Pokémon Pull Rates Explained: What "1 in 80 Packs" Really Means

The Pokémon Company doesn't print odds on English booster packs and never has. What collectors use instead are pull rates worked out by opening lots of packs and counting. TCGplayer's Authentication Center does this for every new set, usually opening between 2,000 and 5,000 packs, and publishes the rate for each rarity with a margin of error. Those are the numbers in the calculator below, along with an early count for Delta Reign, which came out on 6 November 2026.

The numbers themselves are easy to find. What's harder is knowing what they mean when you're standing in a shop with one booster box, which is what this post is about.

What a pull rate actually is

A pull rate is the share of packs that contained a card of a given rarity. TCGplayer found a Special Illustration Rare in 1.25% of Pitch Black packs, which it rounds to "1 in 80". That's a description of a large pile of packs. It says nothing about how the cards are spread between any particular 80 of them.

So the useful way to read it is as a chance per pack. Each pack you open is another 1.25% shot. The packs don't remember each other: having opened 79 empty ones doesn't make the 80th more likely to hit. That's why the chance of at least one climbs quickly at first and then slowly:

Rates from TCGplayer's Pitch Black count. The chances are our own maths, treating each pack as an independent chance.

Two things stand out. Opening "1 in 80" packs leaves more than a third of people with nothing. And the single card most people actually want, a particular Special Illustration Rare of a particular Pokémon, is about six times rarer than the rarity as a whole, because Pitch Black has six of them sharing that slot.

The rule of thumb

For a 1 in X card, opening X packs gives you about a 63% chance. Opening twice as many gets you to about 86%, and three times as many to about 95%. There's no number of packs that guarantees one. For Pitch Black's Special Illustration Rares, a 90% chance takes about 184 packs, which is just over five booster boxes.

Recent sets compared

The regular Mega Evolution era sets have settled into very similar rates. 30th Celebration, a special set with five-card packs, is the outlier.

The top tier is the Mega Hyper Rare, apart from 30th Celebration, where it's the Futuristic Rare. Ascended Heroes also has a separate Mega Attack Rare tier, at 1 in 29, and rarer Ultra Rares, at 1 in 21.

The top-tier figures carry the widest margins. TCGplayer found only a few Mega Hyper Rares in each count, so Perfect Order's "1 in 1,786" and Pitch Black's "1 in 1,081" are better read as "somewhere around 1 in 1,000 to 2,000" than as different rates.

Delta Reign so far

Delta Reign has only been out since 6 November, and no large count has been published yet. The biggest early tally we've seen, 252 packs gathered from community openings, found an ex in 57 packs, an Illustration Rare in 24 and an Ultra Rare in 22, which is in line with the other Mega Evolution era sets. It found four Special Illustration Rares and one Mega Hyper Rare, and that's far too few to set odds from. In the calculator, Delta Reign's two rarest tiers use Pitch Black's rates as a stand-in until better numbers exist.

Why one pack can feel nothing like the numbers

Small numbers of packs are dominated by luck. Open a booster box of Pitch Black and the most likely outcome for Special Illustration Rares is none at all. Some people will get two. Both are normal, and neither tells you the rate is wrong. It takes thousands of packs before the counts settle down, which is why one opener's box on video says very little about a set.

Collectors often argue that boxes are packed more evenly than pure chance, so that a box is less likely to have no hits at all. The Pokémon Company doesn't say how packs are distributed, and TCGplayer's rates are per pack, not per box. Our calculator treats every pack as independent, which is the simplest honest assumption. If boxes are spread more evenly, your chance of at least one per box would be a little higher than shown.

Pull rates and digital card rips

Pull rates have become a bigger topic this autumn because of digital card rips: apps where you pay for a virtual pack, see a card that's backed by a real one in a vault, and then usually sell it straight back to the platform. Sportico reported this week that these packs are typically priced so the average card value comes back 5% to 15% below what you paid, and panellists at its conference described the worst case for the industry as "slot machines for kids". Several sports betting and prediction market companies have launched or are testing rips products.

The maths in this post applies to those too, with one difference. A physical pack's odds are measured by people counting. A rip platform sets its own odds and buyback prices. Either way, every pack is a fresh chance, and on rip platforms the average card is priced to be worth less than the pack. We don't link to or recommend rip platforms, and nothing on Playqub involves real money.

If you just want the card

The calculator makes the trade-off clear. Chasing one particular Special Illustration Rare from Pitch Black means about 333 packs for even odds. That's more than nine booster boxes. If there's one card you want, buying that single card is almost always the cheaper route. Opening packs makes more sense if you enjoy opening packs, you're happy with whatever turns up, or you're building towards a full set.

Sources and method

Pull rates for 30th Celebration, Pitch Black, Perfect Order, Ascended Heroes and Mega Evolution come from TCGplayer's Authentication Center counts, such as its Pitch Black pull rates. Single-card rates are TCGplayer's own, and assume each card at a rarity is equally common. The Delta Reign figures are an early 252-pack community count published by TCGTalk. The digital rips figures are from Sportico's reporting. Chances, expected counts and pack numbers are our own calculations from those rates. We haven't opened packs ourselves for this post.

Frequently asked questions

Does 1 in 80 packs mean I'll get one if I open 80?

No. At 1 in 80 per pack, opening 80 packs gives you about a 63% chance of at least one. You need about 184 packs for a 90% chance, and even then 1 in 10 people opening that many would get none.

What are the odds of a Special Illustration Rare in a booster box?

In recent Mega Evolution era sets such as Pitch Black, any Special Illustration Rare turns up about once in 80 packs. A 36-pack booster box then has about a 36% chance of containing at least one. A specific Special Illustration Rare is far rarer, around 7% per box.

Does The Pokémon Company publish pull rates?

No. It has never published odds for English booster packs. The figures collectors use come from people opening large numbers of packs and counting the results, the biggest regular count being TCGplayer's, which opens several thousand packs of each new set.

What are Delta Reign's pull rates?

There's no large count yet. An early community tally of 252 packs found an ex in about 23% of packs, an Illustration Rare in about 10% and an Ultra Rare in about 9%. That's too few packs to measure the two rarest tiers, so treat Delta Reign odds as provisional.

Which recent Pokémon set has the best pull rates?

30th Celebration, by a distance. TCGplayer measured a Special Illustration Rare in about 1 in 21 packs, against roughly 1 in 80 to 1 in 100 in the regular Mega Evolution era sets.

Filed under Explainers, Guides

Facts in this article were checked against developer and store sources on 11 November 2026. Prices, versions and dates change, so confirm on the official page before you buy.