How Many Packs to Pull Rare Candy from Plasma Blast

Rare Candy chase methodology

This page answers exactly one question: how many Plasma Blast booster packs does it take to pull Rare Candy #105? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip Plasma Blast simulator runs on, mirrored from packGenerator.ts. TCGplayer pricing refreshes every build, so the buy-vs-rip verdict at the bottom reflects current market.

The math: ~1 in 80 per pack

Rare Candy sits in the Secret Rare rare-slot pool for Plasma Blast. There are 4 Secret Rare cards in the Plasma Blast pool, and the Secret Rare slot fires with probability 5.00% per pack. Since the slot is split evenly across the 4 cards in that tier, the per-pack chance of pulling this specific card is 1 in 80 — approximately 1 in 80.

Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit Rare Candy follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.012500. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~80 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~56 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 239 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.

Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened Plasma Blast packs until they pulled Rare Candy, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 56, 95 of them would have it by pack 239, and a handful would still be chasing past that. Expected ≠ guaranteed; the geometric distribution is famously long-tailed on the right side.

Confidence bands — packs vs cumulative probability

Read this table as "what fraction of openers have pulled Rare Candy by pack N?". A 25% band of 23 packs means a quarter of openers hit it inside that window; 99% means almost everyone has hit it by pack 367. The dollar column anchors the variance to real-world sealed-pack cost at $5/pack.

Cheaper to buy Rare Candy as a single?

Buying Rare Candy as a single on TCGplayer (~$191.88) is dramatically cheaper than chasing it through packs — the expected pack-rip cost is roughly $400, well above the market price.

Pack-rip expected dollar cost for this specific card: ~$400 at $5 per Plasma Blast pack. Compare to $191.88 for the single on TCGplayer (Unlimited / non-graded copy at current market). The single buy obviously delivers exactly this card; the pack-rip approach delivers Rare Candy plus the remaining 9 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/bw10 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.

About Rare Candy (Plasma Blast)

Rare Candy is a Secret Rare card from Plasma Blast, the 2013 Pokémon TCG expansion. Plasma Blast (2013) closes the Plasma arc at 105 cards, with Team Plasma branding dropping back to 22. Four ACE SPEC cards return at #92 to #95, including Master Ball and G Booster. Six Pokemon-EX appear in-run and again as Rare Ultras at #96 to #101, the last of which is the Supporter Iris. Water leads the types at 17 and the Restored subtype reappears on three cards.

This specific card ranks as one of the top-3 most valuable pulls in Plasma Blast by TCGplayer market value, which is part of why the chase math is what it is — high market value tends to track with rarity-tier depth, since lower pool sizes concentrate value into fewer cards. The complete top-25 Plasma Blast ranking shows where Rare Candy sits relative to the rest of the chase pool.

Pull odds in context

For reference, a "1 in 80" pull is roughly comparable to a moderate chase — you should expect to crack a couple of boxes. The variance is the killer: any one pack could be the one. The simulation on PackRip's Plasma Blast opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.

Related chases

• Palkia-EX — Full Art, $555.13 market
• Dialga-EX — Full Art, $393.66 market
• All Rare Candy printings across 20 sets
• All top-25 Plasma Blast chases
• Complete the Plasma Blast binder — full calculator

Open Plasma Blast free

Rip Plasma Blast packs free on PackRip's simulator with the same per-rarity pull rates this page is built from. The Hunt Pack mode boosts the Secret Rare slot if you specifically want to optimise for Rare Candy-tier pulls. Coin economy is virtual — no real money on the line.

Strategy: optimising the Rare Candy chase

Every experienced Plasma Blast hunter eventually picks one of three approaches for a specific chase card. The cheapest is the snipe: skip pack-ripping entirely, set a TCGplayer alert at or below the current $191.88 market, and wait for a motivated seller. This is the route most efficient-frontier collectors take when the chase is locked behind a deep rarity tier — and the math above shows why. The expected pack-rip cost ($400) is typically multiples of the single price, and the variance on that expectation is wide enough that a single bad streak can blow past the 95% confidence bound. The single buy is dollar-for-dollar cheaper and emotionally cheaper too — no more refreshing pack-pull videos at 3am.

The middle path is the box-rip-then-snipe: open a sealed booster box of Plasma Blast (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Rare Candy in the box, buy the single for $191.88. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)³⁶ ≈ 36.4% of pulling Rare Candy at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.012500. So a sealed box gives you roughly a 36% chance of hitting this card "for free" alongside the rest of the box contents, plus the rip experience. If you miss, you backstop by buying the single — total worst-case cost is the box price plus the single. Most rational hobbyists end here.

The expensive path is pure-rip-to-pull: keep opening packs until Rare Candy appears. The expected total cost is ~$400, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$1,195. Almost nobody who does this comes out ahead financially — but it produces the binder story, the YouTube content, and the cumulative pulls of the entire pack contents along the way. If your real goal is collecting all of Plasma Blast, not just acquiring Rare Candy, the pure-rip path has an internal logic the singles path doesn't.

Variance is the entire story

Here's a concrete illustration of how wild the geometric distribution gets at low p. Consider 10 hypothetical openers all chasing Rare Candy from Plasma Blast. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 80-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Rare Candy within the first 56 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 56 and 80 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 80, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 239. The unlucky ones will swear the simulator is rigged, the rates are wrong, or that they have terrible RNG — but the math says exactly this distribution should happen every time. The geometric distribution has no memory: each pack is an independent draw, and a 100-pack dry streak does not increase the odds of the next pack hitting.

How Rare Candy compares to the broader Plasma Blast chase pool

Rare Candy sits in the Secret Rare tier of Plasma Blast's rare-slot pool. 4 cards share this tier, and the tier itself fires roughly 5.00% of the time per pack. That means the per-pack chance of pulling any Secret Rare card (not just Rare Candy) is 5.00%, which makes the expected wait for any Secret Rare card much shorter than the wait for this specific one. Pull-rate intuition: a single chase from a 6-card tier is 6× rarer than the tier itself. The deeper the pool, the longer the chase. This is also why "wide" sets with many chase cards in a single tier feel grindier per individual card despite the tier hit rate being identical — a thicker tier dilutes each card's specific share.

If your real goal is "any chase card from Plasma Blast" rather than "Rare Candy specifically", the math gets dramatically friendlier — the wait drops to ~20 packs on average for the tier as a whole. Most binder collectors approach it this way: chase the tier broadly across multiple sets, accept whatever pulls, and snipe the specific holes via TCGplayer later. Targeting one card from a thick tier is the most expensive way to play the chase, and Rare Candy is no exception.