Booster Pack Guide: Rules and Probabilities

This guide covers the rules around booster packs in Pokémon TCG Pocket, detailing how they're structured and the probabilities of opening specific cards. We use information from the "Offering Rates" table, accessible from the booster pack tab within the app.

Basics

• To open booster packs, you need Pack stamina. Your Pack stamina is displayed in the top-right of the Packs screen in the form of a progress bar with a timer.
• You recover 1 Pack stamina in 12 hours

• If you do not have enough Pack stamina, you can reduce the time it takes to recover it with Poké Gold or Pack Hourglasses. They respectively reduce the time to open a pack to 2 hours each and 1 hour each. Note that you can only use them if they enable you to open a pack straight away. For instance, if you have 10 hours left until the next pack opening, you cannot use all your 4 Pack hourglasses to reduce this time to 6 hours.
• You can only store 2 packs at once maximum. It means that if you don't open packs for 24 hours, you'll miss out on the next.
• When you open a pack, aside from the cards, you also get player EXP and pack points.

Pack Selection

• When you choose to open a single pack, you pick a specific booster in an expansion (also called set).
• Unlike the physical TCG, each version of a booster pack for a set contains different cards from other versions, with the exception of a common pool of some cards, some cards and all cards. 
• You're presented with multiple packs circling around. This is purely an aesthetic interface and has no impact on probabilities as the pack have exactly the same content.
• By virtue of this, opening a pack backward or in any kind of fashion has no incidence on probabilities.
• If you have enough resources, you can open 10 packs in one go. This also has no effect on the following probabilities. Their content is of course unique.

Card Selection

A pack has a 1 in 2,000 chance (0.05%) to be a Rare pack containing only and cards.
The following applies to regular packs with 5 cards:

• A booster pack is broken down in terms of probabilities into the first three cards, the fourth card, and the fifth card. The first three cards in your pack are ALWAYS commons. The higher rarities are distributed among the 4th and 5th slots.
• Please note that the content of a pack can be shuffled: if you open a or even a card in the first position, it means that the fourth or fifth card was shuffled to the first spot.
• You can open duplicates of the same card in a booster pack.
• The language of the cards you open will be the app's selected language at the time the pack is opened. This language won't change for obtained cards even if you select another language afterward.

Card Rates in a booster pack by Rarity

A normalized regular pack has the following rarity distribution:

• : 3.0
• : 1.5
• : 0.25 (1 in 4 chance)
• : 0.0833 (1 in ~12 chance)
• : 0.1286 (1 in ~7.77 chance)
• : 0.025 (1 in 40 chance)
• : 0.0111 (1 in ~90 chance)
• : 0.002 (1 in 500 chance)

These are the average number of cards of each type per booster pack. By deduction, note that cards (Pokémon ex) are harder to open than full-art cards of regular Pokémon.

How Hard Is It to Get a Specific Card?

Common and Uncommon

• Each card has a 2% chance per card slot to be opened in a pack. Since there are three card slots in a pack, the total chance to open a specific card is 5.88%. For those cards that also have a counterpart in this pack, the chance increases to 7.389%.
• Each card has a 4.241% chance to be opened. When we account for their full-art counterparts, the total chance to open one of these becomes 5.472%.
• Supporter cards are a bit more complex, as they're the only cards that have a counterpart. In total, you have a 4.506% chance to open a specific Supporter card, with just a 0.277% chance to get specifically their full-art versions.

Rare cards

In Genetic Apex, every Pokémon ex with a print have a rarity print. The legendary birds, Gengar ex, Machamp ex, and Wigglytuff ex also have an extra rainbow-bordered print. The cover Pokémon for Genetic Apex (Charizard ex, Mewtwo ex, and Pikachu ex) have an immersive print as well as a crown rare print. This gives players more opportunities to open one of these, regardless of the rarity.

For specific cards, by adding all the rarities they're available in, here are the opening chances:

• Pokémon ex with just a ☆☆ counterpart (e.g., Arcanine ex): 1.933%
• Pokémon ex with two ☆☆ counterparts: 2.204%
• Pokémon ex with both immersive art and crown rare art, if you open a pack where it's the main character: 3.083%

By comparison, a card has a total 1.780% chance to be opened (3.354% if it has a counterpart).

This means that, regardless of the rarity, it's harder to open a specific card with no counterpart (such as Gardevoir) than any Pokémon ex. This is due to the small number of Pokémon ex per pack (5) compared with the rather large pool of 14 cards per pack.

Similarly, there are 8 different cards per booster and only 1 immersive , meaning that the chance to get a specific card is 0.003125 (1 in 320 chance) compared with the immersive at 0.0111 (1 in ~90 chance).

It's interesting to compare these probabilities to how much a card costs in Pack Points. Moving on, these rates could actually be used as the baseline for the forthcoming trading system of Pokémon TCG Pocket. Do not discard your  cards: they might become more precious than any of your cards.