Abyss Eye (M5) Card List, Pull Rates & Chase Cards Guide

Abyss Eye is the Japanese MEGA-era expansion coded M5, released in Japan on May 22, 2026. A booster box carries an MSRP of ¥6,000 and contains 30 packs of 5 cards each — the standard modern Japanese configuration, and part of why Japanese boxes remain so much cheaper per pack than their English counterparts. The set totals 118 cards: 81 in the numbered base set, plus 37 secret rares. That secret lineup breaks down into 12 Art Rares (AR), 18 Super Rares (SR), 6 Special Art Rares (SAR), and a single Mega Ultra Rare (MUR).

The name is not random. It comes directly from the mascot's signature move: Mega Darkrai ex carries an attack literally called Abyss Eye, which automatically Knocks Out any Pokémon affected by a Special Condition. Naming an entire expansion after one attack tells you exactly how confident The Pokémon Company was in this card — and given that this is Mega Darkrai's first appearance in the trading card game ever, that confidence was justified. Darkness types dominate the checklist accordingly, reinforced by a Shadowy D Energy special energy card that anchors the set's shadow theme.

Beneath the Darkrai headline sit two well-developed supporting casts. Mega Excadrill ex and Rampardos ex head up a fossil-excavation sub-theme, complete with Antique Skull and Armor Fossil items and a Fossil Excavation Site Trainer — a fun deck-building corner that also spills into the set's flavor, with living-fossil Pokémon like Relicanth and the Shieldon line filling out the middle numbers. Mega Zeraora ex, Mega Chandelure ex, Lurantis ex, Wailord ex, and the internet's favorite hangry hamster Morpeko ex round out the ex roster. It is a deeper set than its one-Pokémon reputation suggests.

Let's address the abyss-shaped elephant in the room. At launch, the Mega Darkrai ex SAR (114/081) — illustrated by AKIRA EGAWA — was listed in Japan at an eye-watering ¥99,800. By early July, Japanese market prices had collapsed to roughly ¥30,000 (around $200). On TCGplayer, the same card went from launch sales near $570 to a market price of $383.27 as of July 11, 2026 — Western prices typically lag and carry an import premium, so that gap between the Japanese and US figures is itself worth understanding before you buy. Whichever market you look at, the direction is the same: down roughly 60–70% from peak in about seven weeks.

Why did it crash? The same reason most launch spikes crash: hype-driven scarcity pricing met an enormous print run. Japanese Mega-era sets are printed heavily and reprinted aggressively, and once supply caught up with the Darkrai frenzy, prices normalized. We flag this not to be gloomy but because honest numbers are the whole point of a set guide — anyone quoting you launch-week prices in July 2026 is either out of date or hoping you are.

So what actually leads the set today? The Mega Darkrai ex MUR (118/081) remains king at $497.50, down from launch listings of ¥158,000–198,000 (comfortably over $1,000) but still a genuine trophy card given its brutal pull rate. The SAR Darkrai sits second at $383.27. Then comes the set's quiet overachiever: Gwynn SAR (117/081), illustrated by Naoki Saito, at $66.44 — a Trainer from the Pokémon Legends: Z-A cast (ムク, Muku, in Japanese) that has consistently outperformed the Mega Zeraora ex SAR. The rest of the top ten as of July 11: Morpeko ex SAR at $62.63, Misty's Spirit SR at $49.24, Mega Zeraora ex SAR at $42.71, Mega Chandelure ex SAR at $34.52, Gladion's Showdown SAR at $33.18, Gwynn SR at $18.06, and Mega Darkrai ex SR at $17.71. Notice how many Trainers are on that list — character cards, not just Megas, are carrying this set's value.

Japanese boxes are refreshingly predictable compared to English product, and Abyss Eye follows the modern pattern. A 30-pack box averages roughly 3 Art Rares and 4 Double Rares (RR) — so every box delivers a handful of illustration cards and most or all of the main ex Pokémon lineup. Super Rares land at a rate that makes the gold-etched exes and Trainers reasonably attainable across a couple of boxes.

The premium tiers are where the gambling starts. A Special Art Rare appears roughly once every 3.4 boxes — meaning most single boxes contain no SAR at all, and even when you hit one, there are six different SARs it could be. Only one of those six is the $383 Darkrai. The Mega Ultra Rare is dramatically rarer still: community tracking puts it somewhere between 1 in 45 and 1 in 100 boxes. We present that as a range deliberately — nobody outside The Pokémon Company knows the exact rate, and any site quoting a precise MUR figure is estimating, just like everyone else.

Run the math and it gets sobering fast. At ¥6,000 MSRP (assuming you can even get boxes at MSRP, which post-launch often requires lottery entries at Japanese retailers), an expected SAR costs you around ¥20,000 in boxes — and an expected MUR Darkrai anywhere from ¥270,000 to ¥600,000. Against a $497.50 market price, box-cracking your way to the MUR is a spectacularly bad trade. Keep that arithmetic in mind; we will come back to it when we talk about trading for singles instead.

The international version of this set is Pitch Black, set code ME05, releasing worldwide on July 17, 2026 — just under two months after the Japanese debut. The two sets are nearly 1:1, which makes Abyss Eye an unusually clean set to buy Japanese: almost everything you pull has a direct English counterpart, and our full comparison in the Pitch Black set guide maps the numbering in detail.

Nearly 1:1 is not exactly 1:1, though, and the differences matter to collectors. Pitch Black adds three promo-sourced cards — Mega Slowbro ex, Jett, and Mega Delphox ex — that do not exist in the Japanese M5 checklist. The Zarude Art Rare is removed from packs and becomes an Elite Trainer Box promo in English. And three cards — Miraidon, Koraidon, and Zarude — are demoted from their Japanese slots to standard Holo Rares in ME05. If you want the pack-pulled Zarude AR specifically, the Japanese set is the only place it lives.

There is also the perennial Japanese-vs-English calculus: Japanese cards release earlier, cost less per pack, and are widely considered to have better centering and print quality on average, while English cards feed a larger graded-card market. Neither is objectively better — but for this set in particular, the two-month head start meant Japanese singles established the price story long before a single English pack was opened. English launch prices for the Darkrai chase cards will be worth watching against the corrected Japanese numbers above.

If your goal is the experience — thirty packs of a beautifully dark, fossil-flavored set with guaranteed illustration cards — a Japanese box at or near ¥6,000 MSRP is one of the better entertainment purchases in the hobby. You will reliably come away with around 3 ARs, 4 RRs, and a shot at golds. Import pricing is the catch: European retailers have listed boxes around €99.95, a hefty markup over MSRP that materially changes the expected-value math.

If your goal is specific cards, the box math above should give you pause. One SAR per 3.4 boxes, a one-in-six chance that the SAR you hit is the Darkrai, and a MUR rate between 1/45 and 1/100 means chasing the top two cards through sealed product is strictly for people who enjoy opening packs more than owning cards. The market has already priced this in — it is exactly why singles crashed once supply normalized, and why the smart post-correction play is acquiring the singles you actually want. Everything in the card-by-card list below includes its current market price so you can do that math per card.

One more honest caveat: nothing in this guide is investment advice, and Abyss Eye's own seven-week price history is the best argument for that disclaimer we could possibly write. Buy or trade for cards you want to own. If you are comparing this set against other current chase-heavy expansions before committing, our Chaos Rising set guide makes a useful side-by-side read.

The set opens with a compact Grass corner headlined by Lurantis ex, then shifts into Fire with two fan-favorite lines — the ghostly tea Pokémon and Paldea's armored warrior Armarouge. Nothing here breaks the bank, which makes this stretch prime binder-filler territory for set completionists trading on Swaptio.

A long aquatic stretch gives way to the set's first Mega chase in base form. Wailord ex brings the size, Primarina brings the elegance, and Mega Zeraora ex closes the block as one of the set's marquee exes — with Miraidon making a cameo that plays out differently in the English release.

This is the heart of Abyss Eye: a ghost-heavy Psychic block featuring Mega Chandelure ex, the fossil sub-theme's first pillar in Rampardos ex, and — at number 046 — the debut of Mega Darkrai ex itself, the card this entire expansion is named after.

The shadow theme deepens with a parade of Dark-type schemers — Malamar, Thievul, Mabosstiff — plus Morpeko ex in its perpetually hangry glory. The Metal block then delivers the fossil sub-theme's second pillar, Bastiodon, before Mega Excadrill ex caps the run.

A short but flavorful Colorless block. The Pikipek line brings Alolan charm, while Type: Null and Silvally set up the Gladion story that pays off in the Trainer lineup and its Super Rare chase.

Do not skim this block. Abyss Eye's Trainer roster — Misty's Spirit, Gladion's Showdown, Gwynn, the Rust Syndicate Grunt — produces several of the set's most valuable secret rares, and the two special Energy cards anchor its Lightning and Darkness strategies. The base printings here are cheap; their gold and SAR versions are anything but.

Every box averages about three of these twelve full-art illustration cards, which keeps individual prices gentle — most trade between $3 and $6. Two stand apart: the Goldeen AR at $9.27 and the Slowbro AR at $16.24, the latter singled out by PokeBeach as their favorite illustration rare of the entire set. ARs are the classic Japanese-set trading currency: easy to pull, easy to swap, and the fastest way to build trade credit on Swaptio's offer feed.

Eighteen Super Rares split into full-art ex Pokémon, gold-etched Item cards, and full-art Trainers. The Trainers are the story here: Misty's Spirit SR at $49.24 is worth more than any SR ex in the set, and Gwynn SR at $18.06 edges out even the gold Darkrai. Gold Item cards, by contrast, mostly sit near a dollar — pull tax, essentially.

The six SARs are Abyss Eye's showcase tier — oversized artwork, roughly one copy per 3.4 booster boxes, and the widest price spread in the set: from $33 for Gladion's Showdown to $383 for the EGAWA Darkrai. Two of the six are Trainer cards, and both outperform half the Mega SARs — a very 2026 state of affairs.

One card sits alone at the top of the checklist — the metallic Mega Ultra Rare treatment of Mega Darkrai ex, pulled somewhere between once per 45 and once per 100 boxes.

Everything about Abyss Eye's price history argues for the same strategy: acquire the specific cards you want, and let someone else pay the lottery tax. Importing sealed Japanese product means marked-up boxes (€99.95 at some European retailers against a ¥6,000 MSRP), international shipping, and pull rates that put the two headline Darkrai cards behind a 1-in-3.4-boxes and 1-in-45-to-100-boxes wall respectively. Meanwhile, the singles market has already crashed to rational levels — the correction did the negotiating for you.

This is exactly the scenario a P2P exchange handles well. Plenty of collectors cracked Abyss Eye boxes during the hype window and are now sitting on SARs, SRs, and stacks of Art Rares they would happily swap for cards they actually want. Post a wishlist of the Abyss Eye cards you are hunting, list your own spares on the offers feed, and let the correction work in your favor: a trade agreed at July 2026 prices is a very different deal from one struck at launch.

For practical trading, Abyss Eye sorts into five rough tiers as of July 11, 2026. Trophy tier ($350+): the MUR Darkrai ($497.50) and SAR Darkrai ($383.27) — cards you trade toward over multiple deals, not in one. Premium tier ($40–70): Gwynn SAR ($66.44), Morpeko ex SAR ($62.63), Misty's Spirit SR ($49.24), and Mega Zeraora ex SAR ($42.71) — clean one-for-one material against other sets' mid-chases. Mid tier ($12–35): the remaining SARs, Gwynn SR, Mega Darkrai ex SR, Slowbro AR, Mega Chandelure ex SR, and Morpeko ex SR — the workhorses of most Abyss Eye trades. Filler-plus ($3–10): the other ARs and gold exes, ideal for evening out lopsided deals. Bulk: everything else, best moved in playsets or as trade sweeteners.

Two honest caveats when valuing trades. First, this set's prices have moved 50–70% inside two months — always check current numbers on the day you trade, and expect your partner to do the same. Second, the crash punished hype cards and spared character cards: Misty's Spirit, Gladion's Showdown, and Morpeko held or gained while the Mega SARs fell. If you are trading Abyss Eye cards you plan to hold for a while, that pattern — durable character demand versus decaying hype — is worth more than any single price point in this article. These are observations, not investment advice; the only guaranteed return in this hobby is the collection itself.

Japanese singles have a discovery problem: the collector three neighborhoods away with a spare Gwynn SAR has no idea you want one. Swaptio closes that gap. Add the Abyss Eye cards you are missing to your wishlist on the Se busca feed, and when another collector lists them — or spots your want and has the card sleeved in a binder — you connect directly and settle the trade between yourselves, no middleman margin involved. You can even share your wishlist as a public link, which is a painless way to tell your trading circle exactly which M5 numbers you still need.

And if you are deciding between chasing this set in Japanese or waiting for English product, keep both guides handy: this page for M5 numbers and Japanese market context, and our Pitch Black (ME05) guide for the international release on July 17. Whichever language you collect in, the cards are better acquired from another collector's binder than from a €100 box with a 71% chance of containing zero SARs.