Every card rarity in Pokémon TCG Pocket, explained

The ladder, top to bottom

Diamonds first: one, two, three and four. One diamond is a common, four diamonds is an ex card. Then stars: one star is an art rare, two stars covers both super rare and special art rare, three stars is an immersive. Then the shiny marks, one and two. Then the crown, on its own at the top.

The symbol is printed in the bottom corner of every card, so you can read a card’s rarity without knowing its name. Promos have no symbol at all, because they are handed out rather than pulled.

That ordering is the game’s, not ours, and it is worth knowing because it is not the same as the order of difficulty. More on that below, because it catches everybody out.

Only the last two cards in a pack can be rare

A pack is five cards and the first three are always one diamond. Every rarity above that is competing for the fourth and fifth slots, which roll separately.

This is the single most useful fact about the game’s economy. It is why an ex card feels common and a crown feels impossible even though both come out of the same pack: there are only two chances per pack, and the fifth slot is far more generous than the fourth.

Which rarities change a game

Four diamonds. That is the honest answer. An ex card has the high HP and the big attack, and a deck is built around one or two of them. Everything above four diamonds is the same card with better artwork.

A special art rare Charizard plays exactly like the four-diamond Charizard. It is not stronger, it does not have a different attack, and no opponent is at a disadvantage for facing the plain one. Everything from one star upwards is cosmetic.

That is worth saying plainly because a lot of advice blurs it. If you are building a deck, you want ex cards and the trainers that support them. If you are filling a binder, you want the stars and the crowns, and you should know you are paying for art.

What three stars and two shiny marks actually are

Three stars is an immersive card. Tap and hold one and the artwork breaks out of its own border — you end up standing inside the scene rather than looking at it. A main expansion usually prints three, a small one prints a single card.

Two shiny marks is a shiny super rare, which arrived with Shining Revelry. Shinies are alternate colour versions, and the double-mark ones are now rarer overall than the two-star cards most players still think of as the top of the chase. That change happened quietly and a lot of older guides never caught up with it.

Both sit below the crown, and both are genuinely hard. An immersive from an expansion that printed only one of them can be harder to pull than a crown from an expansion that printed three.

Why rarity and difficulty are not the same thing

The game publishes an offering rate for each rarity. That rate is shared out between every card at that rarity in the expansion, so the chance of getting the one you want is the rate divided by the size of the pool.

Divide, and the ladder stops being a straight line. A set that printed seventy-five four-diamond cards splits one rate seventy-five ways, and each of those perfectly ordinary ex cards ends up harder to pull than a crown from a set that printed only one crown.

Nobody publishes that second number because working it out needs a full card database. We have one, so every card page on this site carries its own figure rather than its rarity’s, and the rarest-cards page ranks the game by it.

What it costs to chase one

There is no pity timer. Packs do not remember each other, so a hundred bad ones do not improve the next. The only guarantee in the game is the Pack Point exchange, which gives five points a pack and charges 2,500 for a crown rare.

Five hundred packs, in other words, if you simply save. At two free packs a day that is most of a year, which is the real reason people restart or buy rather than wait.