>>55357334It's because ES and LO weren't printed nearly enough to meet the demand, and came out during the great 2021 card hype surge. Keep in mind, a ton of people came out of the woodwork at once around the time Battle Styles/Chilling Reign came out due to stuff like Logan Paul, Biden Bux, the McDonald's cards, and the Shining Fates Charizard Vmax.
It's been three years since that snowball, and hype around SV hasn't been nearly as big. Card collecting is still much bigger than pre 2021, but not enough to cause the rippling effect that caused ES/LO to become what they did.
You also need to factor in pull rates. ES/LO had notoriously low pull rates, and both had extremely popular chase cards. PF on the other hand has pretty good pull rates and no super huge chase card that everyone needs. These sets also have a gigantic amount of gorgeous Illustration Rares, and even if most of them aren't expensive pulls, they're still great enough to feel good to pull. Ironically this leads to less packs being bought because the dopamine of pulling a rare card isn't nearly as exciting or enticing since the rates are higher. Packs are also much easier to find since there's much more supply, so there's less for scalpers to attach to, and less FOMO for ripping packs.
Mix all that together and you have a much weaker "market" for cards than SWSH.
