How Many Packs to Pull Origin Forme Palkia V from Astral Radiance

Origin Forme Palkia V chase methodology

This page answers exactly one question: how many Astral Radiance booster packs does it take to pull Origin Forme Palkia V #167? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip Astral Radiance 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 350 per pack

Origin Forme Palkia V sits in the Full Art rare-slot pool for Astral Radiance. There are 30 Full Art cards in the Astral Radiance pool, and the Full Art slot fires with probability 8.56% per pack. Since the slot is split evenly across the 30 cards in that tier, the per-pack chance of pulling this specific card is 1 in 350 — approximately 1 in 350.

Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit Origin Forme Palkia V follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.002853. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~351 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~243 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 1,049 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.

Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened Astral Radiance packs until they pulled Origin Forme Palkia V, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 243, 95 of them would have it by pack 1,049, 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 Origin Forme Palkia V by pack N?". A 25% band of 101 packs means a quarter of openers hit it inside that window; 99% means almost everyone has hit it by pack 1,612. The dollar column anchors the variance to real-world sealed-pack cost at $5/pack.

Cheaper to buy Origin Forme Palkia V as a single?

Buying Origin Forme Palkia V as a single on TCGplayer (~$89.00) is dramatically cheaper than chasing it through packs — the expected pack-rip cost is roughly $1752, well above the market price.

Pack-rip expected dollar cost for this specific card: ~$1,752 at $5 per Astral Radiance pack. Compare to $89.00 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 Origin Forme Palkia V plus the remaining 9 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/swsh10 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.

About Origin Forme Palkia V (Astral Radiance)

Origin Forme Palkia V is a Full Art card from Astral Radiance, the 2022 Pokémon TCG expansion. Astral Radiance (2022) introduces the Radiant tier — three cards, drawn from an 8.33 percent slice of the rare slot. With its Trainer Gallery subset merged in the pool runs 246 cards, and the Hisuian forms dominate the V and VSTAR tiers: Hisuian Lilligant, Typhlosion, Decidueye and Samurott all appear at both. Seven VSTAR cards outnumber the four VMAX, the first set where that happens.

This specific card ranks as one of the top-3 most valuable pulls in Astral Radiance 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 Astral Radiance ranking shows where Origin Forme Palkia V sits relative to the rest of the chase pool.

Pull odds in context

For reference, a "1 in 350" 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 Astral Radiance opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.

Related chases

• Machamp V — Full Art, $202.36 market
• Beedrill V — Full Art, $69.45 market
• All Origin Forme Palkia V printings across 3 sets
• All top-25 Astral Radiance chases
• Complete the Astral Radiance binder — full calculator

Open Astral Radiance free

Rip Astral Radiance 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 Origin Forme Palkia V-tier pulls. Coin economy is virtual — no real money on the line.

Strategy: optimising the Origin Forme Palkia V chase

Every experienced Astral Radiance 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 $89.00 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 ($1,752) 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 Astral Radiance (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Origin Forme Palkia V in the box, buy the single for $89.00. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)³⁶ ≈ 9.8% of pulling Origin Forme Palkia V at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.002853. So a sealed box gives you roughly a 10% 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 Origin Forme Palkia V appears. The expected total cost is ~$1,752, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$5,245. 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 Astral Radiance, not just acquiring Origin Forme Palkia V, 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 Origin Forme Palkia V from Astral Radiance. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 351-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Origin Forme Palkia V within the first 243 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 243 and 351 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 351, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 1,049. 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 Origin Forme Palkia V compares to the broader Astral Radiance chase pool

Origin Forme Palkia V sits in the Full Art tier of Astral Radiance's rare-slot pool. 30 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 Origin Forme Palkia V) 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 Astral Radiance" rather than "Origin Forme Palkia V 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 Origin Forme Palkia V is no exception.