Many people believe that booster packs with a higher weight are more likely to have rarer and more valuable art cards inside. They are frequently advertised on selling sites with the word ‘heavy’ suggesting that the weight indicates there will be special cards inside. We decided to find out if the Celebrations pack weight affects the pull rate.
Our Sample Packs
Booster packs for the Celebrations 25th Anniversary set are unique in that they only contain 4 cards. There are no non-holo cards in the set. Cards are either holo rare cards or art cards. The complete Celebrations set contains 50 cards – 25 make up the main set which is legal for tournament play, the other 25 are re-makes of classic cards that have appeared over the last 25 years.
Booster packs for this special set are not available in booster boxes, they can only be obtained from special collection boxes and sets.
We decided to use 36 booster packs for our experiment which we felt would give us a good indication of whether Celebrations pack weight affects pull rate.
Celebrations Pack Weight
We used a highly sensitive digital scale to get an accurate weight for each pack.
The Celebrations pack weight ranged from 9g to 1g.
9g – 11 packs
10g – 21 packs
11g – 4 packs
The Results
After opening just a few packs it became obvious that the majority of cards in a pack are holo rare cards from the main set. We have therefore taken finding an art card or a classic collection card as a significant pull.
The 9g Packs
The first Celebrations packs to be opened were the 11 x 9g weight packs.
2 of the packs contained just holo rare cards.
7 of the packs contained 3 holo rares and 1 art or classic collection card.
Of these, 3 packs contained Flying or Surfing Pikachu V from the main set and 1 pack contained Zamazenta V from the main set. These cards are currently selling for around £2 ($2.90).
1 pack contained Surfing Pikachu VMAX and 1 pack contained Flying Pikachu VMAX. The sale price for these at present is around £4.50 ($6.70).
Only 1 pack contained a classic collection card, but this was a chase card – Umbreon gold star which is currently selling for around £60 ($70).
Total value of cards from these packs = £77 – an average of £7 per pack (in $ = $85 .40 – average $7.76)
The 10g Packs
Next we opened the 21 x 10g packs
11 packs contained just holo rare cards.
3 packs contained 3 holo rare cards and 1 art card or classic collection card.
Of these, 1 pack contained Zacian V and 1 pack contained Flying Pikachu V, both from the main set. These cards are currently selling for around £2 ($2.90)
The other pack contained Luxray Lv.X from the classic collection. This card can be sold at present for around £7 ($11)
7 packs had 2 holo rare cards and 2 art or classic collection cards.
From these we pulled 2 Pikachu full art, 1 Flying Pikachu V, 1 Zamazenta V, 1 Zacian V 2 Surfing Pikachu VMAX from the main set. Total value around £18 ($28.30)
We also pulled 3 Claydol, 1 Rocket’s Zapdos, 1 Here Comes Team Rocket, 1 Blastoise Base Set and 1 Umbreon gold star from the classic collection. Total value around £100 ($124.00)
This works out to an average pull of £5.60 per pack. In dollars $5.90.
The 11g Packs
Finally we opened the 4 Celebrations 11g weight packs.
2 of the packs contained 4 holo rare cards.
1 pack contained 3 holo rares and 1 Professor’s Research full art card from the main set. Professor’s research is currently on sale for around £5 ($6).
The final pack contained 2 holo rares, a Flying Pikachu V from the main set and a Dark Gyarados from the Classic collection. These cards could be sold for around £7 ($9).
This equates to an average return of just £3 per pack or $3.75 for the 11g packs.
Conclusion
From the 36 packs we opened it is very clear that heavier Celebrations packs do not contain rarer and more valuable cards. In fact, these packs offered the worst return averaging at just £3 ($3.75) return per pack.
It was actually the lighter 9g packs that gave the highest average return per pack at £7 or $7.76.
It should be remembered that we only used 36 packs for this experiment and it may be that opening more packs would give a different result.
