Update — August 2026. Pitch Black streeted on schedule, July 17, 2026. Everything below was written on June 24, three weeks before release, so it reads forward — treat it as the pre-release picture.
Three things in it were out of date. The drop timing here ("Monday–Tuesday mornings") came from an 8-day sample and has been superseded by two full months of data: Walmart drops Wednesday between 9pm and midnight ET; Target runs 3–5am ET, on Friday or Tuesday. And two MSRPs below were wrong and have now been corrected in the table: the booster box is $161.64, not $143.64, and the 3-Pack Blister is $13.99, not $14.99. Full corrections at the end of this post; the timing breakdown is in Pokemon TCG Drop Timing — July 2026.
Mega Evolution: Pitch Black streets July 17, 2026. Whether you get it at retail or end up paying a scalper comes down to two things you can know in advance: what it should cost, and how little time you'll have to grab it. We have data on both.
TL;DR:
- You'll have minutes, not hours. The last Mega-era ETB drop we tracked — Ascended Heroes at Walmart on June 19 — sold out in 7 minutes.
- Know the MSRP before you click. Elite Trainer Box $49.99, booster box (36 packs) $161.64. Anything well above that is markup.
- Drops cluster Monday–Tuesday mornings, US Eastern. Weekends are nearly dead. Preorders are staggering out across retailers now.
- Watch more than one store — Best Buy, Target, Walmart, Pokémon Center, and Amazon each list a different slice.
How fast does it actually sell out?
Fast enough that "I'll grab it after work" doesn't work.
The clearest recent data point is from our own drop log: on June 19, Ascended Heroes Elite Trainer Boxes hit Walmart and were out of stock within 7 minutes. That's the same product tier and the same Mega Evolution era as Pitch Black — the most direct comparison available, and it's not an outlier. Community drop-watchers we follow routinely post six-minute warnings before a Walmart drop and tell people to camp Pokémon Center between 11am and 3am for a release.
There's good news buried in that: restocks do come back. A set's first drop is rarely its last. But the first drop is the cleanest shot at MSRP before the listing churns, and every later restock is just as fast. So the winning move isn't refreshing for hours — it's being told the instant stock flips, then moving in the first couple of minutes.
What Pitch Black should cost
These are the standard sealed products at regular retail (Best Buy / Target / Walmart). Pokémon Center prices its own booster box higher, noted separately.
| Product | MSRP |
|---|---|
| Sleeved Booster (single pack) | $5.99 |
| 3-Pack Blister | $13.99 |
| Booster Bundle | $26.94 |
| Elite Trainer Box (ETB) | $49.99 |
| Booster Box (36 packs) | $161.64 |
| Booster Box — Pokémon Center tier | $179.64 |
The number to memorize is the booster box: $161.64 at mass retail. On launch day, the same box routinely trades on the secondary market at a meaningful premium — which is exactly the gap a retail-price pickup captures. For the full fair-price breakdown across every product type, see our Pokémon TCG MSRP reference.
Where it drops
We watch Pitch Black across five retailers, and they don't carry identical lineups — so it pays to cover more than one:
- Best Buy — the widest spread (ETB, booster box, bundle, 3-pack, sleeved single), and often early to post preorders.
- Target — ETB, booster box, bundle, 3-pack; tends toward early-morning windows around a release.
- Walmart — ETB, booster display box, bundle, 3-pack. This is where the 7-minute sellout happened.
- Pokémon Center — ETB, booster box, bundle, direct from the source, via an online waiting line.
- Amazon — ETB and bundle; price floats above MSRP at times, so check it against the table above.
When to be watching
We logged every restock alert we sent over an 8-day window and bucketed them by day and hour. The pattern was clear: Monday and Tuesday produced most drops, concentrated in two windows — late morning (around 11am ET) and evening (6–11pm ET). Weekends were nearly dead. (Full breakdown: when do Pokémon TCG drops actually happen.)
For Pitch Black specifically, two timelines run in parallel: preorders are rolling out now and stagger across retailers — one store can post days ahead of another — while release-week restocks around July 17 will follow that same Monday/Tuesday-morning skew. None of it is guaranteed for a single product, but if you're choosing when to pay attention, that's where the odds are.
The honest takeaway: at a 7-minute sellout, being fast matters less than being first to know. That's the one thing worth automating — bujusjujus watches all five retailers and pushes the moment Pitch Black is buyable, with a link straight to the listing.
Update — August 2026
Pitch Black has now released, so here's what the guide above got right, what it got wrong, and how the launch actually went.
How it played out. Our first Pitch Black in-stock alert fired July 10 — a full week ahead of the July 17 street date — and the family landed at Target, Walmart and Amazon. Target and Walmart sold it at sticker. Amazon gouged the Booster Bundle to +60% over MSRP, the same markup it ran on that exact SKU back in June. Same product, same week, two very different prices depending on where you were watching.
Correction 1 — the drop timing. The "Monday–Tuesday mornings" advice above came from an 8-day snapshot taken in late May. Two full months of data since have replaced it, and the real answer isn't a single weekly rhythm at all — each retailer keeps its own clock:
- Walmart — Wednesday, between 9pm and midnight ET. Thirty out of thirty July restocks.
- Target — 3am–5am ET, and only on Friday or Tuesday. Fifty-four out of fifty-five.
- Amazon — no clock whatsoever, in either month.
Nothing buyable appeared between 3pm and 8pm ET in the whole of July. The full breakdown is in Pokemon TCG Drop Timing — July 2026.
Correction 2 — the 3-Pack Blister MSRP. The table above originally listed $14.99. We now anchor Mega Evolution–era 3-pack blisters at $13.99, which is what the per-blister maths works out to from distributor case pricing. If you're using this page to judge whether a listing is marked up, use $13.99 — the dollar matters, because it's the difference between a blister reading as roughly at-sticker and reading as a markup.
Correction 3 — the booster box MSRP (added 2026-09-11). The table above originally listed the 36-pack booster box at $143.64. That is the Scarlet & Violet–era figure: 36 × $3.99. Pitch Black is a Mega Evolution–era set, and those packs are $4.49, so the display is $161.64. The error was visible inside the original table itself — the Booster Bundle was already listed at $26.94, which is 6 × $4.49. Both the table and the prose now read $161.64. The Pokémon Center tier was likewise corrected from $179.99 to $179.64 (36 × $4.99).
This matters beyond this page: $143.64 is still widely repeated for Mega Evolution–era sets, and using it makes an at-sticker box look like a 12% markup. Our canonical figures live in the Pokémon TCG MSRP reference.
One caveat worth adding — Pokémon Center. The guide suggests camping the Pokémon Center queue for a release. Three consecutive monthly recaps since have found the same thing: PC queues generate plenty of "the queue is live" noise and almost never resolve into a confirmed at-MSRP cart. Treat a PC queue as awareness, not opportunity, until it actually turns into a checkout.
What still stands. The MSRPs for everything other than the blister and the box, the five-retailer spread, and the core point — a comparable Mega-era ETB sold out in 7 minutes, so being first to know beats being fast — all held up.
Affiliation note: bujusjujus is an independent restock-alert service, not affiliated with or endorsed by The Pokémon Company, Nintendo, Creatures Inc., or any retailer named here. Release date and lineup reflect what we track as of June 24, 2026; details and preorder availability can change — confirm the final price on the retailer's page before buying. Sell-out timing is from our own restock log (Ascended Heroes ETB, Walmart, 2026-06-19) and an 8-day drop-timing sample (2026-05-25 to 06-02); treat specifics as directional. MSRPs are the standard retail figures we monitor against.