Gyarados
Other versions of this card
Other cards of Gyarados
About Gyarados — Weaknesses
- Wild Swing deals 20 damage for 2 energy (10.0 damage/energy) — about 67% below the average for Stage 1 cards, needs extra support to pull its weight.
- Retreat cost is 3 energy — fairly high, easy to get stuck Active under pressure.
- Weak to Lightning (+20 damage) — avoid facing that type's decks.
Good pairings
Gyarados's attack scales with the number of Water Pokémon on your Bench. These Basic, 0-retreat Water cards are easy to keep benched to stack up damage:
Gyarados is a Shiny card from the Wisdom of Sea and Sky set. Check its attacks, retreat cost and which pack it drops from below.
Attacks
You may discard any number of your Benched [Water] Pokémon. This attack does 40 more damage for each Benched Pokémon you discarded in this way.
Pokédex entry
Once it appears, it goes on a rampage. It remains enraged until it demolishes everything around it.
Which pack does this card drop from?
Three ways to get this card
Odds recalculated from the official per-slot pull-rate table for pack Lugia: the chance of this rarity in each slot divided by the 10 cards of this rarity in that pack.
Want to know exactly how many packs you need to open to get Gyarados?
Is Gyarados played in any meta deck?
Gyarados is a core card in 1 of the 50 meta decks currently tracked (tier B), most notably Mega Sharpedo ex Gyarados. Worth chasing: it holds collection value and it changes games, so if you play to climb, this is the card to spend Pack Points on first.
Same type in this set
Card name by language
Reading Gyarados's stat block
Gyarados is a Shiny Stage 1 card from the Wisdom of Sea and Sky set with 130 HP. Every STAT on this page comes straight from the card record; the expected pack count further down is a statistical estimate recomputed from the pull table, not a promise.
Its weakness is Lightning, which is the fastest way for an opponent to remove it in a straight trade, and its retreat cost is 3 — that is what you pay in energy to swap it out mid-turn, and it is the number people forget until the card is stranded in the active spot.
Its attacks:
- Wild Swing — 20 damage · cost Water + Water — You may discard any number of your Benched [Water] Pokémon. This attack does 40 more damage for each Benched Pokémon you discarded in this way.
Read the energy costs together, not just the damage. A card with two attacks usually trades a cheap, weak opener for a pricier attack that does the real work, and the question that decides whether it belongs in a deck is whether you can actually pay for the big one on curve.
Which pack actually drops it
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. Gyarados drops from Lugia. 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 Lugia 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 Gyarados that works out to 0.07% in slot 4 · 0.29% in slot 5, which is 0.36% for any single pack, or about 276 packs before you can expect to see one.
Three ways to own it
Pulling is only the first path, and it is the one that can betray you: 0.36% per pack means the expected 276 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. Gyarados costs 1,000 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 Gyarados: It can be traded for 10,000 Shinedust.
Evolution line and other printings
Gyarados 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.
Where this card stands on the ladder
Gyarados is a core card in 1 of the 50 meta decks currently tracked (tier B), most notably Mega Sharpedo ex Gyarados. Worth chasing: it holds collection value and it changes games, so if you play to climb, this is the card to spend Pack Points on first. 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.
Frequently asked questions
Which pack should I open to get Gyarados?
Gyarados drops from Lugia. 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 Gyarados?
About 276 packs on average. That comes from the per-slot pull table rather than a single blended number: 0.07% in slot 4 · 0.29% in slot 5, which is 0.36% 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 Gyarados instead of pulling it?
It can be traded for 10,000 Shinedust. 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.