The Big Hit Went From One Per Box to One Every Third Box

The Pokemon Company publishes no pull rates, but TCGplayer's Authentication Center has ripped thousands of packs of nearly every modern set and published what came out. Line their per-set studies up chronologically and the quiet policy change is unmissable: the top-tier hit got roughly three times rarer between mid-2023 and late 2024, and it has stayed rare since. Not one set announcement mentioned it.

The 2023 buyer opened a booster box expecting slightly more than one Special Illustration Rare. The 2025 buyer expects one every second or third box. TCGplayer's own Temporal Forces study published the turning point as a comparison table: Paldea Evolved SIRs measured 3.17 percent per pack, Paradox Rift 2.11, Temporal Forces 1.17. Their Surging Sparks study then confirmed the new floor had held for a full year of releases, with per-rarity odds effectively constant from set to set.

Over the same stretch, the lower tiers loosened. Double rares went from 1 in 7 packs in early 2023 to 1 in 5 by 2025; Illustration rares from 1 in 13 to 1 in 9 in the Mega era; Ultra rares from 1 in 15 to 1 in 12 in three of the four studied Mega-era sets (Ascended Heroes is the outlier at 1 in 21). The pack's TOTAL hit frequency looks healthier than ever while its expected value concentrates ever harder into cards you will mostly never pull. That is not an accident of print sheets; it is product design, and the biggest exception proves it: Prismatic Evolutions shipped SIRs at a measured 1 in 45, twice the surrounding rate, for a premium-priced special set built around exactly that promise.

Every rate is a published measurement from TCGplayer Infinite's per-set pull-rate studies (typically 8,000+ packs; 700 to 5,000+ for special or recent sets), extracted verbatim; the 1-in-N figures are the studies' own rounded rates, and per-box expectations are 36 divided by N, rounded to two decimals. Release months are the sets' English release dates. The table carries the standard expansions, plus 151, whose 1 in 32 is the rate its 2023 neighbours measured. Four further sets carry a published SIR rate and are held out of it because they are special or subset releases printed and priced on their own terms: Paldean Fates (1 in 58, January 2024), Prismatic Evolutions (1 in 45, January 2025), and Black Bolt and White Flare (1 in 80 each, on a combined sample, July 2025). Each of the four is looser than the standard set beside it, which is the point the body makes about Prismatic Evolutions and holds in smaller degree for the other three. Shrouded Fable is omitted because TCGplayer published no study for it; its community-measured rate (1 in 64, sample 2,354 packs) is shown on its set page with its own attribution. Sources for every set are linked on the set pages under Pull rates.