Fusion Strike Chase Cards: The Top 10, and One Very Hungry Gengar
A Gengar is eating Fusion Strike. On the card, it is working through berries and uprooted trees. In the price guides, it has got through everything else in the set, and at $1,022.03 it sells for three times the card in second place.
Fusion Strike came out on November 12, 2021, and its 284 cards stood as the English record until Ascended Heroes took it this January. It was that big because it was a catch-up set: PokeBeach listed more than 90 cards held back from Evolving Skies, plus secret rares that in Japan had come inside pre-built decks or as shop promos. It also added a new family of cards, marked Fusion Strike on a banner and built to help each other, and the card that ran the game with it: Mew VMAX, which can borrow the attack of any Fusion Strike Pokémon you have waiting in reserve. The Mew deck was still winning two years later, when Vance Kelley took the 2023 World Championship with it.
Critics liked the set well enough, and Bleeding Cool scored it 7.5 out of 10. The people opening it called it Fusion Strikeout. TCGplayer opened more than 4,000 packs at launch, and going by the odds it published, it found only about four Gengar alternate arts, three Espeons and two Mew VMAX alternate arts in the whole lot.
Sealed booster boxes sat at around $100 for most of 2022. By late 2025 they had passed $1,000, and after cooling since this May they sell for about $886 on PriceCharting, still the second most expensive Sword & Shield box after Evolving Skies. On TCGplayer, the Gengar alone has put on about a third since March.
This was the era of alternate arts. The headline cards were Pokémon V and their bigger VMAX forms, which show the Pokémon grown to the size of a building, the Dynamax trick from the Sword and Shield games, and a few, like this Gengar and Inteleon, get a special Gigantamax shape as well. An alternate art swaps the standard computer-rendered Pokémon for a full painted scene. The alternate-art V cards sit inside the main numbering, and the alternate-art VMAX cards are secret rares numbered past 264. The list also has a rainbow rare, the ordinary art recoloured in a rainbow wash, a full art, which stretches the standard Pokémon across the whole card with nothing painted behind it, and one perfectly ordinary card.
How the prices work. The prices in the boxes below are live and move with the market; the ones in the writing are accurate as of publication, September 25, 2026. Everything is raw and near mint unless it says otherwise.
The whole set, priced card by card, is on the Fusion Strike card list.
Ten cards, starting with one upside down.
#10 Genesect V 255/264 (Alternate Art)
Illustrated by Akira Komayama
A robot doing a hand spin.
Akira Komayama has Genesect upside down in a breakdancing freeze, balanced on the point of one arm with its legs flung up and its eyes glowing, in a pink-lit corner covered in graffiti and junk: a bin, a boombox, a crate, a crushed can. Grinning on a rusty oil drum at the top left, eyes shut and tongue out, sits a Smeargle.
Presale buyers paid about $66. By 2024 it had sunk below $15, and it has only climbed back to $27.41.
#9 Inteleon VMAX 266/264 (Alternate Art Secret Rare)
Illustrated by Kazuma Koda
Somewhere out there, a berry is in trouble.
Kazuma Koda drew Gigantamax Inteleon lying flat along the top of its own coiled tail on a starry night over dark hills, one arm out, firing a jet of water across the sky towards a splash on the far horizon. Its Pokédex entry claims it can hit a berry rolling along more than nine miles away, and this card believes every word. In Japan it turned up only in some copies of a pre-built Inteleon VMAX deck.
It sold for about $90 before release, partly to players who wanted it for their decks, and is $27.64 now. Only the Genesect is anywhere near as far below its launch price.
#8 Mew V 250/264 (Full Art)
Illustrated by aky CG Works
The card that was written off on day one.
On release day, TCGplayer's list put it bluntly: "I wouldn't count on full-art Mew V surviving the test of time." For nearly three years that looked like a safe call, and by mid 2024 it was selling for well under $10. aky CG Works drew a standard computer-rendered Mew floating against a teal and pink haze of glowing bubbles and nothing else, which was the complaint.
It is $32.15 now. TCGplayer was right for nearly three years, and then it was wrong.
#7 Gengar VMAX 157/264 (Regular Art)
Illustrated by 5ban Graphics
The same Gengar, drawn the ordinary way.
This is the standard Gengar VMAX from the main set: 5ban Graphics' computer-rendered Gigantamax Gengar, its grin sitting on top of a second, much bigger mouth, a pink spiral with a huge tongue thrust out towards you, claws raised against a swirl of colour. It is not a secret rare at all. It has the same attacks as the $1,000 card, minus the painting, and that has turned out to be worth something too.
It was under $10 in 2023 and is $43.83 now.
#6 Celebi V 245/264 (Alternate Art)
Illustrated by Teeziro
Somebody has told this tree it is April.
Teeziro has let snow fall on a flight of old stone steps under lilac light. Celebi is flying through, and wherever its golden sparkles have looped through the branches of the big tree on the left, the tree has burst into green leaf, while a little one on the right is only just catching up. The courtyard is the Crown Shrine, from Sword and Shield's Crown Tundra expansion. In Japan this was a bonus card for anyone who bought two boxes of a set called Jet-Black Spirit.
Launch buyers paid about $40. It is $89.94 now.
#5 Mew VMAX 268/264 (Rainbow Rare)
Illustrated by 5ban Graphics
Same Mew, new paint job.
This is the rainbow rare: 5ban Graphics' standard Mew VMAX, curled up with one leg kicked high and its tail looping round, recoloured from green through blue to orange. The day before release it briefly had a higher TCGplayer market price than the rarer painted Mew VMAX at number three, and TCGplayer's launch-day list noted that it "didn't last". It did not. By late 2023 it was under $30.
It has climbed by about half since March, to $100.29.
#4 Mew V 251/264 (Alternate Art)
Illustrated by Naoki Saito
Mew's day out.
Naoki Saito drew Mew out for a walk by the sea in bright daylight, a Dreepy perched on its head like a hat and a crowd of friends pressing in around it while confetti falls: Hoopa, Smeargle, Toxel and Toxtricity. Each of them has a Fusion Strike card of its own, so this is less a day out than a team photo.
Launch buyers paid about $60, early 2024 buyers under $30, and today's buyers pay $102.22.
#3 Mew VMAX 269/264 (Alternate Art Secret Rare)
Illustrated by AKIRA EGAWA
Mind the buses.
AKIRA EGAWA painted a giant Dynamax Mew rising through a city at night, smiling up at the sky, with red Dynamax clouds looped round it and ribbons of rainbow light swirling past. A black taxi tumbles through the air at the top left, red double-decker buses go spinning past, one with a Poké Ball on the front, and a big wheel glitters below.
When it was revealed, Bleeding Cool reported that many fans thought it looked too much like the ordinary Mew VMAX, and predicted it would not hold its value. By early 2024 it was under $60. It is $250.14 now.
#2 Espeon VMAX 270/264 (Alternate Art Secret Rare)
Illustrated by Kouki Saitou
The house belongs to someone. The roof now belongs to Espeon.
Kouki Saitou drew a giant Espeon fast asleep across the steep roof of a half-timbered house, front paws hanging over the edge and the red gem on its forehead glowing, while seabirds wheel through a blue sky and pink beams rise in the distance. When it first appeared, Bleeding Cool's writer assumed it had to be a fan-made card. In Japan it was a promo in a boxed set released alongside Eevee Heroes, the set that became Evolving Skies, so it never made those packs and was held over for this one.
It sold for about $182 before release, slipped to about $94 in January 2022, and spent half of that year swapping first place with the Gengar. It is $342.07 now, and the Gengar has been ahead every month since February 2023.
#1 Gengar VMAX 271/264 (Alternate Art Secret Rare)
Illustrated by sowsow
Dinner time.
sowsow, last seen on our Evolving Skies chase cards list surrounding an Espeon V with floating books, painted Gigantamax Gengar looming over a hillside at night, its mouth a pink tunnel of rings and its long tongue laid across the grass like a road. A howling wind is dragging everything in: berries, strawberries, an apple core, whole uprooted berry trees. Behind it are crooked towers with orange-lit windows and a crescent moon, all in soft crayon texture. The Pokédex says that mouth leads straight to the afterlife, so the berries are having a worse evening than they look.
In Japan it was never a pack card: like the Inteleon, it was a random bonus in a pre-built deck. Here it opened at about $182 before release and slid to about $93 by March 2022. From there it climbed, with a few stumbles, through $318 in April 2024 and $512 that December, to today's $1,022.03.
Is it worth grading Fusion Strike cards?
For the most expensive cards on this list, a PSA 9 is a small loss.
| Card | Raw | PSA 10 | Profit | PSA 10 pop | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gengar VMAX 271 | $1,022.03 | $2,270.91 | $1,089.89 | 14,649 | Gamble |
| Espeon VMAX 270 | $342.07 | $651.00 | $238.95 | 12,661 | Gamble |
| Mew VMAX 269 | $250.14 | $445.97 | $165.85 | 8,507 | Gamble |
| Mew V 251 | $102.22 | $425.21 | $293.01 | 6,434 | Gamble |
| Mew VMAX 268 | $100.29 | $305.11 | $174.84 | 3,739 | Gamble |
| Celebi V 245 | $89.94 | $377.90 | $257.98 | 8,927 | Gamble |
| Gengar VMAX 157 | $43.83 | $209.62 | $135.81 | 9,209 | Gamble |
| Mew V 250 | $32.15 | $220.98 | $158.85 | 1,411 | Gamble |
| Inteleon VMAX 266 | $27.64 | $78.35 | $20.73 | 3,477 | Gamble |
| Genesect V 255 | $27.41 | $192.24 | $134.85 | 2,542 | Gamble |
PSA 10 is our market estimate from recent graded sales. Profit is what is left after buying the card raw and paying the grading fee and shipping. PSA 10 pop is how many copies PSA has graded a 10 so far: copies graded, not sold, and the supply a new slab would join. Safe bet means a PSA 9 still turns a profit; Gamble means only a 10 does.
PSA gives the three painted VMAX cards at the top a 10 more often than not, 53 to 63 percent of the time, and a 10 is worth about double a raw copy. A 9 is worth slightly less than raw, so a miss loses the fee and a bit more.
PSA is stricter with the painted V cards. The Mew V, Celebi and Genesect alternate arts get a 10 only 43 to 46 percent of the time, and we could find no published explanation for the difference. Land one and it pays: a PSA 10 sells for about four times a raw copy of the Mew V or the Celebi, and about seven times for the Genesect.
The cheap end is the odd one out. On the regular Gengar VMAX, the Mew V full art, the Inteleon and the Genesect, a PSA 9 sells for around one and a half times a raw copy, so even a near miss claws back some of the fee.
The table speaks for the average copy. Yours might be better or worse, and Slab Advisor will size it up from one photo, with a grade estimate and the price that grade fetches.
Further down the binder
Eleventh, a long way back at about $15, is the Greedent V alternate art: Greedent sitting in a berry bush with its cheeks and arms full, while a gang of Skwovet peer over a fallen log beside it.
The regular Gengar VMAX has a stamped twin. Copies with a small Play! Pokémon logo sell for far more, but they came from 2023 prize packs, sealed packs handed out to players at local tournaments, not from Fusion Strike boosters, and they sell so rarely that their prices jump around. The same goes for stamped copies of the Mew V, the ordinary Mew VMAX and the Gengar V.
In 2023 it came out that, back in 2021, someone had walked off with thousands of Fusion Strike secret rares from the printing plant and tried to sell them to a card shop in Texas, which called Pokémon instead. Fans wondered whether that explained Fusion Strikeout. Pokémon said the packs had shipped to shops as intended.
Sorting a shoebox of Fusion Strike? The Fusion Strike card list will tell you which ones to take out first.
Fusion Strike was Mew's set. Mew got six cards and a World Championship out of it, and still finished third.