The latest set of Pokémon TCG cards, Mega Evolution, contains possibly the hardest to pull cards in the card game’s history. While our review praised the new era following the end of Scarlet & Violet for a new-found generosity of pull-rates, with a greater chance of getting a gorgeous full-art card, what we couldn’t know at the time was just how close to impossible it was to receive one of the two new gold cards in the set. Now, thanks to the fine folks at TCG Player, those odds have been revealed. They’re astonishing.
As I said in the review, given my dataset was so tiny—50 packs in total, kindly supplied to us by The Pokémon Company—it wasn’t really possible to draw any meaningful conclusions on pull-rates. However, my personal experience saw the chances of getting something beyond a holo were far higher than I’ve seen in years. If you include the Mega Evolved ex cards, it was better than one-in-three. For an Ultra Rare or higher, I was hitting somewhere around one-in-four. It seems I could have been somewhat lucky, given TCG Player‘s final figures based on tearing open an enormous 5,000 booster packs saw that Ultra Rare or higher figure at 19 percent, but the site draws the same conclusion that this is a more generous set than we’ve seen in a good while.
Unless you’re talking Mega Hyper Rare. That’s the completely daft rarity title given to the set’s brand new type of gold cards, which according to TCGP only appear once in every 1,260 packs. That is mindblowing. As the site points out, that means you’d need to open something like 35 booster boxes of packs before you’d likely find only one of either the Mega Lucario or Mega Gardevoir etched foil cards. Given the massively inflated prices for booster boxes of $339, thanks to the still-ongoing lack of product being provided by The Pokémon Company, to ensure your odds would cost you $11,865. Oh, and that’s for pulling one of the two. If you’re after a specific one of them, those odds leap to one in 2,520 (or $23,730 worth of packs).
Obviously, those two gold cards are already fetching high prices in the first week of the set’s launch (in the U.S. only—Mega Evolution has had even worse production issues than other recent sets and is still not available in Europe and other parts of the world). Mega Lucario has a market price at the time of writing of at least $561, while Mega Gardevoir goes for over $480, unsurprisingly making them the two most expensive cards in the set.
Before the set went on sale, it had seemed doubtful that any card could beat the Special Illustration Rare version of the Mega Gardevoir ex for the top spot, least of all a gold card. While gold cards were treasured during the early Sword & Shield era of the PTCG, by the end of that run the sheen had very much worn off. The lackluster line art saw interest rapidly drop once they were less of a novelty, and despite their often being more difficult to pull than SIR full-art cards, prices and desire plummeted until TPCi eventually gave up on them entirely at some point during the three years of Scarlet & Violet. A quickly abandoned effort to reboot them as green-and-gold cards went nowhere, and that seemed to be that.
However, the gold card’s return in Mega Evolution has come with a significant upgrade in quality. Both cards are far more elaborately designed than previous versions, with a much better foil effect, making them aesthetically more appealing. But it’s the recently discovered rarity that’s really driving their prices so wildly high.
That’s not a good thing. Sure, if you’re the person who hits that 1 in 1,260 luck with a purchased pack you’re going to be very happy. But any time a particular card starts fetching crazy money, it causes the issues for the TCG to only get worse. Scalpers swoop down in ever-greater numbers to hold product hostage for ludicrous prices, and any product that does make it to shelves is instantly scooped up by adults investing in the gamble. It’s been near-impossible to buy new packs of Pokémon cards in stores for coming up on a year now, and a new gold rush will only make this worse. For a hobby that’s meant to be about kids building decks and battling each other in live games, it’s a hell of a bummer.
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