How Many Packs to Pull Charizard ex from FireRed & LeafGreen

Charizard ex chase methodology

This page answers exactly one question: how many FireRed & LeafGreen booster packs does it take to pull Charizard ex #105? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip FireRed & LeafGreen 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 54 per pack

Charizard ex sits in the Pokémon-ex rare-slot pool for FireRed & LeafGreen. There are 9 Pokémon-ex cards in the FireRed & LeafGreen pool, and the Pokémon-ex slot fires with probability 16.70% per pack. Since the slot is split evenly across the 9 cards in that tier, the per-pack chance of pulling this specific card is 1 in 54 — approximately 1 in 54.

Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit Charizard ex follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.018556. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~54 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~38 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 160 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.

Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened FireRed & LeafGreen packs until they pulled Charizard ex, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 38, 95 of them would have it by pack 160, 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 Charizard ex by pack N?". A 25% band of 16 packs means a quarter of openers hit it inside that window; 99% means almost everyone has hit it by pack 246. The dollar column anchors the variance to real-world sealed-pack cost at $5/pack.

Cheaper to buy Charizard ex as a single?

Pack-ripping breaks even or beats singles on raw cost for Charizard ex — but you'd absorb the rest of the pack contents along the way. Most hunters still mix: rip for the experience, buy the single if RNG turns sour.

Pack-rip expected dollar cost for this specific card: ~$269 at $5 per FireRed & LeafGreen pack. Compare to $500.00 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 Charizard ex plus the remaining 8 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/ex6 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.

About Charizard ex (FireRed & LeafGreen)

Charizard ex is a Pokémon-ex card from FireRed & LeafGreen, the 2004 Pokémon TCG expansion. FireRed & LeafGreen (2004) is a 116-card Kanto set. Its nine cards at rarity Rare Holo EX include two separately numbered Mr. Mime ex prints, #110 and #111, alongside Blastoise ex #104, Charizard ex #105 and Venusaur ex #112. Four Secret Rares close the list — Charmander #113 plus the legendary birds Articuno ex #114, Moltres ex #115 and Zapdos ex #116. Twenty-eight illustrators contributed.

This specific card ranks as one of the top-3 most valuable pulls in FireRed & LeafGreen 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 FireRed & LeafGreen ranking shows where Charizard ex sits relative to the rest of the chase pool.

Pull odds in context

For reference, a "1 in 54" 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 FireRed & LeafGreen opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.

Related chases

• Gengar ex — Pokémon-ex, $838.00 market
• Blastoise ex — Pokémon-ex, $430.00 market
• All Charizard ex printings across 9 sets
• All top-25 FireRed & LeafGreen chases
• Complete the FireRed & LeafGreen binder — full calculator

Open FireRed & LeafGreen free

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

Strategy: optimising the Charizard ex chase

Every experienced FireRed & LeafGreen 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 $500.00 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 ($269) 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 FireRed & LeafGreen (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Charizard ex in the box, buy the single for $500.00. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)³⁶ ≈ 49.0% of pulling Charizard ex at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.018556. So a sealed box gives you roughly a 49% 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 Charizard ex appears. The expected total cost is ~$269, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$800. 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 FireRed & LeafGreen, not just acquiring Charizard ex, 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 Charizard ex from FireRed & LeafGreen. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 54-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Charizard ex within the first 38 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 38 and 54 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 54, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 160. 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 Charizard ex compares to the broader FireRed & LeafGreen chase pool

Charizard ex sits in the Pokémon-ex tier of FireRed & LeafGreen's rare-slot pool. 9 cards share this tier, and the tier itself fires roughly 16.70% of the time per pack. That means the per-pack chance of pulling any Pokémon-ex card (not just Charizard ex) is 16.70%, which makes the expected wait for any Pokémon-ex 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 FireRed & LeafGreen" rather than "Charizard ex specifically", the math gets dramatically friendlier — the wait drops to ~6 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 Charizard ex is no exception.