSA 9 sale prices against the raw card, the gem rate, and the expected value after fees.