Poké Ball

Poké Ball is a Crown Rare card from the Shining Revelry set — a Trainer card of the Item kind: no HP, no evolution, no attacks of its own. It hits the table, fires its effect, and steps aside.

What it does: Put a random Basic Pokémon from your deck into your hand.

Trainer cards are balanced by how often you may play them in a turn, not by damage. Read the effect against what your deck is short of — energy acceleration, draw, healing, or forcing a switch — because a Trainer is only strong when it solves the exact bottleneck your deck actually has.

Rare cards are not spread evenly across a set. Each one is locked to specific packs, and opening the wrong pack from the right set means this card never shows up no matter how many you buy. Poké Ball drops from Shining.

Odds are set per slot, not per card — and the slot layout differs from one pack type to another, so never carry one pack's formula over to another. The Shining pack gives 5 cards per opening — slot 1 is always Common · slot 2 is always Common · slot 3 is always Common · slot 4: 89.00% is Uncommon · slot 5: 56.00% is Uncommon. For Poké Ball that works out to 0.04% in slot 4 · 0.16% in slot 5, which is 0.21% for any single pack, or about 486 packs before you can expect to see one.

Pulling is only the first path, and it is the one that can betray you: 0.21% per pack means the expected 486 packs is an average, not a promise.

The second path removes luck entirely. Every pack you open awards 5 Pack Points (an official in-game mechanic, not part of the drop-rate table) regardless of what comes out of it, and those points accumulate until you can redeem this exact card outright. Poké Ball costs 2,500 PP — no pulls, no gambling, just the count.

The third path is trading, which spends Shinedust rather than Pack Points, and whether it is open to you depends entirely on the card's rarity. For Poké Ball: This rarity can never be traded — Pack Points or a direct pull are the only ways.

Poké Ball does not evolve from or into anything — it stands alone.

Some Pokémon are also printed more than once — across different sets or promo drops, with different art, different rarity, and sometimes different attacks under the same name. Where other printings of this card exist, they are linked on this page, because the stats can differ even when the name matches.

Poké Ball is not a core card in any of the 50 meta decks currently tracked. Chase it for the art and the collection, not for the ladder — spend Pack Points on core cards first, then come back for this one.

The meta deck table is recomputed from tournament data (play rate plus win/loss/tie record), not from anyone's opinion. A card missing from that table can still be beautiful and still be expensive to trade for, but it will not win games on its own — those are two different questions and this page answers them separately.

Which pack should I open to get Poké Ball?

Poké Ball drops from Shining. Opening a different pack from the same set will not produce it, because pack variants inside one set carry completely different rare-card pools.

Roughly how many packs does it take to pull Poké Ball?

About 486 packs on average. That comes from the per-slot pull table rather than a single blended number: 0.04% in slot 4 · 0.16% in slot 5, which is 0.21% for any one pack. It is an expected value — a statistical estimate, not a guarantee: half of all players will need more.

Can I trade for Poké Ball instead of pulling it?

This rarity can never be traded — Pack Points or a direct pull are the only ways. Trading uses Shinedust, and whether a card is tradeable at all is fixed by its rarity tier — Immersive Rare and Crown Rare cards can never be traded under any circumstance, so for those two tiers Pack Points or a direct pull are the only ways in.