How Many Packs to Pull Marshadow & Machamp-GX from Unbroken Bonds

Marshadow & Machamp-GX chase methodology

This page answers exactly one question: how many Unbroken Bonds booster packs does it take to pull Marshadow & Machamp-GX #199? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip Unbroken Bonds 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 292 per pack

Marshadow & Machamp-GX sits in the Full Art rare-slot pool for Unbroken Bonds. There are 25 Full Art cards in the Unbroken Bonds pool, and the Full Art slot fires with probability 8.56% per pack. Since the slot is split evenly across the 25 cards in that tier, the per-pack chance of pulling this specific card is 1 in 292 — approximately 1 in 292.

Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit Marshadow & Machamp-GX follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.003424. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~293 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~203 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 874 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.

Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened Unbroken Bonds packs until they pulled Marshadow & Machamp-GX, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 203, 95 of them would have it by pack 874, 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 Marshadow & Machamp-GX by pack N?". A 25% band of 84 packs means a quarter of openers hit it inside that window; 99% means almost everyone has hit it by pack 1,343. The dollar column anchors the variance to real-world sealed-pack cost at $5/pack.

Cheaper to buy Marshadow & Machamp-GX as a single?

Buying Marshadow & Machamp-GX as a single on TCGplayer (~$225.46) is dramatically cheaper than chasing it through packs — the expected pack-rip cost is roughly $1460, well above the market price.

Pack-rip expected dollar cost for this specific card: ~$1,460 at $5 per Unbroken Bonds pack. Compare to $225.46 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 Marshadow & Machamp-GX plus the remaining 10 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/sm10 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.

About Marshadow & Machamp-GX (Unbroken Bonds)

Marshadow & Machamp-GX is a Full Art card from Unbroken Bonds, the 2019 Pokémon TCG expansion. Unbroken Bonds (2019) runs 238 cards with 26 TAG TEAM cards, and its 25-card Rare Ultra tier is padded with duplicate alternate prints — Pheromosa & Buzzwole, Muk & Alolan Muk, Marshadow & Machamp, Greninja & Zoroark and Gardevoir & Sylveon each appear twice there. Sixty-five illustrators contributed. Fighting leads the types at 28 and there are no Prism Star cards.

This specific card ranks as one of the top-3 most valuable pulls in Unbroken Bonds 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 Unbroken Bonds ranking shows where Marshadow & Machamp-GX sits relative to the rest of the chase pool.

Pull odds in context

For reference, a "1 in 292" pull is roughly comparable to a deep chase — multi-box territory, often case-level commitment. The variance is the killer: any one pack could be the one. The simulation on PackRip's Unbroken Bonds opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.

Related chases

• Gardevoir & Sylveon-GX — Full Art, $578.85 market
• Greninja & Zoroark-GX — Full Art, $297.95 market
• All Marshadow & Machamp-GX printings across 2 sets
• All top-25 Unbroken Bonds chases
• Complete the Unbroken Bonds binder — full calculator

Open Unbroken Bonds free

Rip Unbroken Bonds 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 Marshadow & Machamp-GX-tier pulls. Coin economy is virtual — no real money on the line.

Strategy: optimising the Marshadow & Machamp-GX chase

Every experienced Unbroken Bonds 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 $225.46 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 ($1,460) 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 Unbroken Bonds (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Marshadow & Machamp-GX in the box, buy the single for $225.46. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)³⁶ ≈ 11.6% of pulling Marshadow & Machamp-GX at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.003424. So a sealed box gives you roughly a 12% 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 Marshadow & Machamp-GX appears. The expected total cost is ~$1,460, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$4,370. 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 Unbroken Bonds, not just acquiring Marshadow & Machamp-GX, 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 Marshadow & Machamp-GX from Unbroken Bonds. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 293-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Marshadow & Machamp-GX within the first 203 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 203 and 293 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 293, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 874. 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 Marshadow & Machamp-GX compares to the broader Unbroken Bonds chase pool

Marshadow & Machamp-GX sits in the Full Art tier of Unbroken Bonds's rare-slot pool. 25 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 Marshadow & Machamp-GX) 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 Unbroken Bonds" rather than "Marshadow & Machamp-GX 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 Marshadow & Machamp-GX is no exception.