How Many Packs to Pull Charizard ex from Obsidian Flames

Charizard ex chase methodology

This page answers exactly one question: how many Obsidian Flames booster packs does it take to pull Charizard ex #223? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip Obsidian Flames 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 214 per pack

Charizard ex sits in the Special Illustration Rare rare-slot pool for Obsidian Flames. There are 6 Special Illustration Rare cards in the Obsidian Flames pool, and the Special Illustration Rare slot fires with probability 2.80% per pack. Since the slot is split evenly across the 6 cards in that tier, the per-pack chance of pulling this specific card is 1 in 214 — approximately 1 in 214.

Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit Charizard ex follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.004667. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~215 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~149 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 641 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.

Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened Obsidian Flames packs until they pulled Charizard ex, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 149, 95 of them would have it by pack 641, 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 62 packs means a quarter of openers hit it inside that window; 99% means almost everyone has hit it by pack 985. The dollar column anchors the variance to real-world sealed-pack cost at $5/pack.

Cheaper to buy Charizard ex as a single?

Buying Charizard ex as a single on TCGplayer (~$141.86) is dramatically cheaper than chasing it through packs — the expected pack-rip cost is roughly $1071, well above the market price.

Pack-rip expected dollar cost for this specific card: ~$1,071 at $5 per Obsidian Flames pack. Compare to $141.86 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 9 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/sv3 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.

About Charizard ex (Obsidian Flames)

Charizard ex is a Special Illustration Rare card from Obsidian Flames, the 2023 Pokémon TCG expansion. Obsidian Flames (2023) leans hard on the Tera subtype at 13 cards and carries 21 Double Rares across 230 cards, but thins the art tiers sharply — only 12 Illustration Rares, six Special Illustration Rares and three Hyper Rares. It is also unusually light on Trainers at 19. One hundred and two illustrators contributed.

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

Pull odds in context

For reference, a "1 in 214" 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 Obsidian Flames opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.

Related chases

• Ninetales — Illustration Rare, $50.87 market
• Charizard ex — Hyper Rare, $45.94 market
• All Charizard ex printings across 10 sets
• All top-25 Obsidian Flames chases
• Complete the Obsidian Flames binder — full calculator

Open Obsidian Flames free

Rip Obsidian Flames packs free on PackRip's simulator with the same per-rarity pull rates this page is built from. The Hunt Pack mode boosts the Special Illustration Rare 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 Obsidian Flames 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 $141.86 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 ($1,071) 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 Obsidian Flames (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Charizard ex in the box, buy the single for $141.86. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)³⁶ ≈ 15.5% of pulling Charizard ex at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.004667. So a sealed box gives you roughly a 15% 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 ~$1,071, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$3,205. 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 Obsidian Flames, 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 Obsidian Flames. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 215-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Charizard ex within the first 149 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 149 and 215 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 215, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 641. 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 Obsidian Flames chase pool

Charizard ex sits in the Special Illustration Rare tier of Obsidian Flames's rare-slot pool. 6 cards share this tier, and the tier itself fires roughly 2.80% of the time per pack. That means the per-pack chance of pulling any Special Illustration Rare card (not just Charizard ex) is 2.80%, which makes the expected wait for any Special Illustration 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 Obsidian Flames" rather than "Charizard 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 Charizard ex is no exception.