{"id":15296,"date":"2026-08-03T07:56:37","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T00:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/?p=15296"},"modified":"2026-08-03T07:56:39","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T00:56:39","slug":"how-many-packs-of-pokemon-cards-do-you-have-to-buy-to-catch-em-all-probably-hundreds-and-most-will-be-quite-boring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/how-many-packs-of-pokemon-cards-do-you-have-to-buy-to-catch-em-all-probably-hundreds-and-most-will-be-quite-boring\/","title":{"rendered":"How many packs of Pok\u00e9mon cards do you have to buy to catch \u2019em all? Probably hundreds, and most will be quite\u00a0boring"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Pokemon
Antonio Ciufo \/ Getty Images<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Pok\u00e9mon turns 30 this year. Beginning life as a video game which spawned a wildly successful trading card game and an anime series, the franchise \u2013 based around collecting an assortment of fanciful \u201cpocket monsters\u201d \u2013 has become an inescapable piece of the world\u2019s pop-culture furniture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A dedicated 30th-anniversary card set is due to be released to celebrate the occasion. A wave of nostalgia has created high demand for trading cards, with resale prices rising and sellers adopting anti-scalping measures and guarding against increasingly audacious thefts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Behind the hype is a simple question familiar to generations of players: if you try to \u201ccatch \u2018em all\u201d by opening booster packs \u2013 sets of randomly allotted cards \u2013 how long would it actually take? And would you get bored before then?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Opening packs, virtually<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To tackle these questions, we can turn to mathematics. I built and ran a computer simulation of six recent Pok\u00e9mon Trading Card Game sets from the current Mega Evolution series: the base Mega Evolution set plus the expansion sets Phantasmal Flames, Ascended Heroes, Perfect Order, Chaos Rising, and Pitch Black.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The simulation model uses published \u201cpull rates\u201d \u2013 how often particular cards turn up \u2013 estimated from thousands of real booster packs opened by collectors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I then created 10,000 virtual collectors, and simulated each of them opening packs one at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every simulated pack contained ten cards. The simulation recorded which cards were new, which were duplicates, and how many packs each collector needed to complete the numbered base set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This base set includes the ordinary numbered cards, up to the regular rare Pok\u00e9mon EX cards \u2013 often around 100 cards per set. This excludes special illustration and ultra-rare \u201cchase\u201d cards that appear beyond the main set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The distinction between the \u201cbase\u201d and \u201cfull\u201d sets matters, as acquiring every secret and special card is vastly harder as they are designed to be a rare, lottery-like feature. The more relatable question may be how long it takes to assemble the main base set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer? More than 100 packs, usually<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For five of the six sets I examined, the typical simulated collector needed about 110\u2013130 packs to complete the base set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pitch Black, the newest set in the model, had a median of about 129 packs. Mega Evolution required about 130, Phantasmal Flames 131, Chaos Rising 133 and Perfect Order was the kindest at about 111.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

That is a big pile of wrappers! The nature of random chance will also give different collectors very different outcomes, even when they open the same number of packs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the above chart, you might notice one line looks very different to the others. The Ascended Heroes set required a median of about 771 packs, because it contains 39 \u201cdouble rare\u201d cards, compared with only nine or ten in the other sets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the cruel feature of random collecting games: finding the first few cards is easy. Finding the final missing cards can take far longer than intuition suggests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When does opening packs stop feeling fun?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Completing a set is only half the story. Opening packs is also entertainment and is meant to be fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can define a \u201cfreshness\u201d measure to try and analyse this. It is not a psychological test of fun, but a simple number to try and capture the novelty: the percentage of cards in a new pack that you have not seen before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the beginning, almost every card is new. But freshness falls quickly!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For most of the simulated sets, after roughly 15 packs, fewer than half the cards in the next booster are expected to be new. By 30 packs, a typical pack contributes only one or two unfamiliar cards in most sets, and around three in Ascended Heroes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ascended Heroes stays fresher for longer because its base set is so large. But that variety comes with a trade-off: it also takes far longer to complete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our simulation shows how maths can help explain a familiar collector experience. Early packs feel full of discovery. Later packs become a stack of repeated \u201ccommon\u201d and \u201cuncommon\u201d cards, punctuated by the small chance of something genuinely new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is an old mathematical problem<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Mathematicians call this the \u201ccoupon collector\u2019s problem\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imagine cereal boxes contain one random coupon and you want the full set. At first, almost every coupon helps. As your album fills, duplicates dominate. The last missing coupon can take an unexpectedly long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pok\u00e9mon packs present a more complicated version of the problem, because they contain multiple cards and different rarities have different probabilities. Computer simulation lets us reproduce those details while keeping track of the variation between collectors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same mathematics has serious applications. Ecologists use related models to estimate how much sampling is needed to observe all species in a population. Similar ideas appear in epidemiology, animal-behaviour research, and industrial quality control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The results of my simulation don\u2019t say people should stop opening packs. Opening them can be fun, social and nostalgic. But it does reveal what you are buying: an experience whose novelty fades much faster than a collection approaches completion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thirty years after Pok\u00e9mon began, the slogan remains \u201cgotta catch ’em all!\u201d But as we now know, that might mean catching many of them again and again and again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Nathan Garland<\/a>, Lecturer in Applied Mathematics and Physics, Griffith University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pok\u00e9mon turns 30 this year. Beginning life as a video game which spawned a wildly successful trading card<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[468,418],"class_list":["post-15296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international","tag-card-games","tag-pokemon"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t