Week 36: Sisu, Divine Water Dragon Surfaces From a Starter Pack

Week 36's pull: a water dragon out of a starter pack

Every week we go through the openings and pick one card to talk about properly. This week it wasn't a close call. FrostKeeper79 opened a Lorcana Starter and out came Sisu - Divine Water Dragon (V.2) from Rise of the Floodborn, raw and near mint, carrying a market value of €47.82. The card is now catalogued in the vault under FrostKeeper79's name, and the full card record is public.

Below: what the card actually is, why the Floodborn-era Sisu prints keep such a steady following, and — the part we care about most — how to read a number like €47.82 without kidding yourself.

What actually came out of the pack

The card is Sisu - Divine Water Dragon, specifically the (V.2) printing, from Rise of the Floodborn, the second Lorcana set. Condition on arrival at the vault: RAW NM. No grading company has touched it. It is a raw card in near mint condition, catalogued and photographed exactly as it was received, and you can open the card record here.

In our catalogue the (V.2) suffix does one simple job: it keeps an alternate printing separate from the base card, so two different prints never share one blended value. When you read the sealed pool list for a pack before buying, that suffix tells you exactly which version is inside. It matters more than people expect — the gap between two printings of the same character is often wider than the gap between two entirely different characters.

• Card: Sisu - Divine Water Dragon (V.2)
• Set: Rise of the Floodborn (Lorcana)
• Condition: RAW NM
• Market value: €47.82
• Pack: Lorcana Starter
• Opened by: FrostKeeper79

Why the Floodborn Sisu prints hold their following

Sisu is the character most people picture when they think of Rise of the Floodborn. The Divine Water Dragon treatment is an art-first card in a game that already sells itself on art, and it pulls demand from three directions at once: Lorcana players who want the character on the table, art collectors who buy dragons on sight, and film fans who never touched a card game before Lorcana existed. That overlap is what tends to keep a floor under a print like this.

There is also the headline-character factor. Characters that front a set get printed, reprinted and reimagined in later products, and each new version quietly redistributes attention across the older ones. Sometimes that lifts an early alternate printing, sometimes it flattens it. It is one of the reasons we always publish the exact printing name rather than just writing "Sisu" and leaving you to guess.

Reading €47.82 honestly

What the number is

€47.82 is the market value we list for this printing in this condition: a reflection of recent real sales, not an asking price and not what a dealer would quote you across a convention table. It moves. It moved before this pack was opened and it will move again. If Sisu is reprinted or the set catches a wave of new players, that figure changes in either direction.

What the number is not

It is not a guarantee, and it is not a forecast for your next opening. Every pool on TCGBoxes is published in full and sealed before the pack goes on sale — every card in it, its condition, its listed value. That means the shape of the pool is visible before you spend anything, and you can see where a €47.82 card sits inside it. It sits near the top. Most Lorcana Starter openings will land below it, and the honest arithmetic is that across many openings the average result sits under the strongest card in the pool. That is not pessimism; it is what a published distribution looks like when you actually read it.

Raw NM versus graded

A raw NM card and a graded one are different products with different buyers. Grading costs money, takes weeks, and carries genuine outcome risk: a card that looks flawless in hand can come back a point lower than you hoped, and the value of the print in that grade may not cover what you spent getting there. Plenty of collectors keep art-driven Lorcana cards raw on purpose — no case, no glare, nothing between you and the illustration. Neither choice is wrong. The mistake is deciding after you've already paid the submission fee.

Three doors after a pull like this

1. Leave it in the vault. The card stays insured and catalogued, and the record stays accessible.
2. Ship it home. Available at any time, on FrostKeeper79's schedule, not ours.
3. Sell it back for store credit. Settled in euro store credit, usable on other packs and cards in the shop.

There is no correct answer here, only a personal one. A €47.82 raw card is exactly the range where the decision is genuinely open: big enough to matter, small enough that keeping it because you like it is a completely reasonable position.

How we keep openings checkable

The pool is written and sealed before the pack is listed, and it is published so anyone can read it — no card is added, removed or swapped once sales start. Every opening returns a draw certificate, and you can recompute it yourself to confirm that the card you received is the one the sealed pool and the draw record say it should be. Nothing about the result is decided after the fact, and nothing about it depends on trusting our word.

A short collecting guide for Rise of the Floodborn

• Track printings, not characters. Note the exact print name — (V.2) and base are not interchangeable, and mixing them up is the most common way collectors misprice their own shelf.
• Decide raw or graded before you buy. The plan should exist before the card arrives, not after.
• Set a personal ceiling per card. Write it down. Ceilings you keep in your head move upward on their own.
• Read the sealed pool, all of it. The top card is the loud part; the middle of the list tells you far more about what an opening usually looks like.
• Watch reprint pressure. Headline characters get revisited. That is fine — just don't buy an alternate print as if it were the last one that will ever exist.
• Ship what you'd miss. If a card is the reason you collect, having it in a binder at home is a perfectly good outcome.

Nice one, FrostKeeper79

A €47.82 Sisu out of a Lorcana Starter is a strong outcome from a modest pack, and it deserves the write-up. Whether it stays vaulted, goes home, or comes back for store credit, it is a good card, correctly catalogued, in near mint condition — and the whole record of how it got there is there to be checked.