How Many Packs to Pull Charizard VMAX from Shining Fates

Charizard VMAX chase methodology

This page answers exactly one question: how many Shining Fates booster packs does it take to pull Charizard VMAX #SV107? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip Shining Fates 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 234 per pack

Charizard VMAX sits in the VMAX rare-slot pool for Shining Fates. There are 13 VMAX cards in the Shining Fates pool, and the VMAX slot fires with probability 5.56% per pack. Since the slot is split evenly across the 13 cards in that tier, the per-pack chance of pulling this specific card is 1 in 234 — approximately 1 in 234.

Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit Charizard VMAX follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.004277. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~234 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~162 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 699 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.

Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened Shining Fates packs until they pulled Charizard VMAX, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 162, 95 of them would have it by pack 699, 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 68 packs means a quarter of openers hit it inside that window; 99% means almost everyone has hit it by pack 1,075. 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 (~$150.73) is dramatically cheaper than chasing it through packs — the expected pack-rip cost is roughly $1169, well above the market price.

Pack-rip expected dollar cost for this specific card: ~$1,169 at $5 per Shining Fates pack. Compare to $150.73 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/swsh45 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.

About Charizard VMAX (Shining Fates)

Charizard VMAX is a VMAX card from Shining Fates, the 2021 Pokémon TCG expansion. Shining Fates (February 2021) is a special Sword & Shield expansion built around the return of the Shiny Vault — a 122-card subset (numbered SV001–SV122) of Shiny Pokémon, Shiny V and Shiny VMAX cards led by the chase Shiny Charizard VMAX. The 73-card main set carries Eternatus VMAX, Crobat V and a run of Galar-region Pokémon, while the vault delivers the sparkle. PackRip merges the Shiny Vault subset straight into the pull pool — exactly like the real product, where vault cards appeared in the reverse-holo slot — and routes the whole subset into a dedicated Shiny Vault sparkle tier. The set is famous as the Shiny Vault bridge between Hidden Fates (2019) and Paldean Fates (2024). Pack composition is the 10-card modern layout (1 Rare + 3 Uncommon + 4 Common + 1 Energy + 1 Reverse Holo / Shiny Vault).

This specific card ranks as one of the top-3 most valuable pulls in Shining Fates 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 Shining Fates ranking shows where Charizard VMAX sits relative to the rest of the chase pool.

Pull odds in context

For reference, a "1 in 234" 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 Shining Fates opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.

Related chases

• Ditto VMAX — VMAX, $15.82 market
• Skyla — Full Art, $11.79 market
• All Charizard VMAX printings across 4 sets
• All top-25 Shining Fates chases
• Complete the Shining Fates binder — full calculator

Open Shining Fates free

Rip Shining Fates 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 Shining Fates 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 $150.73 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 ($1,169) 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 Shining Fates (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit Charizard VMAX in the box, buy the single for $150.73. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)³⁶ ≈ 14.3% of pulling Charizard VMAX at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.004277. So a sealed box gives you roughly a 14% 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 ~$1,169, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$3,495. 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 Shining Fates, 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 Shining Fates. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 234-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull Charizard VMAX within the first 162 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 162 and 234 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 234, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 699. 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 Shining Fates chase pool

Charizard VMAX sits in the VMAX tier of Shining Fates's rare-slot pool. 13 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 Shining Fates" 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.