Are Lv.X, LEGEND and BREAK Cards Worth Anything?

Pokemon has retired nine card mechanics since 2007, and TCGplayer still files each of them under its own Stage label: Level Up, LEGEND, Mega, Primal, BREAK, Restored, VMAX, VSTAR and V-UNION. Sixteen spellings, strictly: the provider writes Level Up and Level-Up as separate values, and files Gigantamax beside VMAX. Primal Reversion is the mechanic's published name and the one this note uses; the provider's field just says Primal. That gives 634 English products, and every one of the 634 carries a Near Mint condition quote. Sorted by the middle card of each group, they do not form a gentle slope. Three of the nine ask three figures at the median. Four ask single digits.

Two of our own notes get close to this and neither could answer it. Pokemon Card Rarity Chart: What Each Tier Is Worth prices the rarity tiers, which is a different cut: a Lv.X and a modern Ultra Rare share the tier and share nothing else. Launch, Mania, Markdown: the Mega Era on Our Own Tape follows five chase cards from the 2025 and 2026 Mega sets, which is a separate population from this one, because TCGplayer files those new Mega cards under Basic, Stage 1 and Stage 2. Not one 2025 or 2026 Mega card is in the Mega group here. The 83 products in it are XY era M-EX cards and later reprints of XY era M-EX cards, nothing else.

Restored breaks the obvious story. It ran from Noble Victories in November 2011 to Steam Siege in August 2016, so its first printing predates BREAK, VMAX, VSTAR and V-UNION, and its median is 97 cents on 15 products. Eleven of those 15 are Uncommon. Lv.X sits at $100.00 because a Lv.X was the top card of its set: 56 of the 79 are Ultra Rare, 20 are promos, and only 2 of the 79 ask under $5. Restored was a line of text on a fossil Uncommon. The mechanic was retired in both cases. Only one of them was ever scarce.

That fourth column is the median of each card's own ratio to the median priced card in the same set, so it holds the era still. Read the third and fourth rows against the chart and the ordering flips. A Mega EX is 58.2 times its set's middle card and a Lv.X is 50.2 times its set's middle card, even though the Lv.X median is 2.4 times the Mega EX median in dollars. The Diamond and Pearl era floor is simply higher: the median priced card in Rising Rivals is $1.87 and in Arceus $1.31, against $0.39 in Flashfire and $0.29 in Steam Siege. Bulk's Hidden Floor measured the same era effect at the bottom of the market, where the worst WotC cards hold $2.34 against seven cents for the worst Sword and Shield ones. Part of what a Lv.X costs is the year it was printed in, and the year lifts the commons too. V-UNION is left out of this table on purpose: all 24 of its products are promos, so its only set-mate population is the SWSH promo file, which is not a set.

A LEGEND card is two cards. You need the top half and the bottom half to play it, and the provider quotes each half as its own product, which is why the LEGEND bar reads $249.54 for something nobody can own on its own. Across the 10 complete pairs we hold, every one of them two halves with a Near Mint quote on each, the median assembled cost is $477.85. V-UNION is the same trap in four pieces: six complete V-UNION cards sit in the 24 quarters, their median assembled cost is $30.14, and because the provider also sells a four-card bundle the sum of the quarters can be checked against a quoted whole.

On Zacian the two routes agree to eleven cents. On Pikachu they are 31% apart and on the second Morpeko printing the four quarters ask double what the bundle asks. Nothing here says which number is right. It says the mechanic has no single price, and a ratio built from one half of a LEGEND or one quarter of a V-UNION is comparing a fragment to a card. The cheapest complete LEGEND in the table is also the newest: 30th Classic Collection reprinted Darkrai & Cresselia in September 2026 and the pair asks $41.99, against $284.91 for the cheapest original, the 2010 Palkia & Dialga from Triumphant. Reprints sit inside every one of these groups and pull each median down a little: that same 30th Classic Collection put one card from six retired mechanics back on sale and they ask $7.33 to $21.17, Mew VMAX $18.77, M Gardevoir EX $11.42, Greninja BREAK $10.37, Arceus VSTAR $7.33. Celebrations Classic Collection did it in 2021 with Luxray GL LV.X at $4.12 and Garchomp C LV.X at $5.15. Being retired is not what holds a price up. The reprints say it plainly: same mechanic, a fresh printing, a tenth of the price.

Twenty-four cards in the VMAX group are not VMAX. The Stage field is the provider's, and on 24 of the 260 products it files as VMAX, the card is a plain V. Cramorant V (Shining Fates) has 200 HP and one attack called Beak Catch, and TCGplayer's extended data calls its stage VMAX. Kricketune V (Battle Styles) is the same error. All 24 are cheap, a median of $1.06 and a top of $8.89, so leaving them in drags the VMAX median from $10.02 down to $8.18 and inflates the Lv.X multiple from 10.0x to 12.2x. Both figures are true of the population they describe. The one we lead with counts only the 236 products whose printed name says VMAX or Gigantamax, because the question was about a mechanic and those 24 cards do not have it.

No group here carries older quotes. Of the 79 Lv.X quotes, 10 are more than seven days old, 8 of those are more than thirty days old, and the oldest two were last seen on 2026-06-13. Fourteen of the 79 sit in a condition ladder where some rung below Near Mint is quoted above it, which cannot be right. Ten diverge from the twice-daily price dump by more than 5%. Keep only the quotes that are fresh within seven days, coherent down the ladder and within 5% of the dump, and 57 of 79 survive with a median of $114.99, a 15% move on the figure that answers the title question. Call it about $100 on everything we hold and about $115 on the clean subset.

Two of those rows carry the weight. The dearest Lv.X in the whole group is Snorlax, and its $797.47 is a Near Mint condition quote last refreshed on 2026-09-08, 34 days before this was written, while the dump's market figure for the same product on 2026-10-12 was $999.99. On the clean subset the dearest Lv.X is Gengar LV.X (Arceus) at $752.68, quoted two days ago and 3% off the dump. And the median quote across the 75 Lv.X products from the Diamond and Pearl and Platinum era, $102.66, belongs to Garchomp LV.X, whose quote is 116 days old and sits 45% below the $187.00 the dump prints for it. The four this leaves out are the 2021 and 2026 reprints and Zacian LV.X (SWSH Black Star Promos), and all four ask under $11. The middle of this distribution is held up by a number nobody has looked at since June.

VMAX and VSTAR fail the ladder test about a third of the time: 84 of 260 VMAX products and 36 of 111 VSTAR products have a lower condition quoted above their Near Mint. Those two groups are modern, liquid and freshly quoted, so staleness is not the problem there; the rungs below Near Mint are thin and one optimistic Lightly Played listing is enough to invert a ladder. On the clean, name verified subset the VMAX median is $12.69 across 142 products and the Lv.X multiple falls to about 9x. Every version of this hook lands between 9x and 13x, and which one you quote depends entirely on which rows you keep.

Every figure here is an ask, not a sale. A condition quote is what a seller wants for a Near Mint copy, and on thin vintage cards it can be one listing, which Five Cards in Six Trade on a Single Listing measured and How to Tell a Pokemon Card Price Is Stale explains how to spot. None of these groups has a sold-price series behind it in this note. The universe is also English only, because the file this comes from is TCGplayer's English product list; Lv.X, LEGEND and BREAK all had Japanese printings, and none of those are in the 634.

Two groups are too thin to carry a mechanic-level reading and are printed with their counts for that reason. Primal Reversion has the highest median of the nine at $332.41, and it is six products covering two Pokemon in three treatments each. Ranked by ask they run $420.61, $363.35, $332.41, $221.85, $62.18 and $54.63. The top one is Primal Kyogre EX (Ancient Origins), a shiny full art. Then comes the Primal Clash full art of the same Pokemon, Primal Kyogre EX (Primal Clash) at $363.35. Only then the second shiny, Primal Groudon EX (Ancient Origins) at $332.41. So the two shinies take first and third rather than the top two, and the three remaining Primal Clash cards sit below them. That is a six-card curiosity, not a market. Restored has 15 products, and 13 of those 15 quote the Normal printing of a product the provider says has two printings, so the Restored figure is the plain copy and says nothing about the reverse holo of the same card. And the quotes themselves drift. condition_quotes is upserted continuously rather than written once a day, which already cost Pokemon Card Condition Price Guide its reproducibility to the cent and will cost this note the same. That table keeps no history, so no quote in this note can be rebuilt for an earlier date, by a reader or by us. Only the day-keyed dump figures beside them can. Read the table as a shape with its populations attached, not as nine numbers that will still be exact next week.

Read from moonstone production on 2026-10-12. Universe: tcgcsv_products, 32,868 rows, one per English TCGplayer product across all 220 groups, so no Japanese and English set-name deduplication is needed. 22,735 of those carry a Stage field in the provider's extendedData. 744 fall in a retired-mechanic Stage value after case-fold merges (Legend with LEGEND, Level Up with Level-Up, Mega with MEGA and Mega Evolution, BREAK Evolution with BREAK, V-UNION with V-Union, Gigantamax folded into VMAX). EXCLUDED, each counted: 67 products in the Jumbo Cards group (oversized display cards, not the playable card), 37 in the World Championship Decks group (silver border, not tournament legal, a different product class), and 6 V-UNION [Set of 4] listings, which are bundles and are used only as the cross-check in the parts table. That leaves 634 products and all 634 carry a Near Mint quote, so no selection on price was applied. 3 of the 634 have no row in our own catalog and are therefore not linked anywhere in this note. PRICES: condition_quotes WHERE condition = 'NM' AND price > 0, one row per product, as_of values running 2026-06-13 to 2026-10-11. Only Near Mint is a card price here; the LP, MP, HP and Damaged rungs were read only to test ladder coherence and never mixed into a median. 621 of the 634 quotes are the Holofoil printing on a single-printing product; the exception is Restored, where 13 of 15 quote the Normal printing of a two-printing product. Medians are the upper middle value on an even sample, the house convention. The clean subset keeps a quote only if its as_of is within seven days of 2026-10-12, no rung below Near Mint is quoted above it, and it sits within 5% of the latest tcgcsv_prices market figure for the same printing. Latest means the most recent day that product carries rather than one fixed day: 628 of the 634 have a 2026-10-12 row, and products 475987, 489300 and 85750 fall back to 2026-09-27, 2026-10-02 and 2026-10-07. A different 3 of the 634, all Prize Pack Series cards, carry no dump figure at all for the quoted printing, so that third test is reported for them rather than failed, and 2 of those 3 sit inside the clean subset having passed a test that was never applied to them. 440 of 634 survive on that reading and 438 if a missing dump figure is counted as a failure. Per group 57 of 79 Lv.X, 142 of 236 name verified VMAX, 65 of 111 VSTAR, 80 of 83 Mega EX, 36 of 36 BREAK, 17 of 20 LEGEND, 18 of 24 V-UNION, 11 of 15 Restored and 6 of 6 Primal. The VMAX group is published two ways because the provider's Stage field is wrong on 24 of its 260 products, which are plain V cards: 260 products give a median of $8.18 and a 12.2x Lv.X multiple, the 236 whose printed name says VMAX or Gigantamax give $10.02 and 10.0x, and the note leads with the second. Set-mate multiples divide each product's Near Mint quote by the median Near Mint quote of every Stage-carrying product in the same provider group, computed over 7,803 priced products in the 63 groups these cards appear in; all 63 clear a 10-product minimum. NOT A TIME SERIES: condition_quotes is a continuously upserted snapshot, so every figure is one reading and no figure here is a change over time. No graded, PSA population or gem-rate data is used anywhere in this note. A prior adversarial pass on this topic counted 643 products rather than 634, with 4 more VMAX, 1 more VSTAR and 4 more Mega EX from an addition we could not reproduce. That pass is a document rather than a stored reading, so its figures are quoted here as provenance and cannot be recomputed either.