3 sets · updated regularly
Stop guessing what a pack is worth. Pick a set, pick a rarity or a specific chase card, and see the odds per pack, per box, and the amount of money required to reach a given chance.
Mega Hyper Rare (gold) · 1 cards in this rarity · each one equally likely
Per pack
0.1%
In one box (36)
3.8%
Per ETB (9)
1.0%
Average packs
1 in 925
Open how many packs?
36 packs
≈ 1.0 booster boxes
Chance of at least one
3.8%
Two or more: <0.1%
| Confidence | Packs | Booster Boxs | Spend |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50% | 641 | 18 | $2,898 |
| 75% | 1,282 | 36 | $5,796 |
| 90% | 2,129 | 60 | $9,659 |
| Boxes | Packs | At least one | Spend |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 36 | 3.8% | $161 |
| 2 | 72 | 7.5% | $322 |
| 3 | 108 | 11% | $483 |
| 5 | 180 | 18% | $805 |
Buy or rip? This card trades at $475. Spending the same money on booster boxs buys about 106 packs, which gives you a 11% chance of pulling it — and a 89% chance of ending up with nothing but bulk.
The maths
A pull rate has two versions and they are constantly confused. The tier rate tells you how often any card of a rarity appears — one Special Illustration Rare every 80 packs, for example. The card rate divides that across the number of cards in the tier, so with six SIRs in a set any single one is closer to 1 in 480.
Chasing a specific artwork is always the card rate. That is why two players can both quote "1 in 80" from the same set and disagree about how rare their card is. When a table does not say which one it means, check whether the number divides evenly into the set's card count — that usually reveals it.
Everything else follows from one formula: 1 − (1 − 1/N)^n, the chance of at least one hit in n packs. To go backwards — how many packs for a given confidence — solve for n instead.
Cost
Products do not change your odds per pack — they change how much each pack costs. A booster box almost always beats buying loose packs, because the retail price per pack inside a 36-pack display is the lowest sealed rate available. Bundles and Elite Trainer Boxes sit in between and are usually priced for the extras, not the packs.
This is why "is it worth buying a box" and "how many packs do I need" are really one question. Work out how many packs your target confidence needs, then divide by the packs in each product and compare the totals rather than the headline price.
Use the product buttons in the calculator to switch every cost figure at once. The confidence table then reports how many of that product you would need, rounded up, and the total spend — which is the number that matters when you are deciding between one box and three bundles.
Prices are retail figures and move quickly after release; secondary-market boxes often trade above them.
Caveats
Any table without a sample size is decoration. Modern sets have tiers that a small opening cannot resolve, so numbers for the rarest cards swing by a factor of two between sources that are both honest. A calculator that quotes exactly "1 in 925" without a range is pretending to a precision nobody has.
This calculator takes the largest counted samples available, shows a range when published estimates disagree, and treats the cards inside a tier as equally likely. That last assumption is the main simplification: in reality some illustrations are printed at different rates within a tier, but nobody has data at that granularity.
Read the outputs as relative difficulty, and as a way to price a decision — not as a promise about the next pack you open.
Each set notes how many packs were counted. If a set you want is missing, the current pull rates are not documented well enough to publish. Planning a team around a card instead? Try the Pokemon Team Planner or a Pokemon roulette run.
FAQ
A pull rate is the chance a given pack contains a card of a certain rarity. It is written either as a probability (1.25%) or as a frequency (1 in 80 packs). Pull rates describe long-run averages, so a 1 in 80 card can appear twice in ten packs or not at all in three hundred.
No. Pokemon booster packs state only that cards are randomly inserted, and no official odds are printed on packs or published online. Every pull rate table you see, including this calculator, is a community estimate built by counting packs that have been opened.
It depends on the card. At 1 in 500 packs you need about 347 packs for a 50% chance and 1,151 packs for a 90% chance; at 1 in 80 it is 56 packs and 184 packs. Because packs are independent, opening the average number of packs still leaves you with roughly a 63% chance, not certainty.
There is no guaranteed slot. Boxes are not seeded to contain one card of every rarity, so a box can miss any given tier entirely. On typical modern rates a booster box is very likely to contain at least one Ultra Rare, while a Special Illustration Rare appears in a minority of boxes.
For one specific card, almost always yes. The calculator shows the expected spend to reach a confidence level; when that number passes the card's market price, buying the single is the cheaper route. Opening packs only makes financial sense if you want a spread of cards, or if you value the opening itself.
Sample size. A few hundred packs is enough to estimate common tiers but nowhere near enough for a 1 in 900 card, which a 1,000-pack sample can miss entirely. Rates also drift between print runs and regions. Treat a figure as reliable only when the site states how many packs it counted.
