Mega Rayquaza ex is a sell at $330 as Delta Reign opens

All 19 Mega chases from earlier regular sets with enough launch-week sales fell by day 90, 12 of them by at least 40%.

Delta Reign came out in English on Friday with the raw Mega Rayquaza ex special illustration rare #138 selling around $330, less than any of the four Mega chases in this story fetched on their first day. TCGplayer said before release that it expected this card to be "the most popular and valuable card in Delta Reign." No PSA 10 has sold yet.

Those four are also why I wouldn't pay it. Of the 24 Mega ex cards at special illustration rare or gold in the regular sets, 19 have enough launch-week sales to compare with what they fetched around day 90. All 19 fell and 12 lost at least 40%, including the four on the chart below that lost about half: Mega Gardevoir ex SIR #178 and the gold Mega Lucario ex #188 from Mega Evolution, Mega Greninja ex SIR #116 from Chaos Rising and Mega Darkrai ex SIR #116 from Pitch Black. I can't show you why it keeps happening, but Rayquaza's Japanese twin had a rough fall of its own.

Don't reach for the gold as the safer Rayquaza, either. The Mega Hyper Rare Mega Rayquaza ex #141 has only four confirmed sales from Friday, between $269 and $350, and gold has been a coin flip in these sets. It fell further than the SIR for Gardevoir and Lucario but less for Greninja and Zygarde. Either single also costs more than the 36 packs that might hold it, with a sealed booster box selling around $220.

The counterexamples I found came from Ascended Heroes, a special set, where Mega Dragonite ex SIR #290 and Mega Gengar ex SIR #284 both sold higher around day 90 than in their first week, though both have fallen hard since. The name also has a real following: the 2015 Roaring Skies M Rayquaza EX full art #105 sold for at least $21,000 in PSA 10 four times in late October even after a rough month, with just 116 PSA 10s out of 4,957 graded at PSA as of Nov. 5.

But Delta Reign is a regular expansion, not a special set like Ascended Heroes. A famous dragon doesn't change that. If I pulled a #138 today I'd sell it this weekend and I wouldn't buy one at $330. I'd leave a bid around $165, half of Friday's price, starting Feb. 4, day 90, and run it into March. Even that isn't a floor, because Gardevoir and Lucario both sell for well under half of their first-week prices today. If it's still near $330 on Feb. 4, Rayquaza did what those four couldn't and I'll pay up.