Which Pokemon product should you actually buy?

Walk into a store and you will see a wall of boxes at prices from $5 to $165, with no indication of what is inside any of them. The names do not help: a booster bundle and a booster box sound like the same thing and differ by a factor of six in price. A tin, a chest and a collection are three different products. An Elite Trainer Box is neither elite nor a box of trainers.

Underneath the branding there are really only four decisions: how many packs you want, whether you want the accessories bundled, whether you want a card you can only get in that product, and whether you care which expansion the cards come from. Everything on this page is a different answer to those four questions.

Three things, in this order. First, pack count — a current-era pack holds 10 cards plus a basic energy, and that is the unit everything is priced against. A booster box at roughly $155 to $165 for 36 packs is the cheapest per pack of anything Pokemon sells. Second, bundled accessories: the 65 sleeves, dice, energy cards and storage box in an Elite Trainer Box are real items with a real cost, which is why an ETB's price per pack looks poor until you price those separately. Third, exclusivity — a promo card available only in that product, which is the entire reason some Elite Trainer Boxes cost more than others.

What does not decide the price, at retail, is how good the cards inside might be. Every sealed pack of a given expansion has the same odds. A box that costs more does not pull better. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

Buying a booster box. It is easy to see why: 36 packs for $160 is obviously better value per pack than 9 packs for $50, so it looks like the smart purchase. It is usually the wrong one. Thirty-six packs of a single expansion produces a great deal of the same common cards, no sleeves to protect anything, and nowhere to put it all. A child opens twelve packs in an afternoon, loses interest in the duplicates, and the cards end up loose in a drawer where they get bent.

The second mistake is buying sealed product and no accessories. Cards come out of packs with sharp corners and no protection. Within a week they have been shuffled on a carpet, carried to school in a pocket and stacked under a book. The $15 of sleeves and a binder matter more to whether the collection survives than which box the cards came in — which is why every page in this section links across to the binders and the sleeves.

• Never bought any of this before: start with Pokemon cards for parents, then the best packs to buy.
• Buying a gift and you have a budget: the gift guide by budget sorts everything by what you want to spend.
• Deciding between two specific boxes: Elite Trainer Box vs booster box is the comparison most people need.
• Worried about buying fakes: how to spot fake Pokemon cards covers what to check before and after you buy.