Nobody in the West gets Japanese boxes for MSRP (most people in Japan don’t either). For people with MSRP fixations, your best bet is to set up a Japanese middleman, enter the Pokemon Center lottery, and win. You can only win one box. Even if you do win, by the time you pay domestic Japan shipping, middleman fees, and international shipping, you’ll be at or above the market price.
Buying on eBay is the simplest way to get a Japanese box.
On Ebay, you can get Silver Lance, Matchless Fighter and Fusion Skyscrapers for around $75, Fusion Arts and Shiny Star V for $100, and Eevee Heroes and Blue Sky Stream for not much more.
You don’t need to know people overseas or have distribution hookups to get great prices. Not sure how much cheaper one could expect them to be.
I was notified about the VMAX climax by a twitter notification. The last time amazon did a drop like this was a few days before Eevee Heroes I think which was in late August.
Not sure what japanese MSRP even means now, one guy talked about having to pay 116% more at distributor level for Fusion Arts. Meanwhile, someone’s obviously getting it cheap enough to dump truckloads of boxes at sub-$100 on eBay. All happening at the same time as the lottery stuff.
Not sure how much of this is internal policing or just pure chaos but regardless, it is not something one has any influence over and sub $100 per japanese box is as good as one could ever expect in todays climate.
PlazaJapan is always kinda all over the place with pricing. Sometimes its $50 for a box, sometimes its $150, sometimes u wait a few days to order and suddenly its $30 more expensive.
Basically i just wait it out until i feel content with the price. Side note, they ship incredibly fast. Its a bit pricey, but worth it when u can get 5 boxes from Japan to Canada in like a day and a half
Usually prices are quite high when the set first releases but I am almost always able to get it close to MSRP after the set is only a few weeks old. I follow some twitter accounts that will tweet out when something comes into stock so that has helped me find things. Unfortunately, they tweet about English releases frequently so I have to sift through the junk.
P.S. How do you get the mon in the bottom of your response?