How Many Packs to Pull Team Aqua's Sharpedo from Double Crisis

Team Aqua's Sharpedo chase methodology

This page answers exactly one question: how many Double Crisis booster packs does it take to pull Team Aqua's Sharpedo #21? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip Double Crisis 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 18 per pack

Team Aqua's Sharpedo sits in the Rare Holo rare-slot pool for Double Crisis. There are 6 Rare Holo cards in the Double Crisis pool, and the Rare Holo slot fires with probability 33.00% per pack. Since the slot is split evenly across the 6 cards in that tier, the per-pack chance of pulling this specific card is 1 in 18 — approximately 1 in 18.

Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit Team Aqua's Sharpedo follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.055000. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~19 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~13 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 53 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.

Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened Double Crisis packs until they pulled Team Aqua's Sharpedo, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 13, 95 of them would have it by pack 53, 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 Team Aqua's Sharpedo by pack N?". A 25% band of 6 packs means a quarter of openers hit it inside that window; 99% means almost everyone has hit it by pack 82. The dollar column anchors the variance to real-world sealed-pack cost at $5/pack.

Cheaper to buy Team Aqua's Sharpedo as a single?

Buying Team Aqua's Sharpedo as a single on TCGplayer (~$5.45) is dramatically cheaper than chasing it through packs — the expected pack-rip cost is roughly $91, well above the market price.

Pack-rip expected dollar cost for this specific card: ~$91 at $5 per Double Crisis pack. Compare to $5.45 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 Team Aqua's Sharpedo plus the remaining 9 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/dc1 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.

About Team Aqua's Sharpedo (Double Crisis)

Team Aqua's Sharpedo is a Rare Holo card from Double Crisis, the 2015 Pokémon TCG expansion. Double Crisis (2015) is a 34-card set where every card name is prefixed Team Aqua's or Team Magma's. Its two Rare Ultras are Team Aqua's Kyogre-EX #6 and Team Magma's Groudon-EX #15. Darkness leads the small type spread at six cards. GAME FREAK inc. is credited on four cards, unusual for a Pokemon TCG set.

This specific card ranks as one of the top-3 most valuable pulls in Double Crisis 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 Double Crisis ranking shows where Team Aqua's Sharpedo sits relative to the rest of the chase pool.

Pull odds in context

For reference, a "1 in 18" pull is roughly comparable to a common chase — most active openers hit it within a sealed booster box (36 packs). The variance is the killer: any one pack could be the one. The simulation on PackRip's Double Crisis opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.

Related chases

• Team Aqua's Kyogre-EX — Full Art, $493.29 market
• Team Magma's Groudon-EX — Full Art, $463.22 market
• All Team Aqua's Sharpedo printings across 2 sets
• All top-25 Double Crisis chases
• Complete the Double Crisis binder — full calculator

Open Double Crisis free

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

Strategy: optimising the Team Aqua's Sharpedo chase

Every experienced Double Crisis 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 $5.45 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 ($91) 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 Double Crisis (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Team Aqua's Sharpedo in the box, buy the single for $5.45. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)³⁶ ≈ 87.0% of pulling Team Aqua's Sharpedo at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.055000. So a sealed box gives you roughly a 87% 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 Team Aqua's Sharpedo appears. The expected total cost is ~$91, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$265. 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 Double Crisis, not just acquiring Team Aqua's Sharpedo, 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 Team Aqua's Sharpedo from Double Crisis. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 19-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Team Aqua's Sharpedo within the first 13 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 13 and 19 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 19, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 53. 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 Team Aqua's Sharpedo compares to the broader Double Crisis chase pool

Team Aqua's Sharpedo sits in the Rare Holo tier of Double Crisis's rare-slot pool. 6 cards share this tier, and the tier itself fires roughly 33.00% of the time per pack. That means the per-pack chance of pulling any Rare Holo card (not just Team Aqua's Sharpedo) is 33.00%, which makes the expected wait for any Rare Holo 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 Double Crisis" rather than "Team Aqua's Sharpedo specifically", the math gets dramatically friendlier — the wait drops to ~4 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 Team Aqua's Sharpedo is no exception.