Pokémon TCG Pocket Rarity Guide: All 11 Tiers and Real Pull Rates

Every card in the game sits in one of 11 tiers, grouped into four visual families shown by the icon printed on the card itself. If you're new, the icon is the fastest way to gauge a card's value at a glance without knowing the exact name of the tier: diamonds mean common progression fodder, stars mean a genuine chase card, a crown means a trophy pull, and a shiny star means an alternate-art chase that runs on its own separate track.

Note that SR and SAR share the same effective tier — same points cost, same trade cost, same pull odds — they're just two different art treatments of the same rarity slot, as are S and SSR within the Shiny family.

A normal pack deals 5 cards, but only 2 of them can ever roll above Common — the first 3 slots are always Common, every time, in every pack. That's not a rumor, it's baked into the odds table itself: slots 1 through 3 simply have no chance rows for anything above Common. Here's the exact per-slot breakdown used across most sets:

Slot 5 always runs at roughly 4x the odds of Slot 4 for every tier above Common — which is why the 5th card in any pack is the one worth watching first, and why community talk about a pack "feeling loaded" usually traces back to what showed in that final slot. For a newcomer, the practical takeaway is simple: 3 out of every 5 cards you pull are locked to Common no matter what, so judge a pack's luck only by its last two slots.

A Rare Pack — the pack the community calls a God Pack — appears at a flat 0.05% rate, roughly 1 in 2,000 packs opened. Every one of its 5 cards is guaranteed Star-tier or higher; none of the 5 can land on a Diamond-tier Common, Uncommon, Rare, or Double Rare. It's the one pack type in the entire game where the odds table for slots 1–3 changes completely instead of staying locked to Common.

• Appearance rate: 0.05% (about 1 in 2,000 packs)
• All 5 cards guaranteed Star-tier or above
• Example per-slot split seen on early sets: Art Rare 40% · Super Rare 50% · Immersive Rare 5% · Crown Rare 5%, identical across all 5 slots

The exact split shifts a little from set to set as newer tiers like Shiny get folded into the pool, but the core rule — zero Diamond-tier cards inside — holds across every set. At roughly 1 in 2,000, most players will open a great many packs across a set's lifespan before ever seeing one, which is exactly why it's treated as a jackpot rather than a plan.

Rarity doesn't just decide how hard a card is to pull — it decides what that card is worth once you have it, whether you're redeeming with Pack Points or trading with a friend.