Pokémon pack pull rates

Is it worth cracking packs for the chase card?

Modelled odds of pulling a set's top card, multiplied by the current pack price (or box price divided by 36), give the average spend to open one — compared here with buying the card as a single. Only sets with a market pack or box price are included. In 105 of 106 such sets the modelled spend is higher than the card's price; the ten widest gaps are shown.

“Modelled odds” is the hit-slot model above applied to one named card, not a measured rate. The spend figure counts only the chase card: the other cards pulled along the way have resale value too, and this table ignores it.

How the pull-rate model works

Every set on this page is opened the same way: the model deals a fixed pack structure and gives it exactly one hit slot, then decides which rarity tier that slot lands on using the weights above. A modern pack is modelled as five commons, three uncommons, one reverse holo and the hit slot. With all four hit tiers present, the weights normalise to roughly 59.7% rare, 27.9% holo, 10% ultra and 2.5% secret. If a set prints no cards at a tier, that tier drops out and the remaining weights are rescaled, which is why two sets can show different tier percentages from the same model.

The tier chance is then split evenly across every card printed at that tier. That is the step that turns a tier rate into a card rate, and it is also the step with the least evidence behind it: real print sheets are not evenly loaded, and The Pokémon Company does not publish sheet layouts or pack odds. So a named card's modelled odds are the tier weight divided by the tier's card count — nothing more. The set with the most secret-tier cards here is Prismatic Evolutions with 37, so under the model each one of its secrets is about a 1 in 1,487 pack.

Sets released in 2010 or earlier use a separate vintage model — a seven-common, three-uncommon pack with one rare-or-holo slot weighted 67:33. 52 of the 131 sets listed fall under it. The vintage model has no ultra or secret tier (those sets' ex, Gold Star, LV.X and secret cards are not modelled separately), and the holo count is what the catalogue records for the set, so a vintage holo's modelled odds depend only on how many holos the set printed.

Reading the table

Pack price is the one column taken from sealed-product prices rather than the model, and its small label says where. 120 sets show the lowest booster-pack price in CardTrack's sealed catalogue snapshot of 22 June 2026 (“market”), and 11 fall back to a flat era estimate marked “est.” because CardTrack holds no sealed price for them. None of these is a completed sale. Among sets with a sealed price, the cheapest pack is Perfect Order at $6.07 and the dearest is Neo Destiny at $2,095.00; a vintage pack price is the price of an unopened collectible, not of the cards inside it.

Cards is the number of cards the catalogue holds for the set, and hit-slot cards is how many of them are rare or better, with the rare / holo / ultra / secret split in brackets. The average set here has about 63 hit-slot cards. That split matters more than the total: a set that prints many ultras and secrets spreads the same modelled tier chance across more cards, so any one of them gets longer. Top chase is the set's most valuable card at current market price, which is what the crack-versus-buy table above multiplies out and what best-upside sets ranks against pack cost.

Pack odds versus box odds

A booster box does not improve the odds of any single pack — it gives you 36 independent draws. Under the modern model, a secret-tier hit lands in about 2.5% of packs, so a 36-pack box carries on average 0.9 secret-tier cards, and the chance a box contains at least one is about 60%. Those two numbers are why pulls feel worse than the odds read: an average of nearly one per box means many boxes have none, and a specific secret rare is that tier chance divided again by the number of secrets in the set.

The longest single-card shot among sets with a market pack price is Umbreon ex from Prismatic Evolutions at a modelled 1 in 1,487 packs, which at $15.77 a pack is an average spend of $23,450 to pull it once, against a single priced at $1,325.

Modelled versus measured pull rates

A measured pull rate comes from opening a counted number of packs and recording every hit — the opposite of the pack simulator, which opens modelled packs — and it is only as good as its sample: a few hundred packs pins a common tier reasonably well and says almost nothing about a card that appears once in a thousand. Retailers and community projects publish counts of this kind for some individual sets, and they are the right source for a specific set's real distribution. CardTrack has no opened-pack dataset and does not pretend to.

What this page adds is consistency and the real numbers around the model: the same assumptions applied to every set, so sets can be compared on the facts that do differ — how many cards each tier holds, what a pack costs today on the sealed market, and what the chase is worth. When a measured sample for a set disagrees with the model, trust the sample; the model is the disclosed fallback, not the answer.