The rarest card in every Pokémon TCG Pocket expansion

The rule that decides it

A crown rare has the same offering rate in every expansion. What changes is how many cards share it. One rate split three ways gives each card a third of the chance, so a set with three crowns has three of the hardest cards in the game, and a set with one has a crown you are three times more likely to see.

Genetic Apex printed three — Charizard ex, Pikachu ex and Mewtwo ex — at roughly 1 in 1,448 packs each. Those are the hardest cards in Pokémon TCG Pocket and they have been since launch. Mega Rising also printed three, so Lilligant, Klefki and Flame Patch sit alongside them.

At the other end, Mythical Island printed a single crown, Mew ex, at about 1 in 483. Same rarity, same symbol, three times easier. Triumphant Light, Extradimensional Crisis, Eevee Grove and Secluded Springs are all one-crown sets and behave the same way.

The current run of expansions

Everything from Space-Time Smackdown onwards has settled into a pattern of two crowns per set, which puts each of them near 1 in 966 packs. That covers Palkia ex and Dialga ex, Lunala ex and Solgaleo ex, Ho-Oh ex, and the whole B series through to Gholdengo in Team Rocket’s Ambition.

So if you are chasing the newest set, the number to hold in your head is about one in a thousand packs for the card you actually want. Roughly 2,200 packs to be ninety per cent sure of seeing it, which is three years of free packs.

The two sets where the rarest card is not a crown

Deluxe Pack: ex is the strange one. It printed seventy-five four-diamond cards and only a single crown, so the ex cards split their rate seventy-five ways and land at about 1 in 901 — harder than that set’s crown, and harder than most crowns anywhere. Venusaur ex is the worst of them.

Shining Revelry is the other. It printed thirteen super rares, and dividing by thirteen puts Beedrill ex at roughly 1 in 499 — just past that set’s crown. Two stars beating a crown looks like an error and is not; it is what happens when a set prints one crown and a wall of super rares.

Both are worth knowing about before you commit an evening to a target. The symbol on the card is not the difficulty.

Promo sets do not have one

Promo A and Promo B contain no crowns, no immersives and no stars. Their hardest cards are ordinary three-diamond rares out of large pools, which makes them awkward to complete but not genuinely rare. Nothing in them is a chase card, whatever a listing might tell you.

Where to check any card

Every card on this site carries its own figure — the offering rate for its rarity, divided by how many cards share that rarity in its expansion. That is the number that answers "how hard is this one", and it is not a number any other card database prints.

The rarest-cards page ranks the whole game by it, with every crown rare, every immersive and every double shiny listed in full.