Pokémon's 30th Anniversary Expansion Is a Reseller's Nightmare

The Pokémon Trading Card Game has spent the past several years becoming increasingly hostile to the people who actually want to collect it. Products disappear immediately, individual cards reach absurd prices, and opening an entire booster box no longer guarantees that a collector will pull one of the set's most desirable cards. Pokémon TCG: 30th Celebration is finally pushing back against that miserable cycle. The anniversary expansion has no shortage of cards designed to attract resellers, including new Future Rare cards featuring Mew and Mewtwo and three secret Mew variants. However, Pokémon appears to have made most of the set's desirable cards significantly easier to pull than their equivalents in recent expansions. The improved odds are already driving aftermarket prices down and making it much harder for scalpers to dictate what collectors must pay. According to early pull-rate data reported by Kotaku, Special Illustration Rares appeared in approximately 5.24% of packs from an initial 420-pack sample. That works out to slightly better than one SIR in every 20 packs, compared to the roughly one-in-80 odds collectors have endured across recent Scarlet & Violet and Mega Evolution expansions. The sample also found Illustration Rares in approximately one out of every five packs, doubling their usual frequency.

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