How Many Packs to Pull Reshiram ex from White Flare

Reshiram ex chase methodology

This page answers exactly one question: how many White Flare booster packs does it take to pull Reshiram ex #173? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip White Flare 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 36 per pack

Reshiram ex sits in the Hyper Rare rare-slot pool for White Flare. There are 1 Hyper Rare card in the White Flare pool, and the Hyper Rare slot fires with probability 2.80% per pack. Since the slot is split evenly across the 1 cards in that tier, the per-pack chance of pulling this specific card is 1 in 36 — approximately 1 in 36.

Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit Reshiram ex follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.028000. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~36 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~25 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 106 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.

Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened White Flare packs until they pulled Reshiram ex, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 25, 95 of them would have it by pack 106, 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 Reshiram ex by pack N?". A 25% band of 11 packs means a quarter of openers hit it inside that window; 99% means almost everyone has hit it by pack 163. The dollar column anchors the variance to real-world sealed-pack cost at $5/pack.

Cheaper to buy Reshiram ex as a single?

Pack-ripping breaks even or beats singles on raw cost for Reshiram 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: ~$179 at $5 per White Flare pack. Compare to $465.28 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 Reshiram ex plus the remaining 9 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/rsv10pt5 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.

About Reshiram ex (White Flare)

Reshiram ex is a Hyper Rare card from White Flare, the 2025 Pokémon TCG expansion. White Flare (2025) mirrors Black Bolt almost exactly in shape — 173 cards, 69 of them Illustration Rare, 10 Trainers, and one card at the Black White Rare rarity that PackRip folds into Hyper Rare. Where the two diverge is type: White Flare leads with Darkness at 27 and Fire at 23, against Black Bolt's Water and Grass.

This specific card ranks as one of the top-3 most valuable pulls in White Flare 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 White Flare ranking shows where Reshiram ex sits relative to the rest of the chase pool.

Pull odds in context

For reference, a "1 in 36" 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 White Flare opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.

Related chases

• Reshiram ex — Special Illustration Rare, $211.09 market
• Oshawott — Illustration Rare, $92.01 market
• All Reshiram ex printings across 6 sets
• All top-25 White Flare chases
• Complete the White Flare binder — full calculator

Open White Flare free

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

Strategy: optimising the Reshiram ex chase

Every experienced White Flare 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 $465.28 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 ($179) 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 White Flare (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Reshiram ex in the box, buy the single for $465.28. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)³⁶ ≈ 64.0% of pulling Reshiram ex at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.028000. So a sealed box gives you roughly a 64% 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 Reshiram ex appears. The expected total cost is ~$179, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$530. 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 White Flare, not just acquiring Reshiram 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 Reshiram ex from White Flare. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 36-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Reshiram ex within the first 25 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 25 and 36 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 36, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 106. 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 Reshiram ex compares to the broader White Flare chase pool

Reshiram ex sits in the Hyper Rare tier of White Flare's rare-slot pool. 1 card shares this tier, and the tier itself fires roughly 2.80% of the time per pack. That means the per-pack chance of pulling any Hyper Rare card (not just Reshiram ex) is 2.80%, which makes the expected wait for any Hyper 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 White Flare" rather than "Reshiram ex specifically", the math gets dramatically friendlier — the wait drops to ~36 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 Reshiram ex is no exception.