The Trial-Deck Cards Trading Like Ghosts

Ask collectors which Dawn of Palpagos cards are hardest to find and the conversation usually starts with booster-pack SSPs. The foil treatment is louder, the sale prices are often higher, and the chase is easy to understand. Yet the visible resale market points to a quieter corner of the release: the TSP parallels hidden inside the two launch trial decks.

That observation is worth following—but only if we use the right language. PalCollector can measure how often an exact printing appeared in a captured sold-results feed. We cannot turn that number into a factory population report. Bushiroad has not published the number of trial decks printed or the odds of receiving a TSP instead of a TSR.

The trial-deck slot is random.

The official product pages for the Red・Blue trial deck and Green・Purple trial deck say that one parallel-rarity card—either TSR or TSP—replaces a card in the 50-card main deck. That matters. A buyer is guaranteed a parallel slot, not a specific TSP and not necessarily a TSP at all.

The official card list shows four TSP designs across the two products: Grizzbolt and Elphidran Aqua in ETD01; Mossanda and Astegon in ETD02. TSP supply therefore depends on the number of decks opened, the unpublished TSR-versus-TSP distribution, and the distribution among the possible parallel designs.

What the first sales window shows.

PalCollector’s captured file contains 8,105 eBay sold/completed search-feed rows from July 30 through September 6, 2026. We narrowed that broad capture to 1,974 conservative observations: English-query, raw, quantity-one singles mapped to one exact official printing, sold through a fixed-price listing or auction with a visible displayed price. Hidden Best Offers, lots, graded cards, unresolved printings, products, and known false positives stay outside the trend.

Price and scarcity are different signals.

Chillet’s $702 observed average towers over the TSP group, even though its qualifying sale count is not the lowest. That is not a contradiction. Price reflects demand, timing, character popularity, artwork, and seller behavior alongside supply. A beloved Pal can command more money than a harder-to-locate card. A thinly traded card can also appear expensive simply because one sale moves the average.

This is why “undervalued” is too strong a conclusion from five weeks of data. Astegon, Grizzbolt, and Elphidran Aqua deserve a collector’s attention because their visible turnover is thin. The dataset does not prove that their total populations are lower than every SSP or that prices must rise.

What could change the ranking?

• More decks opening: sealed trial decks may release additional TSP copies into the market.
• Search-feed gaps: eBay sold results are broad but not a complete canonical ledger, and title quality affects matching.
• Hidden offers: 3,932 Best Offer rows in the full capture were held out because displayed values may not equal accepted prices.
• Demand differences: low sale frequency can mean low supply, low willingness to sell, low demand—or some combination.
• Future products: the official product notes say cards may be reprinted or featured again.

The useful collector conclusion is deliberately narrower than the headline instinct: the launch TSPs occupy a constrained product channel, their exact odds are unpublished, and three of the four produced only three or four qualifying visible-price sales in our first window. That is a market worth watching closely.