How Many Packs to Pull Mewtwo from Detective Pikachu
| Card | Mewtwo — Detective Pikachu #12 |
|---|---|
| Rarity tier | Full Art |
| Per-pack odds | 1 in 47 |
| Expected packs to pull | 47 |
| 50% confidence band | 33 packs |
| 95% confidence band | 139 packs |
| TCGplayer market | $9.08 |
| Pack-rip break-even | 2 packs @ $5 |
Mewtwo chase methodology
| Formula | Specific-card odds = Full Art tier rate (8.56%) ÷ 4 cards; confidence bands solve 1 - (1 - p)^N. |
|---|---|
| Assumptions | Independent pack rolls, uniform selection within the rarity tier, no pity timers, no box mapping, no first-edition/condition split, no duplicate protection. |
| Data source | Card identity and rarity from the bundled Pokemon TCG API catalog; pull-rate constants from the live simulator; market price from the bundled TCGplayer snapshot. |
| Update cadence | Regenerated by prerender; price values update when the TCGplayer snapshot is refreshed through the data pipeline. |
| Limitations | The page estimates probability and raw market cost only; it does not model grading premiums, counterfeit risk, sealed-product appreciation, or individual print-run collation. |
This page answers exactly one question: how many Detective Pikachu booster packs does it take to pull Mewtwo #12? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip Detective Pikachu 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 47 per pack
Mewtwo sits in the Full Art rare-slot pool for Detective Pikachu. There are 4 Full Art cards in the Detective Pikachu pool, and the Full Art slot fires with probability 8.56% 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 47 — approximately 1 in 47.
Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit Mewtwo follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.021400. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~47 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~33 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 139 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.
Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened Detective Pikachu packs until they pulled Mewtwo, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 33, 95 of them would have it by pack 139, 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
| P(pulled by N packs) | Packs needed | Sealed cost at $5/pack |
|---|---|---|
| 10% | 5 packs | ~$25 sealed cost |
| 25% | 14 packs | ~$70 sealed cost |
| 50% | 33 packs | ~$165 sealed cost |
| 75% | 65 packs | ~$325 sealed cost |
| 90% | 107 packs | ~$535 sealed cost |
| 95% | 139 packs | ~$695 sealed cost |
| 99% | 213 packs | ~$1,065 sealed cost |
Read this table as "what fraction of openers have pulled Mewtwo by pack N?". A 25% band of 14 packs means a quarter of openers hit it inside that window; 99% means almost everyone has hit it by pack 213. The dollar column anchors the variance to real-world sealed-pack cost at $5/pack.
Cheaper to buy Mewtwo as a single?
Buying Mewtwo as a single on TCGplayer (~$9.08) is dramatically cheaper than chasing it through packs — the expected pack-rip cost is roughly $234, well above the market price.
Pack-rip expected dollar cost for this specific card: ~$234 at $5 per Detective Pikachu pack. Compare to $9.08 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 Mewtwo plus the remaining 10 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/det1 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.
About Mewtwo (Detective Pikachu)
Mewtwo is a Full Art card from Detective Pikachu, the 2019 Pokémon TCG expansion. Detective Pikachu (2019) is an 18-card film tie-in credited to just two illustrators: MPC Film on 11 cards and Framestore on seven. Every card is a Pokemon. It has no GX cards at all; its four Rare Ultras are Charizard #5, Greninja #9, Mewtwo #12 and Ditto #17, and Detective Pikachu #10 sits at plain Rare.
This specific card ranks as one of the top-3 most valuable pulls in Detective Pikachu 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 Detective Pikachu ranking shows where Mewtwo sits relative to the rest of the chase pool.
Pull odds in context
For reference, a "1 in 47" 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 Detective Pikachu opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.
Related chases
- Charizard — Full Art, $11.36 market
- Ditto — Full Art, $11.27 market
- All Mewtwo printings across 19 sets
- All top-25 Detective Pikachu chases
- Complete the Detective Pikachu binder — full calculator
Open Detective Pikachu free
Rip Detective Pikachu packs free on PackRip's simulator with the same per-rarity pull rates this page is built from. The Hunt Pack mode boosts the Full Art slot if you specifically want to optimise for Mewtwo-tier pulls. Coin economy is virtual — no real money on the line.
Strategy: optimising the Mewtwo chase
Every experienced Detective Pikachu 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 $9.08 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 ($234) 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 Detective Pikachu (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Mewtwo in the box, buy the single for $9.08. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)36 ≈ 54.1% of pulling Mewtwo at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.021400. So a sealed box gives you roughly a 54% 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 Mewtwo appears. The expected total cost is ~$234, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$695. 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 Detective Pikachu, not just acquiring Mewtwo, 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 Mewtwo from Detective Pikachu. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 47-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Mewtwo within the first 33 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 33 and 47 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 47, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 139. 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 Mewtwo compares to the broader Detective Pikachu chase pool
Mewtwo sits in the Full Art tier of Detective Pikachu's rare-slot pool. 4 cards share this tier, and the tier itself fires roughly 8.56% of the time per pack. That means the per-pack chance of pulling any Full Art card (not just Mewtwo) is 8.56%, which makes the expected wait for any Full Art 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 Detective Pikachu" rather than "Mewtwo specifically", the math gets dramatically friendlier — the wait drops to ~12 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 Mewtwo is no exception.