A seller's stated value is not what the item is worth

The expected value at the seller's stated values, from the box and pack calculator.

Read as
A box advertising $180 of average value against a $100 price is offering more than it charges.
Actually
That figure is computed from values the seller chose. The number that matters is computed from prices recorded somewhere the seller does not control, and then reduced again by what the seller's own terms charge to turn an item back into money.

A stated value is a catalogue price. Nobody is obliged to pay it, the seller least of all — and where the seller offers to buy the item back, the rate it offers is usually a fraction of the value it printed.

So this site carries the two figures in separate columns and never averages one in place of the other. The seller's arithmetic is reported because it is what the marketing claims; the arithmetic from observed prices is reported because it is what a buyer can act on. Publishing only the first would restate a claim as a finding.

Then the terms apply. A sell-back at 70% takes 30% of whatever is left, and a delivery charge takes a flat amount off every purchase that ships. A box whose stated average is $180 and whose observed average is $95 realises $66.50 at a 70% sell-back — against a price of $100.

Where an outcome carries a probability but no price anyone outside the seller has recorded, no figure from observed values is published at all. Falling back on the stated value there would quietly reintroduce exactly the number the column exists to avoid.

The method behind this figure

Randomised purchase economicsbox-economics v1.0.0. Its formula, assumptions and limitations are published in full on the methodology page.

Related: Mystery box and pack EV calculator, Recorded boxes and packs, Glossary, Reading the numbers