HeartGold & SoulSilver Rare Holo Pull Rate — 28.00% per pack (1 in 4)
28.00% of HeartGold & SoulSilver booster packs contain a Rare Holo card — roughly 1 in 4 packs. HeartGold & SoulSilver ships 14 Rare Holo cards in the pool, so the chance of pulling any specific Rare Holo is 0.0200 (≈1 in 50). 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.
HeartGold & SoulSilver Rare Holo pull-rate methodology
| Formula | Tier odds = 28.00% per pack; per-card odds = tier odds ÷ 14 Rare Holo cards = 1 in 50. |
|---|---|
| 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 HeartGold & SoulSilver
| # | Card | TCGplayer market | Per-card odds |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gyarados #123 | $366.26 | 1 in 50 |
| 2 | Arcanine #1 | $84.39 | 1 in 50 |
| 3 | Gyarados #4 | $60.86 | 1 in 50 |
| 4 | Slowking #12 | $52.31 | 1 in 50 |
| 5 | Ninetales #7 | $49.31 | 1 in 50 |
| 6 | Raichu #10 | $35.65 | 1 in 50 |
| 7 | Wobbuffet #13 | $33.36 | 1 in 50 |
| 8 | Shuckle #11 | $32.98 | 1 in 50 |
| 9 | Quagsire #9 | $24.65 | 1 in 50 |
| 10 | Noctowl #8 | $13.56 | 1 in 50 |
| 11 | Clefable #3 | $11.72 | 1 in 50 |
| 12 | Azumarill #2 | $10.46 | 1 in 50 |
| 13 | Jumpluff #6 | $8.71 | 1 in 50 |
| 14 | Hitmontop #5 | $8.30 | 1 in 50 |
How the 28.00% rate is computed
Every HeartGold & SoulSilver 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 5 tiers — Rare, Holo Rare, Rare Holo, and the era's other chase rarities. The Rare Holo tier captures 28.00% of those rare-slot draws (= 28.00 packs out of every 100). Within the Rare Holo tier, all 14 cards share the slot uniformly, so per-card odds are 28.00% ÷ 14 = 0.0200 = 1 in 50.
This is the same math PackRip's live HeartGold & SoulSilver simulator uses to roll packs — open as many as you want for free, watch the empirical hit rate converge to the theoretical 28.00% 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 0.280000. The expected number of packs until your first Rare Holo hit is 4; at 95% confidence you'll have one within 10 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 10.1 Rare Holo pulls.
Related on PackRip
- Open HeartGold & SoulSilver packs free — same pull rates, live RNG
- HeartGold & SoulSilver binder completion calculator
- HeartGold & SoulSilver per-pack expected value
- Top 25 most valuable HeartGold & SoulSilver cards