AZ's Tranquility SIR Is Trending and M Rayquaza-EX Just Jumped 48%. Here's Why.

A week into the Mega Evolution era and the market is doing something it always does at this stage in a new set's life: the second wave of demand starts showing up. The mascot card peaks, the hype cools, and a different chase emerges as collectors actually look at the rest of the set. At the same time, an old vintage card from a previous Mega Evolution era is having a quiet but very real moment. Here's the read on both.

What's hot: AZ's Tranquility (Chaos Rising #120)

Last week, every TCGPlayer search query and every YouTube unboxing video was about Mega Greninja ex. This week, the trainer SIRs from Chaos Rising are running the show, and AZ's Tranquility (card #120) is leading the pack. r/PokemonCardValue, the Card Chill Discord, and the Mint Mob price tracker all flagged AZ as the fastest-rising secondary card of the week. PokéBeach's day-six wrap-up called it "the sleeper SIR of the set."

The catalyst

This one is partly mechanical, partly narrative.

The mechanical piece is that trainer Special Illustration Rares from recent sets (Iono, N's Reshiram, Erika's Vileplume, Penny) have been outpacing Pokemon SIRs as long-term holds. Collectors learned the lesson with Iono: trainer SIRs print at lower rates, have stronger character pull from collectors who don't even play the TCG, and don't compete with Mega Hyper Rare variants for chase status the way a Mega Pokemon does. AZ slots right into that pattern.

The narrative piece is bigger. AZ is one of the most beloved characters in the entire Pokemon canon. The 3000-year-old former king of Kalos who lost his Floette in the Great War and spent three millennia searching for her. The Pokemon X and Y backstory that made people put down their 3DS and stare at the wall. He has had zero modern TCG appearances until this card. The artwork shows him quietly sitting in a garden with a Floette by his side. For a collector base in their late 20s and 30s who played XY as teenagers, this is a direct emotional hit.

That demographic also overlaps heavily with the disposable-income collector lane, which matters for sustained price action.

The market read

Across TCGPlayer, eBay, and CardLadder over the past 72 hours, near-mint copies of AZ's Tranquility SIR are sitting in a $95–$115 range. The Ultra Rare variant (#106) is in the $32–$40 lane. The base Uncommon (#76) is bulk.

Sold-listing depth tells you what you need to know. At $100 buy-it-now, copies are clearing within four hours. At $115, listings are sitting overnight but still selling. The ceiling is real but not yet found. Historical comp: Iono SIR from Paldea Evolved peaked at $180 in its third week before settling at $130. If AZ follows that arc, you have one to two more weeks of upside before the consolidation.

PSA 10 comps have not landed yet. The set is six days old. Based on how comparable trainer SIRs (Iono, Penny, Erika) have graded out of recent Japanese-origin sets, expect a PSA 10 multiplier in the 2.0–2.5x range, putting graded AZ in the $200–$280 lane once population grows.

Flipper's angle

If you pulled one, do not sell it raw at $100. The base case is you grade and clear $200+ in eight weeks. The downside case is the trainer SIR market softens and you sell raw later for $80. Asymmetric risk favors the grade.

If you are buying in at retail, the next 7 days matter. If sold-listing prices keep ticking up, the market is still finding the ceiling and the upside is intact. If they flatten at $105 and start sitting, that is the new floor and you missed the entry. Watch the daily sold count on eBay. Healthy demand: 15 to 25 copies per day clearing. Topping signal: under 8 per day.

Biggest gainer: M Rayquaza-EX (Roaring Skies #76)

Vintage cards are doing something interesting right now and almost nobody is talking about it. The largest seven-day mover I tracked across PriceCharting, TCGPlayer market data, and eBay sold listings this week is not a brand-new chase. It is a 2015 full art. Near-mint M Rayquaza-EX from Roaring Skies (card #76, the Emerald Break full art) went from $34 to $50 over the last seven days. That is a +47.7% move on a card that had been sleepwalking in the $30–$36 range for over eight months.

The catalyst

Chaos Rising launched the Mega Evolution era in modern Pokemon TCG. That happened on May 22. Within 48 hours, vintage Mega EX Google searches spiked. Within 96 hours, the eBay floor on the four most iconic vintage Mega EX cards (M Rayquaza EX, M Charizard EX from Flashfire, M Gardevoir EX from Steam Siege, M Mewtwo EX from BREAKthrough) all moved upward. M Rayquaza-EX is the one with the cleanest move because it has the most cultural weight. Emerald Break is the attack name that defined competitive Pokemon TCG for the entire 2015 to 2016 season. Mega Rayquaza decks won Worlds. The card art (Rayquaza coiling through an emerald sky) is in every "iconic Pokemon cards" YouTube video ever made.

When the modern market spins up a new mechanic that explicitly invokes the old one, the OG prints get a nostalgia bid. That is exactly what is happening here, and it is happening faster than the typical vintage cycle because Chaos Rising is doing more cross-promotion of the original Mega EX prints than any prior set in this style.

Is it sustainable?

This is where you have to be careful. Vintage spikes have two failure modes. The first is "speculation evaporates and the card returns to baseline in 30 days." The second is "the spike is the front edge of a structural repricing and the card holds."

The signal that separates the two is sold-listing depth at the new price. Right now, M Rayquaza-EX #76 at $50 has clearing depth on eBay (about 10 to 14 copies per day moving over the last 72 hours, up from 3 to 5 per day pre-spike). That is structural, not speculative. The buyers are not flippers cycling the same inventory, they are end collectors filling a vintage Mega EX slot in their collections.

The risk to the structural read is The Pokemon Company announcing a vintage Mega EX reprint product. There has been no formal announcement, but the Chaos Rising marketing materials reference the original prints heavily, which sometimes precedes a Classic Collection style product. If that gets announced, the premium evaporates fast.

Flipper's angle

At $50 raw, the math on grading gets interesting. Roaring Skies is a 2015 set and copies have been in circulation for 11 years, which means surface and centering are the usual suspects. If you have a clean copy, PSA 10 comps on M Rayquaza-EX #76 in the last 30 days have been clearing in the $180 to $220 lane. Grading cost ($25 to $45 depending on tier) plus risk of a 9 ($85 ceiling) means the expected value is positive but not screaming.

If you are buying in at $50 to flip raw in 30 days, the bet is the structural read holds and the new floor is $55 to $65. That is a tight margin after eBay and PayPal fees. Better play is buy clean copies at $50, grade, and ship the 10s. Skip the 9s.

If you already own copies and have been sitting on them for years, this is a real exit window. The first wave of vintage spikes tends to peak two to three weeks in, and we are about one week in.

What this means for your watchlist

Two distinct lanes, both worth watching.

AZ's Tranquility is the trainer SIR lane. The cards in that lane reward patience and grading. They peak slower than Pokemon chases but hold longer. If you are playing this lane, you are betting on the long-term collectibility of named character SIRs against the slow churn of bulk supply.

M Rayquaza-EX is the vintage nostalgia lane. The cards in that lane move when modern releases reference them, and the move is structural if sold-listing depth holds at the new price. If you are playing this lane, you are watching for the next vintage card a modern set is about to spotlight, and you are buying ahead of the catalyst.

Flipr's Top 10 surfaced AZ's Tranquility on Wednesday morning, before the trainer-SIR thesis became Discord consensus. QuickFlip caught a $34 M Rayquaza-EX listing on Saturday that resold three days later for $48. Both feeds are running hot right now because the market is moving in two different directions at once.

The video below breaks down the current price trends across Chaos Rising, including where AZ's Tranquility sits in the market right now:

The concrete action: pull every binder you have with XY-era Mega EX prints and check the floors on TCGPlayer this week. There is a real chance one of yours has quietly gained 30% since Chaos Rising launched and you have not noticed.