Trick or Trade 2024: The Halloween Promo Set Worth Talking About
Pokémon's annual Halloween booster bag was bigger than ever in 2024. A look at what was inside, which promos mattered, and how the secondary market reacted.
What Trick or Trade is and isn't
Trick or Trade is the annual Halloween promo bundle that pairs mini-packs (three cards each) with a small set of Halloween-themed promo cards. It's mass-market product — sold in groceries and big-box retailers as much as in hobby stores — and its appeal is mostly seasonal nostalgia rather than chase value.
That said, the 2024 release had more under the hood than the typical year.
What was in the 2024 bag
- A larger mini-pack count than 2023.
- A refreshed promo subset with Halloween-styled illustrations.
- The usual mix of recent-set commons and uncommons in the mini-packs themselves.
The Halloween promos are the only cards that meaningfully trade on the secondary market. The mini-pack contents are mostly bulk.
What the secondary market did
Several of the 2024 Halloween promos saw modest premiums above singles pricing from their parent sets, driven mostly by the seasonal artwork. Premiums on this kind of promo typically fade meaningfully within 60–90 days of Halloween, then rebuild slowly the following October.
Should you buy a bag?
If you like opening packs and the seasonal art, yes. If you're optimizing for value per card opened, no — boosters of a current set will almost always be the better dollar. Trick or Trade is fundamentally a fun product, not an investment product, and treating it as either of those is the right way to enjoy it.
