How Many Packs to Pull Gastly from Temporal Forces

Gastly chase methodology

This page answers exactly one question: how many Temporal Forces booster packs does it take to pull Gastly #177? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip Temporal Forces 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 396 per pack

Gastly sits in the Illustration Rare rare-slot pool for Temporal Forces. There are 22 Illustration Rare cards in the Temporal Forces pool, and the Illustration Rare slot fires with probability 5.56% per pack. Since the slot is split evenly across the 22 cards in that tier, the per-pack chance of pulling this specific card is 1 in 396 — approximately 1 in 396.

Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit Gastly follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.002527. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~396 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~274 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 1,184 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.

Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened Temporal Forces packs until they pulled Gastly, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 274, 95 of them would have it by pack 1,184, 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 Gastly by pack N?". A 25% band of 114 packs means a quarter of openers hit it inside that window; 99% means almost everyone has hit it by pack 1,820. The dollar column anchors the variance to real-world sealed-pack cost at $5/pack.

Cheaper to buy Gastly as a single?

Buying Gastly as a single on TCGplayer (~$111.33) is dramatically cheaper than chasing it through packs — the expected pack-rip cost is roughly $1978, well above the market price.

Pack-rip expected dollar cost for this specific card: ~$1,978 at $5 per Temporal Forces pack. Compare to $111.33 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 Gastly plus the remaining 9 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/sv5 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.

About Gastly (Temporal Forces)

Gastly is a Illustration Rare card from Temporal Forces, the 2024 Pokémon TCG expansion. Temporal Forces (March 2024) is the fifth Scarlet & Violet expansion at 218 cards and marks the return of ACE SPEC Trainers — powerful one-per-deck cards absent since the Black & White era. Walking Wake ex and Iron Leaves ex carry the Paradox theme forward, while the ACE SPEC reprints add a distinct rare-slot pull. Illustration Rare, Special Illustration Rare and Hyper Rare tiers continue the modern art-first chase structure. Pack composition is the 10-card Scarlet & Violet layout (1 Rare + 3 Uncommon + 4 Common + 1 Energy + 1 Reverse Holo).

This specific card ranks as one of the top-3 most valuable pulls in Temporal Forces 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 Temporal Forces ranking shows where Gastly sits relative to the rest of the chase pool.

Pull odds in context

For reference, a "1 in 396" 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 Temporal Forces opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.

Related chases

• Morty's Conviction — Special Illustration Rare, $78.41 market
• Gengar ex — Full Art, $73.00 market
• All Gastly printings across 33 sets
• All top-25 Temporal Forces chases
• Complete the Temporal Forces binder — full calculator

Open Temporal Forces free

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

Strategy: optimising the Gastly chase

Every experienced Temporal Forces 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 $111.33 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 ($1,978) 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 Temporal Forces (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Gastly in the box, buy the single for $111.33. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)³⁶ ≈ 8.7% of pulling Gastly at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.002527. So a sealed box gives you roughly a 9% 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 Gastly appears. The expected total cost is ~$1,978, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$5,920. 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 Temporal Forces, not just acquiring Gastly, 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 Gastly from Temporal Forces. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 396-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Gastly within the first 274 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 274 and 396 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 396, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 1,184. 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 Gastly compares to the broader Temporal Forces chase pool

Gastly sits in the Illustration Rare tier of Temporal Forces's rare-slot pool. 22 cards share this tier, and the tier itself fires roughly 5.56% of the time per pack. That means the per-pack chance of pulling any Illustration Rare card (not just Gastly) is 5.56%, which makes the expected wait for any 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 Temporal Forces" rather than "Gastly specifically", the math gets dramatically friendlier — the wait drops to ~18 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 Gastly is no exception.