PackRip

Most Valuable Great Encounters Cards — Top 25 (Market Value)

Great Encounters quick facts
SetGreat Encounters (dp4)
Year2008
Total cards (priced)106
Top cardDialga LV.X #105 — $249.99
Top 25 combined value$862
Price sourceTCGPlayer market (live)

Dialga LV.X — most valuable card in Great Encounters

This is the live market-value ranking of every chase card in Great Encounters (2008), the 106-card Pokémon TCG expansion. Prices update on each PackRip build from TCGPlayer's market feed, so these numbers track the actual ungraded market rather than retail asks. The top 25 alone account for roughly $862 in combined market value — that's where the pack-opening EV comes from.

Top 25 by TCGPlayer market price

  1. #1. Dialga LV.X — Lv.X, #105 — $249.99 (1 in 72 per pack)
  2. #2. Palkia LV.X — Lv.X, #106 — $140.00 (1 in 72 per pack)
  3. #3. Darkrai LV.X — Lv.X, #104 — $138.26 (1 in 72 per pack)
  4. #4. Cresselia LV.X — Lv.X, #103 — $44.95 (1 in 72 per pack)
  5. #5. Rotom — Rare Holo, #7 — $33.82 (1 in 39 per pack)
  6. #6. Darkrai — Rare Holo, #3 — $26.13 (1 in 39 per pack)
  7. #7. Darkrai — Rare Holo, #4 — $25.74 (1 in 39 per pack)
  8. #8. Swampert — Rare Holo, #9 — $22.88 (1 in 39 per pack)
  9. #9. Togekiss — Rare Holo, #11 — $20.40 (1 in 39 per pack)
  10. #10. Blaziken — Rare Holo, #1 — $19.41 (1 in 39 per pack)
  11. #11. Sceptile — Rare Holo, #8 — $15.85 (1 in 39 per pack)
  12. #12. Cresselia — Rare Holo, #2 — $15.12 (1 in 39 per pack)
  13. #13. Pachirisu — Rare Holo, #5 — $14.96 (1 in 39 per pack)
  14. #14. Lapras — Rare, #21 — $14.12 (1 in 32 per pack)
  15. #15. Milotic — Rare, #25 — $13.80 (1 in 32 per pack)
  16. #16. Unown [H] — Rare, #29 — $9.33 (1 in 32 per pack)
  17. #17. Wailord — Rare, #30 — $7.99 (1 in 32 per pack)
  18. #18. Porygon-Z — Rare Holo, #6 — $7.58 (1 in 39 per pack)
  19. #19. Mudkip — Common, #80 — $6.31 (10.5% per pack)
  20. #20. Latias — Rare, #22 — $6.29 (1 in 32 per pack)
  21. #21. Rare Candy — Uncommon, #102 — $6.16 (1 in 11 per pack)
  22. #22. Jigglypuff — Common, #72 — $5.93 (10.5% per pack)
  23. #23. Slowpoke — Common, #82 — $5.90 (10.5% per pack)
  24. #24. Igglybuff — Common, #70 — $5.54 (10.5% per pack)
  25. #25. Unown [G] — Uncommon, #57 — $5.44 (1 in 11 per pack)

How to pull the top card

The single most valuable card in Great Encounters is Dialga LV.X at $249.99. You can chase it for free on PackRip's Great Encounters pack opener — it uses authentic per-rarity pull rates so the simulation produces the same expected-value distribution real boxes do over thousands of openings. The Hunt Pack mode boosts the relevant rarity slot if you want to optimize for this card specifically. Or skip the RNG and buy Dialga LV.X directly on TCGplayer.

Why these prices change

2008 cards trade on relative supply: PSA pop reports, sealed-product scarcity, character popularity (especially Eeveelutions, starters, and legendary Pokémon), and grading-grade availability. PackRip refreshes its catalog every Phase release, so each new set drop pulls a fresh price snapshot via build-prices.mjs and the rankings reshuffle automatically. Bookmark this page — it stays current.

Why card #1 is worth multiples of card #25

The variance inside a single set's top-25 is itself the most informative number on this page. Dialga LV.X at $249.99 sits roughly 46.0× the value of the #25 card ($5.44) — and that spread is the rule, not the exception, for 2008 Great Encounters. The driver is a compounding stack: rarity tier (a Holo Rare is a 1-in-3 pull, a Crystal / Gold Star / Lv.X / Prime / Full Art chase is 1-in-30+), character popularity (Charizard / Pikachu / Eeveelutions trade at multi-x the average for the same rarity tier), illustration quality (full-art and alt-art prints command premiums regardless of competitive viability), and PSA pop-report scarcity (PSA-10 populations for 2008 cards are still expanding, so a low pop today can be 10× the future pop in two years). The top-25 sorts by the joint product of all four, which is why the curve is so steep at the top and flattens by #20+ where the cards are usually Holo Rares of less-popular Pokémon.

Raw vs graded — the multiplier nobody tells beginners

Every price on this page is the raw ungraded NM/M TCGPlayer market median. Graded copies trade at a multiplier on top of that depending on the assigned grade and the population of that grade for the card. The conservative rule of thumb (cross-checked against PSA's own auction history): PSA 9 ≈ 2-3× raw, PSA 10 ≈ 5-10× raw for DP-era cards, with the chase tier (Crystal / Gold Star / Shining / Prime / LEGEND / Full Art) skewing higher because the absolute population is smaller. So Dialga LV.X at a raw $249.99 typically prices a PSA 9 at $625-750 and a PSA 10 at $1250-2500. BGS 9.5 sits between PSA 9 and PSA 10. The grading-cost economics only work when the raw card is worth roughly 4× the grading fee — for 2008 Great Encounters that threshold is met by roughly the top 8 cards on this list.

Historical price trend — how the Great Encounters chase market evolved

The current $249.99 TCGplayer market price on Dialga LV.X is the end-state of a multi-year re-rating. DP-era chases lagged the broader nostalgia boom by an additional 18 months — most of the re-rating happened in 2022-2023. Lv.X cards (including Great Encounters top chases) re-rated 3-10× depending on the specific card. The market is more rational here than at the WotC layer because supply is higher and the cohort is younger. Pricing data on PackRip refreshes monthly via the TCGplayer market feed and the snapshot date is visible at the bottom of every card detail page.

Set-specific drivers — why Great Encounters's top-25 looks the way it does

Great Encounters (2008) sits in a specific niche within the Pokémon TCG market that shapes which cards land in this top-25 and why. DP/Platinum-era sets are valued primarily on Lv.X chases plus a small handful of full-art and Secret Rare standouts. The market is less mature here than WotC or EX, which means individual chase cards can have wider bid-ask spreads. Within Great Encounters specifically, the top-25 reflects this set's particular blend of those factors — high-popularity characters in the chase tier rank disproportionately well, and the deeper into the list you go, the more the ranking reflects pure rarity over character pull.

Condition grading deep-dive — the PSA 10 multiplier

The single biggest determinant of price for any vintage Pokémon card is grading status. PSA 10 ("Gem Mint") copies for 2008 Great Encounters cards trade at substantial multiples of raw NM/M. The exact multiple depends on the specific card's pop report — common cards with high PSA 10 populations carry small premiums (1.5-2.5×), while chase cards with low PSA 10 populations carry massive premiums (8-15× or more). The threshold question for grading is whether the raw card is worth roughly 4× the grading fee — for Dialga LV.X at $249.99 raw, grading economics work cleanly. PSA / BGS / CGC are the three main graders; PSA carries the highest market premium for vintage Pokémon, BGS for modern, CGC for anything in between. The grading turnaround time at PSA fluctuates between 30 days (premium service) and 12+ months (bulk service); the bulk service is rarely worth using because the grading fee is small relative to the holding cost of card capital tied up for a year.

Authentication tips before you buy

DP-era Great Encounters cards (2007-2009) and Lv.X chases have low counterfeit rates because the print run is more recent and the holographic pattern is harder to replicate. Tells: (1) Lv.X gold border foil is microtextured — fakes are typically smooth; (2) PSA-graded slabs for $100+ chase cards are the safest acquisition path; (3) standard back blue-line test still applies (genuine DP backs preserve the WotC-era blue line pattern). For any purchase above $200 raw, the rational path is to buy slabbed (PSA/BGS/CGC) and skip the authentication risk entirely — the grading premium is usually less than the counterfeit risk discount.

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