How Pokémon TCG pull rates changed, 2023 to 2026

The short version

Chase-card odds have gotten steadily worse since 2023. In early Scarlet & Violet sets like 151 and Obsidian Flames, a Special Illustration Rare showed up about once every 30 packs, more than one per 36 packs. By the Mega era the same tier runs at roughly 1 in 80 to 1 in 100 packs in the 10-card sets, under half an SIR per box, and the new Mega Hyper Rare tier sits around 1 in 1,000 packs or worse in most sets. The one clear exception is the Mega Hyper Rare in Ascended Heroes, at about 1 in 540 packs. The table below is the live version of every rate Pullnomics uses; the rest of this guide explains where the numbers come from and how to use them.

How pull rates are measured

We found no official pull rates for English or Japanese sets. Every number here comes from someone opening a large number of packs and counting. (Simplified Chinese products are the exception: as of September 29, 2026 The Pokémon Company's Chinese site printed each rarity group's share of the cards produced, collected on our Chinese pull-rate pages.) The biggest datasets are TCGplayer's authentication-center counts, which run from about 1,000 to more than 8,000 packs per set, plus community counts of collector-submitted openings. Pullnomics uses the midpoint of each set's published range, collected in September 2026.

Two things follow. A rate like "1 in 85" is an estimate with error bars, not a fact about the printer, and the rarer the tier, the wider the error bars. A 4,000-pack sample at a 1-in-1,315 Mega Hyper rate contains about three Mega Hypers in expectation; had the counters found two, the rate would read 1 in 2,000, and four would read 1 in 1,000. One or two cards swing the estimate by a factor of two.

Why sources disagree

Different trackers count different packs from different product types and print runs. For Pitch Black, TCGplayer's 4,000-plus pack count puts the SIR at about 1 in 102, while other trackers report closer to 1 in 80. For Ascended Heroes the site uses 1 in 88.5 for the SIR; PokeBeach counted 1 in 70. Neither is wrong; they are different samples of a noisy process. A 20 or 30 percent gap on an SIR rate is normal, as is a factor-of-two gap on a Mega Hyper rate.

What the rarity tiers are

The modern tiers are:

• Double Rare (DR): the standard ex cards. Roughly 1 in 4.5 to 1 in 8 packs in the sets that report it.
• Ultra Rare (UR): full-art ex and full-art Supporter cards. Roughly 1 in 11 to 1 in 19.5 packs, and 1 in 30 in Shrouded Fable.
• Illustration Rare (IR): full-art alternate illustrations of regular, non-ex Pokémon. Roughly 1 in 8.5 to 1 in 13 packs, and 1 in 5.5 in 30th Celebration, whose six-card pack is built differently.
• Special Illustration Rare (SIR): the alternate-art ex and Supporter cards that hold most of a modern set's value. About 1 in 30 to 1 in 102 packs across the sets tracked here, and 1 in 19.5 in 30th Celebration's six-card pack.
• Hyper Rare: the gold cards of the Scarlet & Violet era. About 1 in 49.5 to 1 in 189 packs: about 1 in 50 in the 2023 sets up to 151, and 1 in 118 to 1 in 189 from Temporal Forces (March 2024) on.
• Mega Hyper Rare (MHR): the Mega era's top tier, replacing the gold slot. About 1 in 540 to 1 in 1,400 packs.
• Mega Attack Rare (MAR): a Mega-era tier in Phantasmal Flames, Ascended Heroes and Perfect Order, roughly 1 in 35 to 1 in 40 packs.
• ACE SPEC: the one-per-deck Trainer and Energy cards, about 1 in 25 packs in Prismatic Evolutions.
• Master Ball reverse holo: a Prismatic Evolutions pattern at roughly 1 in 19.5 packs, separate from the slots above.

Turning "1 in N" into something you can use

A rate of 1 in N packs is easiest to read as an expected count per product. A booster box holds 36 packs, an Elite Trainer Box 9 and a booster bundle 6, so:

• Expected hits per box = 36 ÷ N. At 1 in 85 that is about 0.42 SIRs per box.
• Expected hits per ETB = 9 ÷ N. At 1 in 85 that is about 0.11, or roughly one SIR per nine ETBs.

Expected count is not the chance of at least one, because pulls cluster. The probability of at least one hit is 1 − (1 − 1/N) raised to the number of packs. Worked examples from the table:

• SIR at 1 in 32 (151), 36 packs: 1 − (31/32)^36, about 68 percent, or two boxes in three.
• SIR at 1 in 85 (Surging Sparks), 36 packs: about 35 percent, or one box in three.
• SIR at 1 in 49 (Prismatic Evolutions), 9-pack ETB: about 17 percent.
• Mega Hyper at 1 in 1,260 (Mega Evolution, Phantasmal Flames), 36 packs: about 2.8 percent, or about 35 boxes per Mega Hyper.
• Mega Hyper at 1 in 540 (Ascended Heroes), 36 packs: about 6.5 percent, or about 15 lots of 36 packs per Mega Hyper; the set has no booster box.

Two cautions. These rates are per tier, not per card: a set with 11 SIRs at 1 in 85 puts any specific SIR near 1 in 935 packs if the SIRs are printed evenly, which the datasets do not verify. A small tier shortens the odds: Phantasmal Flames has five SIRs at 1 in 80, which on the same even split puts its Mega Charizard X ex SIR near 1 in 400 packs, about a 9 percent chance per box. And these are averages over thousands of packs; one box will routinely land above or below.

Pull rates for every tracked set

This table uses the same data as the Sealed EV board and updates whenever the rates are revised. It also lists the Sword & Shield sets with published counts, back to 2020, and each set name opens that set's own pull-rate page. The pull-rate board is the same table on a page of its own.

The trend from 2023 to 2026

Read the SIR column top to bottom. Obsidian Flames at about 1 in 29.5 and 151 at 1 in 32 sit at one end. Paldean Fates moved to 1 in 62.5, Temporal Forces to 1 in 74.5, and by Twilight Masquerade (1 in 86) and Stellar Crown (1 in 90) the tier had roughly tripled in scarcity. Late Scarlet & Violet held there: Surging Sparks at 1 in 85, Journey Together at 1 in 93, Destined Rivals at 1 in 94. Prismatic Evolutions at 1 in 49 and Shrouded Fable at 1 in 57, both special sets, are the exceptions.

The Mega era did not reverse that. Mega Evolution opened at 1 in 101, Phantasmal Flames at 1 in 80, Perfect Order at 1 in 80, Chaos Rising at 1 in 82 and Pitch Black at 1 in 102. What changed is the top of the pyramid. From Temporal Forces (March 2024) to Destined Rivals (May 2025) the gold Hyper Rare ran 1 in 118 to 1 in 189 packs; the Mega Hyper Rare that replaced it runs 1 in 975 to 1 in 1,400 in most Mega sets. A tier that used to appear once or twice in every six booster boxes now appears in roughly one box in 30 to 40.

The lower tiers moved the other way. Illustration Rares improved from about 1 in 11 to 13 in late Scarlet & Violet to about 1 in 8.5 to 10 in the Mega era (1 in 5.5 in 30th Celebration's six-card pack), and Ultra Rares from about 1 in 15 to about 1 in 11 to 1 in 12.5 in five of the six Mega sets with a published rate (Chaos Rising is 1 in 16.5). A modern box gives you more mid-tier full arts than a 2024 box did, while the cards that hold most of the value got harder to hit. As of October 8, 2026, the site's sealed EV puts about 16 percent of a Temporal Forces box's hit value in its Special Illustration Rares and Hyper Rares, against about 44 to 67 percent in the Special Illustration Rares and Mega Hyper Rares of the Mega Evolution series booster boxes.

Why Ascended Heroes stands out

Ascended Heroes has Mega Attack Rares at 1 in 35 against 1 in 40 in Phantasmal Flames and Perfect Order, Illustration Rares about 1 in 8.5 and Ultra Rares 1 in 11, the same Ultra Rare rate as Perfect Order. Its SIRs, at 1 in 88.5 (PokeBeach counted 1 in 70), are rarer than in Phantasmal Flames and Perfect Order (1 in 80) or Chaos Rising (1 in 82.5), and its Mega Hyper Rare comes about 1 in 540 packs. That is roughly twice as common as Chaos Rising (1 in 975) and well over twice as common as Mega Evolution and Phantasmal Flames (1 in 1,260), Pitch Black (1 in 1,315) or Perfect Order (1 in 1,400). Per 36 packs, that is about a 6.5 percent chance of a Mega Hyper against roughly 2.5 to 3.6 percent elsewhere.

Better odds are not better value. The Pullnomics catalog lists Ascended Heroes in booster bundles and Elite Trainer Boxes rather than booster boxes, priced accordingly; the set page shows current EV ratios. For the Mega Hyper Rare, Ascended Heroes has the shortest odds per pack of any Mega-era set by a clear margin; for Special Illustration Rares it does not.

Bottom line

Pull rates are estimates from large pack-opening counts, and the rarer the tier, the rougher the estimate. Convert any rate to an expected count per box (36 ÷ N) and a chance of at least one (1 − (1 − 1/N)^packs) before you buy, and remember the rate is for the tier, not for the card you want. Since 2023, SIRs went from more than one per box to well under half, and the Mega Hyper tier is a roughly one-in-35-boxes event outside Ascended Heroes. The per-set guides, starting with Prismatic Evolutions and Surging Sparks, pair these odds with live prices, and the methodology page documents how every number is built.