Across 2,003 retail packs opened after release, a Special Illustration Rare turned up about once every 17 packs, an Illustration Rare every 5, and roughly 62% of all packs contained a hit of some kind. That makes 30th Celebration around four times more generous on Special Illustration Rares than Ascended Heroes, the set before it. One RGB Mew appeared in the 1,153 packs where openers tracked the card. That is a single observation, and the card's odds are still not pinned down.
What are the 30th Celebration pull rates?
| Rarity | Hits | Packs | Per pack | About 1 in | Per booster box |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EX (Double Rare) | 489 | 2,003 | 24.4% | 4.1 packs | 8.8 |
| Illustration Rare | 398 | 2,003 | 19.9% | 5.0 packs | 7.2 |
| Classic Collection | 207 | 2,003 | 10.3% | 9.7 packs | 3.7 |
| Special Illustration Rare | 116 | 2,003 | 5.8% | 17.3 packs | 2.1 |
| Future Rare | 25 | 2,003 | 1.2% | 80.1 packs | 0.4 |
Per-box figures assume 36 packs. An Elite Trainer Box holds 9, so roughly a quarter of each.
At 2,003 packs the common tiers are firm. The Special Illustration Rare rate carries a 95% confidence interval of 4.9% to 6.9% per pack, so somewhere between 1 in 14 and 1 in 21.
Two rows moved when the sample doubled. Special Illustration Rares improved from 1 in 21 to 1 in 17, and Future Rares got rarer, from 1 in 63 to 1 in 80. The three samples disagree most on those two tiers: the Special Illustration Rare runs from 1 in 15 to 1 in 21 between openers, and the Future Rare from 1 in 61 to 1 in 105, so expect both rows to keep moving.
Where do these numbers come from?
Three openers, all opening retail product around the 16 September release, all publishing their own totals.
Danny Phantump pooled 1,053 packs from 117 Elite Trainer Boxes opened across three stores, about 200 of them his own, and showed the spreadsheet on camera: 262 EX, 205 Illustration Rares, 116 Classic Collection, 70 Special Illustration Rares, 10 Future Rares and one RGB Mew, a green one, pulled from an Elite Trainer Box. His sheet lists a quantity for every Double Rare, Special Illustration Rare and Future Rare, and those quantities add up to the tier totals exactly. Every pack in this sample came out of an Elite Trainer Box, and he does not give an opening date for each store.
catspaw.tv opened 850 packs and published a full rate table: 199 EX, 175 Illustration Rares, 82 Classic Collection, 40 Special Illustration Rares, 14 Future Rares.
Kyky Rips opened 100 packs on release day and read his tally to camera: 28 EX, 18 Illustration Rares, 9 Classic Collection, 6 Special Illustration Rares, 1 Future Rare, no RGB Mew.
The 850-pack table checks out internally and externally. Its hits sum to 510, which is exactly the 60.00% total hit rate it states for 850 packs. Its individual rates match its own percentages. And it carries a comparison column of Ascended Heroes rates credited to TCGplayer, which lands on 1 in 69.44 for Special Illustration Rares, 1 in 8.89 for Illustration Rares and 1 in 4.91 for EX. Those are the same figures as the TCGplayer Authentication Center data we already hold, to within a rounding place. An arithmetic check and an independent-source check both pass.
One caveat worth stating. The 850-pack table labels its third row "CC / UR+MAR", so it may be grouping Ultra Rare and MAR cards in with Classic Collection. The rate lands within a point of the Classic-Collection-only sample, so any difference is small, but that row is the softest in the table.
Why ignore the pull rates that came out before release?
Because they came out of stolen product.
30th Celebration leaked badly. Cases were opened publicly on Whatnot weeks before launch, and most of the pull-rate figures that circulated in the English hobby through August trace back to those streams rather than to retail packs. A widely quoted 465-pack figure reaches the hobby second-hand, through one creator crediting another, with no primary source we could find. A 260-pack tally comes from a subscriber who scrubbed seven hours of one of those pre-release streams.
Those numbers may well be correct. They are broadly in line with what the retail packs show. But a leaked case cannot be checked against retail print runs, and the provenance of stolen product is unknowable, so nothing in the table above rests on any of it.
What about the 4,000-pack figures going round?
The largest dataset in circulation is a graphic credited to Discord user Tommy13, built from "over 4000 live streamed English 30th Anniversary Booster Packs". Its RGB Mew line implies 4,063 packs. It puts EX at 1 in 4.0, Illustration Rares at 1 in 5.2, Classic Collection at 1 in 9.6, Special Illustration Rares at 1 in 19.0 and Future Rares at 1 in 99, with one RGB Mew in the lot.
It is not in our table, for two reasons. The streams are undated, so there is no way to separate retail packs from the pre-release streams described above. And the graphic publishes rounded rates without hit counts, so most tiers cannot be turned back into a count without guessing.
It is still a useful cross-check, with one reservation: we cannot rule out that some of those streams were our own three openers. Every tier lands inside our 95% interval: 1 in 4.0 against our 4.1, 5.2 against 5.0, 9.6 against 9.7, 19.0 against 17.3, and 99 against 80 for the Future Rare. Two datasets compiled by different people agree to within a pack or two on every common tier.
Is 30th Celebration really more generous than other sets?
Yes, and the gap is large. The clearest comparison is against Ascended Heroes, the set immediately before it, using TCGplayer's controlled figures.
| Rarity | 30th Celebration | Ascended Heroes | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| EX (Double Rare) | 1 in 4.1 | 1 in 4.9 | slightly better |
| Illustration Rare | 1 in 5.0 | 1 in 8.9 | about 1.8x |
| Classic Collection | 1 in 9.7 | 1 in 12.1 | slightly better |
| Special Illustration Rare | 1 in 17.3 | 1 in 69.4 | about 4x |
| Future Rare | 1 in 80 | 1 in 526 | about 6.5x |
| Any hit at all | 1 in 1.6 | 1 in 2.4 | 62% vs 42% of packs |
The pattern is that the cheap tiers moved a little and the chase tiers moved enormously. A Special Illustration Rare used to be a once-every-two-boxes event. In this set it is closer to twice per box. The top rarity went from roughly one per fifteen boxes to about one per two.
For context, the four most recent sets before this one sat at 1 in 70 to 1 in 83 for Special Illustration Rares. 30th Celebration is not a small improvement on that trend, it is a different kind of set.
How rare is the RGB Mew?
Too rare to measure with 2,000 packs, and nobody quoting an exact number this week has the sample to back it.
Two of our three samples tracked the card. Between them they opened 1,153 packs and pulled one, a green Mew out of an Elite Trainer Box in Danny Phantump's 1,053. The 850-pack table does not break the card out at all, so it stays out of that denominator.
A single hit in 1,153 packs is consistent with true odds anywhere from about 1 in 200 to 1 in 6,500. The Tommy13 graphic also records exactly one Mew, in 4,063 packs, and one card there proves no more than one card here. Danny's own guess is somewhere around 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 1,200, and he adds that it would take something like 100,000 packs to know.
Separately, we read eleven release-week opening videos in full, about 39 hours, looking for a pull. There wasn't one. The card comes up in 108 separate sentences across those transcripts, nearly all of them people saying they hope to hit it.
That is not a claim that none exist. RGB Mews have been pulled. It Was Never A Phase Cards showed examples on 14 September, and a red one was reported pulled in Korea.
The figures being repeated this week are 1 in 465, 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 20,000. The first rests on a single card in a 465-pack pre-release sample, which is one observation and not a rate: a single hit in 465 packs is consistent with anything from roughly 1 in 80 to 1 in 2,600. The other two appear to be rumour, and one of them is 20 times the other. Both now sit awkwardly with the retail packs. At a true rate of 1 in 10,000, the chance of seeing a Mew in 1,153 packs is about 1 in 9. At 1 in 20,000 it is about 1 in 18. Both could still be true, but the packs opened so far point to a less rare card. If you are paying a premium this week on the strength of a Mew number, you are paying on a guess.
Why not just count the cards in the videos?
We tried, and it does not work. The failure is worth explaining because it is not obvious.
The idea was to have a machine read every pack-opening transcript and tally the pulls, which would open up far more footage than the handful of openers who publish totals. To test it, we ran it against the 100-pack video with the host's own summary cut out, so it had to count rather than copy, then compared the result to the totals he states.
It undercounted the hits by 34%.
The cause is not the counting. It is that the pulls are not in the audio. In that video the word "EX" is spoken 17 times against 28 actually pulled, and "illustration rare" 4 times against 18. Openers hold cards up to camera without naming them. The shortfall also differs by tier, so no single multiplier corrects it.
So every figure here comes from a total an opener published themselves, whether spoken aloud or shown on screen. It is a smaller dataset and a true one.
What does this mean if you are buying?
Hits are frequent. On these rates a booster box yields roughly 9 EX, 7 Illustration Rares, 3 or 4 Classic Collection cards and about 2 Special Illustration Rares, and three packs in five contain something. That is a set built to feel good to open.
It also means supply. Generous pull rates push single prices down rather than up, because chase cards arrive faster than demand for them does. A Special Illustration Rare that appears twice a box is not going to hold the price of one that appears once every two boxes, and the market has already started saying so.
These rates are early. Print runs get topped up, distribution differs by region, and 2,003 packs is a second reading rather than a settled one. Treat the common tiers as reliable, the Special Illustration Rare and Future Rare rows as still moving, and the RGB Mew as known only to within a wide range.
None of this is financial advice. It is a count of what came out of some packs.