How Many Packs to Pull M Mewtwo-EX from BREAKthrough

M Mewtwo-EX chase methodology

This page answers exactly one question: how many BREAKthrough booster packs does it take to pull M Mewtwo-EX #160? The numbers below come from the same per-rarity pull-rate model the PackRip BREAKthrough 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 117 per pack

M Mewtwo-EX sits in the Full Art rare-slot pool for BREAKthrough. There are 10 Full Art cards in the BREAKthrough pool, and the Full Art slot fires with probability 8.56% per pack. Since the slot is split evenly across the 10 cards in that tier, the per-pack chance of pulling this specific card is 1 in 117 — approximately 1 in 117.

Pulls are independent and identically distributed, so the number of packs until you hit M Mewtwo-EX follows a geometric distribution with parameter p = 0.008560. The expected number of packs is 1/p — that's ~117 packs on average. But "average" hides huge variance: the median pull lands faster than the mean (~81 packs at 50% confidence), and a long unlucky tail can stretch the wait dramatically. The 95% confidence band — 349 packs — is where 95% of pull-runs finish; the remaining 5% take even longer.

Concretely: if 100 collectors each opened BREAKthrough packs until they pulled M Mewtwo-EX, roughly 50 of them would have it by pack 81, 95 of them would have it by pack 349, 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 M Mewtwo-EX by pack N?". A 25% band of 34 packs means a quarter of openers hit it inside that window; 99% means almost everyone has hit it by pack 536. The dollar column anchors the variance to real-world sealed-pack cost at $5/pack.

Cheaper to buy M Mewtwo-EX as a single?

Buying M Mewtwo-EX as a single on TCGplayer (~$149.63) is dramatically cheaper than chasing it through packs — the expected pack-rip cost is roughly $584, well above the market price.

Pack-rip expected dollar cost for this specific card: ~$584 at $5 per BREAKthrough pack. Compare to $149.63 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 M Mewtwo-EX plus the remaining 9 cards in every pack along the way — which is why the EV calculator at /ev/xy8 spreads the cost across the whole pack contents instead of pinning it to one card.

About M Mewtwo-EX (BREAKthrough)

M Mewtwo-EX is a Full Art card from BREAKthrough, the 2015 Pokémon TCG expansion. BREAKthrough (2015) introduces the Rare BREAK tier to PackRip's catalog with six cards — Chesnaught #12, Raichu #50, Marowak #79, Zoroark #92, Florges #104 and Noivern #113 — scattered through the numbered run rather than grouped at the end. The engine draws BREAK from an 11.1 percent slice of the rare slot, roughly one pack in nine. At 165 cards it is the largest XY-era set in the catalog, and Mewtwo appears eight times across its EX, Rare Ultra and Secret tiers.

This specific card ranks as one of the top-3 most valuable pulls in BREAKthrough 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 BREAKthrough ranking shows where M Mewtwo-EX sits relative to the rest of the chase pool.

Pull odds in context

For reference, a "1 in 117" 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 BREAKthrough opener uses the same exact RNG model, so you can stress-test the wait curve without spending real money.

Related chases

• Mewtwo-EX — Secret Rare, $165.81 market
• Mewtwo-EX — Secret Rare, $158.97 market
• All M Mewtwo-EX printings across 2 sets
• All top-25 BREAKthrough chases
• Complete the BREAKthrough binder — full calculator

Open BREAKthrough free

Rip BREAKthrough 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 M Mewtwo-EX-tier pulls. Coin economy is virtual — no real money on the line.

Strategy: optimising the M Mewtwo-EX chase

Every experienced BREAKthrough 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 $149.63 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 ($584) 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 BREAKthrough (typically 36 packs for vintage sets), enjoy the experience, then if you didn't hit M Mewtwo-EX in the box, buy the single for $149.63. A 36-pack box delivers a probability of 1 − (1 − p)³⁶ ≈ 26.6% of pulling M Mewtwo-EX at least once, where p is the per-pack hit rate of 0.008560. So a sealed box gives you roughly a 27% 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 M Mewtwo-EX appears. The expected total cost is ~$584, but the 95th percentile pushes that to ~$1,745. 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 BREAKthrough, not just acquiring M Mewtwo-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 M Mewtwo-EX from BREAKthrough. Mathematically, you'd expect their results to cluster near the 117-pack expectation — but they won't. Roughly 5 will pull M Mewtwo-EX within the first 81 packs and feel lucky. Roughly 3 will pull between 81 and 117 packs and feel "about average". And roughly 2 will be still pulling past pack 117, with one of them potentially stretching past the 95% bound of 349. 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 M Mewtwo-EX compares to the broader BREAKthrough chase pool

M Mewtwo-EX sits in the Full Art tier of BREAKthrough's rare-slot pool. 10 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 M Mewtwo-EX) 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 BREAKthrough" rather than "M Mewtwo-EX 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 M Mewtwo-EX is no exception.