PULL RATE
DATABASE.

Pull rate data is not manufacturer-published for most modern TCGs. Pokémon stopped publishing official pack odds after Sword & Shield. Konami shares some rarity statements per product line but not slot-level probability. Bandai's One Piece print runs are even more opaque. Ravensburger's Lorcana operates a print-on-demand pipeline with shifting ratios. The only high-transparency publisher is Wizards of the Coast — they publish raw per-slot odds for every MTG set, though not the internal distribution across rares and mythics within the rare slot.

Archive Drops aggregates pull rate data from four categories of public sources: case-break spreadsheets maintained by YouTube openers (typically 3–10 case samples of 36 boxes each, producing 1,000+ pack breaks per set at launch), Reddit pull rate threads with case-break photo verification, TCGplayer market data (which indirectly validates scarcity through price), and manufacturer statements where available. The aggregated rates for a modern Pokémon set typically converge within ±0.3 percentage points at the Ultra Rare tier and ±0.1 at the Special Art Rare tier.

For set launches, we publish initial pull rate estimates within 48 hours of street date and refresh the numbers at 30, 60, and 90 days post-launch. Sets older than 90 days are treated as stable unless a re-print or re-packaging event occurs. If you have a large case-break data set and want to contribute, use the about page. We cite contributor data by attribution.

WHY RATES DIVERGE FROM YOUR LIVED EXPERIENCE

Rates are averages over tens of thousands of packs. A single booster box — 36 packs — is too small a sample to validate or disprove a reported rate. The variance is massive at the chase tier. A 0.5% pull rate means on average one hit per 200 packs, but the distribution is Poisson — roughly 40% of collectors will rip 200 packs with zero hits, and roughly 4% will rip 200 packs with three or more hits. The simulator shows you the distribution. Your friend's third consecutive Charizard is statistically possible and doesn't mean the real rate is higher than 0.5%.

The most common misconception about pull rates is that each card in a pack is drawn independently from a weighted random bag. That is not how production actually works. TCG manufacturers print cards on large uncut sheets, and those sheets are the primary mechanism that determines what you pull. Understanding the physical production pipeline makes the statistical distributions stop feeling arbitrary.

PRINT SHEET LAYOUTS

An industry-standard print sheet holds 121 cards in an 11x11 grid, though variants at 10x10 (100 cards) and 9x11 (99 cards) also appear depending on the press. Each rarity tier is typically printed on its own dedicated sheet. A Pokemon set might use one sheet for commons (with each common appearing roughly 11 times on the sheet to fill the grid), another for uncommons (each appearing 4–5 times), another for rares (each appearing 1–3 times), and separate short-print sheets for Ultra Rares, Illustration Rares, and Special Art Rares. The cards on the Special Art Rare sheet are not evenly distributed: a chase Charizard might occupy only one of the 121 positions on the sheet while a less-desirable SAR occupies four, which is why two cards at the same printed rarity can have pull rates that differ by 4x.

RARE SLOT REPLACEMENT

A Pokemon pack contains one guaranteed rare slot. That slot draws from a master distribution that goes roughly: 65% regular Holo Rare, 20% Ultra Rare, 9% Illustration Rare, 4% Special Art Rare, 1.5% Hyper Rare, 0.5% Gold or Rainbow. The rare slot is not an extra card added when you get lucky — it is the same physical position in the pack, replaced with a card drawn from a different sheet based on a weighted probability. Modern Pokemon also includes a separate reverse holo slot, which draws independently and almost never contains an Ultra Rare tier card.

COLLATION

Collation is the process that sequences cards from print sheets into packs and packs into boxes. Manufacturers deliberately shuffle to prevent two identical cards from appearing in the same booster box, which is why sealed case breaks yield near-full common sets without duplicates from a single box. Good collation is expensive. When Pokemon produced the Sword & Shield era, reports of duplicate Ultra Rares in single boxes were roughly 3–4% of all boxes opened. In modern Scarlet & Violet production, that duplicate rate has dropped closer to 1.5%, suggesting a collation process upgrade. Konami's collation in older Yu-Gi-Oh product was notoriously bad, with 10x10 box displays sometimes producing identical Secret Rare pulls across adjacent packs — a byproduct of running single-sheet presses without a sufficient randomization stage.

INTRA-RARITY VARIANCE

Two cards at the same nominal rarity almost never share identical pull rates. The reasons are partly physical (sheet position counts) and partly intentional (chase management). If a set advertises 10 Special Art Rares at 0.5% each, the actual distribution in a 50,000 pack sample might show the chase card at 0.18% while the least-desirable SAR is 0.72%. This is why aggregated pull rate data from a single set often shows a 3:1 to 5:1 spread between the rarest and most common card at the same rarity tier. Wizards of the Coast historically used bonus sheets specifically to compress this spread, guaranteeing the chase cards had deterministic minimum appearance rates.

SHORT PRINTS VS REGULAR PRINTS

Short prints (SPs) are cards printed at a lower ratio than their assigned rarity suggests. They originated in Yu-Gi-Oh and have since appeared in Pokemon and MTG promotional sets. A Yu-Gi-Oh Super Rare that is also a short print might pull at 1/3rd the rate of other Super Rares in the same set. Short prints are occasionally announced by the publisher but are often discovered only after community aggregates show the discrepancy. The inverse — an over-print — occurs when a publisher prints extra runs of a specific card to meet tournament demand, reducing its pull rate relative to sheet-mates but expanding total supply.

Every TCG uses its own rarity vocabulary, but the tiers roughly align across games. The table below maps equivalent rarities at each tier of scarcity. Use it as a translation guide when comparing pack EV across systems.

Tier mapping is approximate. A Pokemon Special Art Rare typically has a 0.3–0.7% pull rate, comparable to a Yu-Gi-Oh Quarter Century Secret Rare at 0.5–1.2%. A Lorcana Enchanted card at 0.4% sits in the same tier. MTG is the outlier: because Wizards of the Coast publishes explicit ratios (1 mythic per 1 in 7.4 Play Boosters, for example), MTG rarities operate on a declared rather than discovered probability surface.

Pull rates are not static. Every major TCG has restructured its rarity distribution within the last five years, driven by a mix of secondary market pressure, collector engagement metrics, and the arrival of parallel printing technology. The consequences are real: a 2018 Pokemon pack and a 2025 Pokemon pack have almost nothing in common statistically.

POKEMON 2016 — 2020

During the Sun & Moon and early Sword & Shield eras, Pokemon pack distribution was simpler. A typical English pack had a Holo Rare pull rate of approximately 1 in 3 packs (33%), Ultra Rare (GX or V) at roughly 1 in 18 packs (5.5%), Secret Rare (Rainbow or Gold) at 1 in 80 packs (1.25%), and Hyper Rare or full-art textured cards at 1 in 120 packs (0.83%). The total hit rate in any given pack (meaning something beyond a standard Holo) was approximately 7–8%.

POKEMON 2021 — 2025

The Brilliant Stars set in early 2022 introduced Trainer Gallery, and the subsequent Scarlet & Violet era (2023+) introduced the Illustration Rare and Special Illustration Rare (SIR / SAR) rarity tiers. Modern packs show Holo Rare at approximately 1 in 4 packs (25%), Ultra Rare at 1 in 12 packs (8.3%), Illustration Rare at 1 in 24 packs (4.2%), Special Art Rare at 1 in 150 packs (0.66%), and Hyper Rare at 1 in 200 packs (0.5%). Aggregate hit density has roughly doubled against the 2019 baseline, even as MSRP for English Pokemon packs climbed from $3.99 to $4.49 to the current $4.99 street pricing.

MTG PRE-2021

Under the old Draft Booster structure, MTG held a consistent distribution for over two decades: 1 Rare or Mythic per pack, with Mythic Rares appearing at 1 in 8 packs (12.5%) and any given Mythic at roughly 1 in 121 packs. Foils were a slot replacement at 1 in 67 cards, roughly 1 in 4.5 packs (22%). Set Boosters launched in 2020 rebalanced this with a different showcase-slot structure and introduced the Box Topper mechanic.

MTG POST-2022 (PLAY BOOSTERS)

Play Boosters, introduced with Murders at Karlov Manor (2024), replaced Draft Boosters as the default product. The new structure contains 14 cards with a wildcard slot that can contain any rarity and a dedicated non-foil wildcard. The net effect is that a Play Booster has a Mythic rate closer to 1 in 7.4 packs (13.5%), a Rare+ slot rate of essentially 100% (the wildcard virtually never shows a common), and a total foil hit rate of 1 in 3 packs (33%). Bonus Sheet cards (the List) appear in 25% of packs.

YU-GI-OH PACK RESTRUCTURING

Konami shifted from the legacy 9-card booster to the current 7-card booster structure around 2022, starting with the Battles of Legend products and fully standardized by Phantom Nightmare (2024). The new 7-card pack has a guaranteed 2 foils per pack (up from 1) and a significantly higher hit density: a Super Rare or above appears in approximately 35% of packs, a Secret Rare in 8% of packs, and a Quarter Century Secret Rare (the modern chase tier) in 1.5% of packs. The restructure coincided with MSRP rising from $4.29 to $4.99 and specialty products (Rarity Collection) pushing to $6.99 per 7-card pack.

Pull rate changes are not cosmetic. They are economic levers that publishers pull to manage the secondary market and sustain pack demand over a set's 6–12 month active window. Understanding the incentives behind rate shifts explains why publishers keep adding new chase tiers rather than holding a static structure.

SECONDARY MARKET SCARCITY DRIVES PACK DEMAND

When a chase card on the secondary market sells for 50x the MSRP of a pack, sealed pack demand spikes. Publishers understand this relationship exactly. The 2022 Lost Origin set in Pokemon saw the Giratina V Alt Art climb past $400 on TCGplayer within 90 days of release, which sustained booster box sell-through at retail for 18 months past set rotation — far longer than typical. Publishers who engineer sets without chase cards see sealed product sit on shelves and face margin compression as distributors discount.

CHASE-DRIVEN MARKETING

A single ultra-rare card makes a set. Obsidian Flames (2023) is essentially remembered as "the Charizard ex set," Evolving Skies (2021) is "the Umbreon VMAX Alt Art set," and 151 (2023) is "the Charizard ex UPC set." Publishers allocate roughly 70% of set marketing budgets to chase-card promotion, even though the chase represents under 1% of total card production. The pull rate on the chase is deliberately tuned to the upper boundary of scarcity that still produces visible community pulls at launch — enough to generate social proof without flooding supply.

PACK EV VS MSRP MANAGEMENT

Publishers monitor pack EV (expected value) closely. A pack with EV significantly above MSRP attracts professional resellers who buy at retail and sell singles, starving local game stores of product. A pack with EV significantly below MSRP produces complaints and reduces player engagement. The sweet spot is roughly 40–70% of MSRP as pack EV, with the chase providing high-variance EV upside. When EV drifts too high (as in the 2020–2021 Evolving Skies environment where ripped packs were averaging $8 EV against $4 MSRP), the publisher reprints aggressively to compress the secondary market — which is exactly what Pokemon did with Evolving Skies in the 2021 reprint cycle.

SUPPLY CHAIN PIVOT AFTER COVID

The 2020–2021 demand shock exposed a weakness: print runs were calibrated to pre-pandemic demand and could not flex upward within a release window. Every publisher invested in parallel print capacity. By 2023, Pokemon was running simultaneous print lines on three continents, and set reprints became near-instant (within 60–90 days of detected scarcity). This shift allowed publishers to tune chase card scarcity more precisely: first-print chases are printed at low ratios to protect launch-window hype, while second-run chases are printed at higher ratios to compress singles pricing and sustain late-cycle pack demand.

Almost every pull rate number you see on the open web is wrong in some direction. The methodology behind a reported rate matters more than the rate itself. Before trusting a number, apply the following filters.

• Confirmation bias in reported pulls. Hits are reported 3–5x more often than misses. A collector who pulls a Charizard posts a photo. A collector who rips a box and hits nothing rare posts nothing. Aggregators that sample Reddit posts without a structured case-break protocol will overestimate hit rates by 15–30%.
• Small sample case breaks. A 1–3 box opening produces a 36–108 pack sample. At a 0.5% chase rate, the expected number of hits is 0.18 to 0.54 — meaning most such breaks yield zero or one hit, which tells you effectively nothing about the underlying distribution. Only case breaks of 50,000+ packs begin to produce stable estimates for chase-tier cards.
• Self-selection among streamers. High-profile pack openers who stream case breaks are financially incentivized to open visually impressive pulls. Some purchase case-searched product or filter breaks for cameras. Rates aggregated from streamer content tend to overstate chase pulls by 20–40% relative to blind retail case openings.
• Publisher-stated vs measured rates. Where publishers do provide rates (MTG, Lorcana), community-measured rates often diverge by 10–20%. The publisher number is typically a ceiling — real distributions are weighted toward less-desirable cards within a rarity tier, and the publisher rate averages across all cards at that rarity.
• Regional print variance. Japanese, English, and European prints of the same Pokemon set can have different rare slot distributions. Yu-Gi-Oh OCG and TCG prints diverge even more. Aggregators that conflate regional data produce blended rates that do not match any single regional product.

The most reliable methodology is a pre-registered case break protocol: a fixed number of sealed cases opened under camera, with every pack's contents logged regardless of content. A half-dozen groups on YouTube operate at this standard. Their aggregated data is the closest thing to ground truth available for modern TCGs.

Pull rate is only half the value equation. The other half is card price. Pack EV (expected value) is calculated as the sum of (pull rate) multiplied by (card price) across every card in the possible pull pool. For a set with 200 cards, that means 200 terms in the sum, weighted by the probability of each card and priced at the current TCGplayer market rate.

THE EV FORMULA

Pack EV = Σ (P_card × $_card) for all cards in the pull pool.In practice, the EV is dominated by the top 1–3% of cards in the set. A pack might have 200 possible outcomes, but the top chase card alone typically accounts for 30% of total pack EV, and the top five cards combined often account for 70–80% of EV. This is why the chase card scarcity matters so much — it single-handedly determines whether a pack is profitable to rip at MSRP.

THE 1% CHASE AT $500 EXAMPLE

Consider a chase card at a 1% pull rate selling for $500. That card alone adds $5 of EV per pack. But the variance is enormous: 99% of packs contribute nothing from this card, and 1% of packs contribute $500. The standard deviation of outcomes for this single card across 100 packs is approximately $50 — ten times larger than the expected value of $5 per pack. In practice, this means you need to rip around 300+ packs before your measured EV from this card approaches the true EV. A single box of 36 packs will, 70% of the time, return zero value from this card — which feels like losing.

MODERN POKEMON PACK ECONOMICS

Contemporary English Pokemon packs with a strong chase run pack EV in the $8 to $12 range against a $4.50 MSRP. That sounds like a dominant buy — until you account for variance. Only a small fraction of packs hit the EV-driving chase, so most collectors rip at a loss and a few rip at a massive gain. A box of 36 packs at $9 EV per pack has a theoretical expected value of $324, but the 10th percentile outcome is often under $100 (a total bust) and the 90th percentile is over $600 (a chase pull). The long-tail distribution means the median box outcome is typically less than the mean.

THE LONG-TAIL DISTRIBUTION

TCG pack value is distributed as a power law, not a normal curve. A few packs pay for everything. If you rip 100 packs, your most valuable pack typically accounts for 40–60% of the total value returned. Your second most valuable pack accounts for another 15–25%. The remaining 98 packs, in aggregate, account for roughly 30–40% of the total. This is why seasoned collectors do not evaluate a break by the average pack — they evaluate it by whether the top pack hit. A break with no top hit is a loss no matter how many decent uncommons showed up.

Because TCG packs are high-variance financial instruments, a gray market has grown around exploiting pack distribution. Some of these tactics are scams; others are legal but ethically contested. Recognize them.

WEIGHTED PACK SCAMS

Foil and holofoil cards weigh approximately 0.1 grams more than their non-foil equivalents. A pack containing an Ultra Rare or Secret Rare is measurably heavier than a pack without one. Sellers with precision scales (accurate to 0.01g) can identify heavy packs from a sealed booster box and sell those separately as loose packs at a premium, leaving the light packs in the box for a bulk buyer. The bulk buyer receives a box with its chase cards already extracted. Weighing is the reason most pack openers refuse to buy loose packs from non-trusted sources.

REPACKAGED AND RESEALED PRODUCT

Sophisticated resellers open booster boxes, extract hits, refill the packs with commons from bulk, and reseal them using a heat press. A well-resealed pack is visually indistinguishable from a sealed pack without microscopic inspection of the crimp line. Resealed product is most common on eBay for vintage sealed packs (1998–2003 Pokemon, early WoTC MTG), where the premium on vintage sealed is high enough to justify the reseal effort. Modern resealing targets loose-pack markets more aggressively.

LOOSE PACK VARIANCE GAMBLING SITES

A category of websites has emerged that sell "mystery pack" or "loose pack" spins against curated inventory. Some are legitimate; many are unregulated gambling with rigged odds. Common red flags: the operator does not publish a provably fair random function, the inventory is not independently audited, the operator can retroactively pull items from the pool, and withdrawal of winnings is restricted to future spins rather than cash or cards. Treat every such site with extreme skepticism.

CASE SEARCHING AND WEIGHING

Case searching refers to examining an unsealed case at a distributor or retailer to identify boxes likely to contain chase cards, typically by weight or by shake sound. Weighing individual boxes to find heavier cases (which indicate more foils, which correlates with more hits) is technically legal in most jurisdictions but violates most retailer anti-tampering policies. Case-searched product sold into the loose pack market at a premium is the primary upstream source of light boxes in bulk. Some argue the practice is harmless skill-based buying; most serious collectors consider it scam-adjacent, and reputable LGS operators actively prevent it.

The practical defense against all of these tactics is simple: buy sealed booster boxes or cases from reputable retailers, never loose packs from unknown sellers, and never mystery boxes from unregulated resellers. The ~15% premium you pay for provenance is cheap compared to the variance-adjusted loss of buying searched or resealed product. When you rip, rip the whole box on camera, and keep the receipt.