Base Set Rare Holo Pull Rate — 36.00% per pack (1 in 3)
36.00% of Base Set booster packs contain a Rare Holo card — roughly 1 in 3 packs. Base Set ships 16 Rare Holo cards in the pool, so the chance of pulling any specific Rare Holo is 0.0225 (≈1 in 44). These percentages come from PackRip's own rate table (the same constants the simulator runs on) — they are a model of the product, not a measurement of it. The Pokemon Company has never published pull rates.
Base Set Rare Holo pull-rate methodology
| Formula | Tier odds = 36.00% per pack; per-card odds = tier odds ÷ 16 Rare Holo cards = 1 in 44. |
|---|---|
| Assumptions | One independent rare-slot roll per pack; uniform selection within the tier; no pity timers, box mapping, short-print correction, or edition/condition split. |
| Data source | Set checklist and rarity labels from the bundled Pokemon TCG API catalog; tier rates from rareSlotRates(), mirrored from the live pack opener. |
| Update cadence | Regenerated by prerender whenever set metadata, catalog data, or pull-rate constants change. |
| Limitations | This is a theoretical per-pack rate. Real sealed product can show print-run variance, collation quirks, and market-specific edition differences. |
Rare Holo cards in Base Set
| # | Card | TCGplayer market | Per-card odds |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Charizard #4 | $595.18 | 1 in 44 |
| 2 | Blastoise #2 | $213.91 | 1 in 44 |
| 3 | Venusaur #15 | $146.93 | 1 in 44 |
| 4 | Mewtwo #10 | $77.73 | 1 in 44 |
| 5 | Alakazam #1 | $75.13 | 1 in 44 |
| 6 | Raichu #14 | $70.98 | 1 in 44 |
| 7 | Zapdos #16 | $54.55 | 1 in 44 |
| 8 | Chansey #3 | $52.96 | 1 in 44 |
| 9 | Gyarados #6 | $43.30 | 1 in 44 |
| 10 | Nidoking #11 | $39.76 | 1 in 44 |
| 11 | Magneton #9 | $36.78 | 1 in 44 |
| 12 | Ninetales #12 | $36.59 | 1 in 44 |
| 13 | Clefairy #5 | $35.97 | 1 in 44 |
| 14 | Poliwrath #13 | $34.95 | 1 in 44 |
| 15 | Hitmonchan #7 | $26.62 | 1 in 44 |
| 16 | Machamp #8 | — | 1 in 44 |
How the 36.00% rate is computed
Every Base Set booster pack rolls one rare-slot card (plus uncommons, commons, and energy in fixed slots). The rare slot is itself a weighted random draw across 2 tiers — Rare, Holo Rare, Rare Holo, and the era's other chase rarities. The Rare Holo tier captures 36.00% of those rare-slot draws (= 36.00 packs out of every 100). Within the Rare Holo tier, all 16 cards share the slot uniformly, so per-card odds are 36.00% ÷ 16 = 0.0225 = 1 in 44.
This is the same math PackRip's live Base Set simulator uses to roll packs — open as many as you want for free, watch the empirical hit rate converge to the theoretical 36.00% over a large enough sample. Source code lives in src/utils/packGenerator.ts and the per-rarity drift is build-time-asserted against the published rates so the simulator and this landing page can never disagree.
Cumulative probability — how many packs to hit Rare Holo
Rare Holo pulls follow a geometric distribution with per-pack rate 0.360000. The expected number of packs until your first Rare Holo hit is 3; at 95% confidence you'll have one within 7 packs. Most experienced openers crack a sealed booster box (36 packs) and hit Rare Holo with probability 100.0% — so the average box yields just over 13.0 Rare Holo pulls.