How Many Packs to Pull Salamence ex from Journey Together

Salamence ex chase methodology

This page answers exactly one question: how many Journey Together booster packs does it take to pull Salamence ex #187? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip Journey Together 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

Salamence ex sits in the Special Illustration Rare rare-slot pool for Journey Together. There are 6 Special Illustration Rare cards in the Journey Together 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 Salamence 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 Journey Together packs until they pulled Salamence 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 Salamence 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 Salamence ex as a single?

Buying Salamence ex as a single on TCGplayer (~$69.87) 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 Journey Together pack. Compare to $69.87 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 Salamence ex plus the remaining 9 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/sv9 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.

About Salamence ex (Journey Together)

Salamence ex is a Special Illustration Rare card from Journey Together, the 2025 Pokémon TCG expansion. Journey Together (2025) is a lean 190-card set with only 20 Trainers and a shallow art layer — 11 Illustration Rares, six Special Illustration Rares and three Hyper Rares. Commons account for 85 cards. Colorless leads the types at 29. One hundred and fifteen illustrators contributed and no ACE SPEC cards appear.

This specific card ranks as one of the top-3 most valuable pulls in Journey Together 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 Journey Together ranking shows where Salamence 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 Journey Together opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.

Related chases

• Lillie's Clefairy ex — Special Illustration Rare, $133.57 market
• N's Zoroark ex — Special Illustration Rare, $53.95 market
• All Salamence ex printings across 5 sets
• All top-25 Journey Together chases
• Complete the Journey Together binder — full calculator

Open Journey Together free

Rip Journey Together 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 Salamence ex-tier pulls. Coin economy is virtual — no real money on the line.

Strategy: optimising the Salamence ex chase

Every experienced Journey Together 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 $69.87 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 Journey Together (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Salamence ex in the box, buy the single for $69.87. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)³⁶ ≈ 15.5% of pulling Salamence 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 Salamence 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 Journey Together, not just acquiring Salamence 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 Salamence ex from Journey Together. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 215-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Salamence 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 Salamence ex compares to the broader Journey Together chase pool

Salamence ex sits in the Special Illustration Rare tier of Journey Together'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 Salamence 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 Journey Together" rather than "Salamence 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 Salamence ex is no exception.