How Many Packs to Pull Charizard VMAX from Darkness Ablaze

Charizard VMAX chase methodology

This page answers exactly one question: how many Darkness Ablaze booster packs does it take to pull Charizard VMAX #20? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip Darkness Ablaze 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 126 per pack

Charizard VMAX sits in the VMAX rare-slot pool for Darkness Ablaze. There are 7 VMAX cards in the Darkness Ablaze pool, and the VMAX slot fires with probability 5.56% per pack. Since the slot is split evenly across the 7 cards in that tier, the per-pack chance of pulling this specific card is 1 in 126 — approximately 1 in 126.

Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit Charizard VMAX follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.007943. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~126 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~87 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 376 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.

Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened Darkness Ablaze packs until they pulled Charizard VMAX, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 87, 95 of them would have it by pack 376, 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 VMAX 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 578. The dollar column anchors the variance to real-world sealed-pack cost at $5/pack.

Cheaper to buy Charizard VMAX as a single?

Buying Charizard VMAX as a single on TCGplayer (~$54.39) is dramatically cheaper than chasing it through packs — the expected pack-rip cost is roughly $629, well above the market price.

Pack-rip expected dollar cost for this specific card: ~$629 at $5 per Darkness Ablaze pack. Compare to $54.39 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 VMAX plus the remaining 9 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/swsh3 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.

About Charizard VMAX (Darkness Ablaze)

Charizard VMAX is a VMAX card from Darkness Ablaze, the 2020 Pokémon TCG expansion. Darkness Ablaze (August 2020) is the third Sword & Shield expansion at 201 cards and home to Charizard VMAX — the Gigantamax Charizard print that became the single most chased card of the modern Pokémon TCG, driving box prices and pull-rate searches like nothing since Base Set. Eternatus VMAX (the cover legendary in its Eternamax form), Grimmsnarl VMAX, Centiskorch VMAX and Salamence VMAX round out the Dynamax chase, with Crobat V as the era's defining draw-support card. Pack composition is the 10-card modern 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 Darkness Ablaze 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 Darkness Ablaze ranking shows where Charizard VMAX sits relative to the rest of the chase pool.

Pull odds in context

For reference, a "1 in 126" 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 Darkness Ablaze opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.

Related chases

• Charizard V — Pokémon V, $10.46 market
• Mew V — Pokémon V, $9.07 market
• All Charizard VMAX printings across 4 sets
• All top-25 Darkness Ablaze chases
• Complete the Darkness Ablaze binder — full calculator

Open Darkness Ablaze free

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

Strategy: optimising the Charizard VMAX chase

Every experienced Darkness Ablaze 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 $54.39 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 ($629) 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 Darkness Ablaze (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Charizard VMAX in the box, buy the single for $54.39. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)³⁶ ≈ 25.0% of pulling Charizard VMAX at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.007943. 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 Charizard VMAX appears. The expected total cost is ~$629, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$1,880. 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 Darkness Ablaze, not just acquiring Charizard VMAX, 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 VMAX from Darkness Ablaze. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 126-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Charizard VMAX within the first 87 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 87 and 126 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 126, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 376. 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 VMAX compares to the broader Darkness Ablaze chase pool

Charizard VMAX sits in the VMAX tier of Darkness Ablaze's rare-slot pool. 7 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 VMAX card (not just Charizard VMAX) is 5.56%, which makes the expected wait for any VMAX 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 Darkness Ablaze" rather than "Charizard VMAX 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 Charizard VMAX is no exception.