How Many Packs to Pull Lusamine from Crimson Invasion
| Card | Lusamine — Crimson Invasion #110 |
|---|---|
| Rarity tier | Full Art |
| Per-pack odds | 1 in 129 |
| Expected packs to pull | 129 |
| 50% confidence band | 89 packs |
| 95% confidence band | 384 packs |
| TCGplayer market | $42.33 |
| Pack-rip break-even | 8 packs @ $5 |
Lusamine chase methodology
| Formula | Specific-card odds = Full Art tier rate (8.56%) ÷ 11 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 Crimson Invasion booster packs does it take to pull Lusamine #110? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip Crimson Invasion 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 129 per pack
Lusamine sits in the Full Art rare-slot pool for Crimson Invasion. There are 11 Full Art cards in the Crimson Invasion pool, and the Full Art slot fires with probability 8.56% per pack. Since the slot is split evenly across the 11 cards in that tier, the per-pack chance of pulling this specific card is 1 in 129 — approximately 1 in 129.
Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit Lusamine follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.007782. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~129 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~89 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 384 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.
Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened Crimson Invasion packs until they pulled Lusamine, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 89, 95 of them would have it by pack 384, 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% | 14 packs | ~$70 sealed cost |
| 25% | 37 packs | ~$185 sealed cost |
| 50% | 89 packs | ~$445 sealed cost |
| 75% | 178 packs | ~$890 sealed cost |
| 90% | 295 packs | ~$1,475 sealed cost |
| 95% | 384 packs | ~$1,920 sealed cost |
| 99% | 590 packs | ~$2,950 sealed cost |
Read this table as "what fraction of openers have pulled Lusamine by pack N?". A 25% band of 37 packs means a quarter of openers hit it inside that window; 99% means almost everyone has hit it by pack 590. The dollar column anchors the variance to real-world sealed-pack cost at $5/pack.
Cheaper to buy Lusamine as a single?
Buying Lusamine as a single on TCGplayer (~$42.33) is dramatically cheaper than chasing it through packs — the expected pack-rip cost is roughly $643, well above the market price.
Pack-rip expected dollar cost for this specific card: ~$643 at $5 per Crimson Invasion pack. Compare to $42.33 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 Lusamine plus the remaining 10 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/sm4 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.
About Lusamine (Crimson Invasion)
Lusamine is a Full Art card from Crimson Invasion, the 2017 Pokémon TCG expansion. Crimson Invasion (2017) introduces the Ultra Beast subtype to PackRip's catalog on 13 of its 126 cards. Nine cards carry rarity Rare Holo GX, including a Guzzlord-GX alternate at #63a. Its five Secret Rares are all Trainers and Energy. The set is compact by Sun & Moon standards and its type spread is unusually flat, led by Water at 17.
This specific card ranks as one of the top-3 most valuable pulls in Crimson Invasion 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 Crimson Invasion ranking shows where Lusamine sits relative to the rest of the chase pool.
Pull odds in context
For reference, a "1 in 129" 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 Crimson Invasion opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.
Related chases
- Gyarados-GX — GX, $25.80 market
- Gengar — Rare Holo, $24.82 market
- All Lusamine printings across 4 sets
- All top-25 Crimson Invasion chases
- Complete the Crimson Invasion binder — full calculator
Open Crimson Invasion free
Rip Crimson Invasion 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 Lusamine-tier pulls. Coin economy is virtual — no real money on the line.
Strategy: optimising the Lusamine chase
Every experienced Crimson Invasion 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 $42.33 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 ($643) 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 Crimson Invasion (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Lusamine in the box, buy the single for $42.33. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)36 ≈ 24.5% of pulling Lusamine at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.007782. So a sealed box gives you roughly a 25% 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 Lusamine appears. The expected total cost is ~$643, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$1,920. 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 Crimson Invasion, not just acquiring Lusamine, 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 Lusamine from Crimson Invasion. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 129-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Lusamine within the first 89 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 89 and 129 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 129, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 384. 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 Lusamine compares to the broader Crimson Invasion chase pool
Lusamine sits in the Full Art tier of Crimson Invasion's rare-slot pool. 11 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 Lusamine) 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 Crimson Invasion" rather than "Lusamine 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 Lusamine is no exception.