How Many Packs to Pull Charizard V from Champion's Path

Charizard V chase methodology

This page answers exactly one question: how many Champion's Path booster packs does it take to pull Charizard V #79? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip Champion's Path 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 40 per pack

Charizard V sits in the Secret Rare rare-slot pool for Champion's Path. There are 2 Secret Rare cards in the Champion's Path pool, and the Secret Rare slot fires with probability 5.00% per pack. Since the slot is split evenly across the 2 cards in that tier, the per-pack chance of pulling this specific card is 1 in 40 — approximately 1 in 40.

Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit Charizard V follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.025000. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~40 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~28 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 119 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.

Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened Champion's Path packs until they pulled Charizard V, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 28, 95 of them would have it by pack 119, 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 V by pack N?". A 25% band of 12 packs means a quarter of openers hit it inside that window; 99% means almost everyone has hit it by pack 182. The dollar column anchors the variance to real-world sealed-pack cost at $5/pack.

Cheaper to buy Charizard V as a single?

Pack-ripping breaks even or beats singles on raw cost for Charizard V — but you'd absorb the rest of the pack contents along the way. Most hunters still mix: rip for the experience, buy the single if RNG turns sour.

Pack-rip expected dollar cost for this specific card: ~$200 at $5 per Champion's Path pack. Compare to $266.40 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 V plus the remaining 9 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/swsh35 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.

About Charizard V (Champion's Path)

Charizard V is a Secret Rare card from Champion's Path, the 2020 Pokémon TCG expansion. Champion's Path (September 2020) is a special Sword & Shield set at 80 cards themed around the Galar gym leaders. Its headline is Charizard VMAX — the Rainbow Rare print became one of the most sought-after and expensive modern cards, driving Champion's Path Elite Trainer Box prices for years. Gardevoir VMAX, Drednaw VMAX, Alcremie VMAX and the gym-leader full-art trainers round out the chase, alongside gold Secret Rares. Sold mainly through Elite Trainer Boxes and tins, sealed Champion's Path is scarce. 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 Champion's Path 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 Champion's Path ranking shows where Charizard V sits relative to the rest of the chase pool.

Pull odds in context

For reference, a "1 in 40" pull is roughly comparable to a moderate chase — you should expect to crack a couple of boxes. The variance is the killer: any one pack could be the one. The simulation on PackRip's Champion's Path opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.

Related chases

• Alcremie VMAX — VMAX, $6.07 market
• Gardevoir V — Full Art, $4.75 market
• All Charizard V printings across 5 sets
• All top-25 Champion's Path chases
• Complete the Champion's Path binder — full calculator

Open Champion's Path free

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

Strategy: optimising the Charizard V chase

Every experienced Champion's Path 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 $266.40 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 ($200) 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 Champion's Path (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Charizard V in the box, buy the single for $266.40. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)³⁶ ≈ 59.8% of pulling Charizard V at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.025000. So a sealed box gives you roughly a 60% 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 V appears. The expected total cost is ~$200, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$595. 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 Champion's Path, not just acquiring Charizard 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 Charizard V from Champion's Path. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 40-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Charizard V within the first 28 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 28 and 40 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 40, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 119. 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 V compares to the broader Champion's Path chase pool

Charizard V sits in the Secret Rare tier of Champion's Path's rare-slot pool. 2 cards share this tier, and the tier itself fires roughly 5.00% of the time per pack. That means the per-pack chance of pulling any Secret Rare card (not just Charizard V) is 5.00%, which makes the expected wait for any Secret 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 Champion's Path" rather than "Charizard V specifically", the math gets dramatically friendlier — the wait drops to ~20 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 V is no exception.