Evolving Skies Pack Weight – does it make a difference?

 

It is widely believed that booster packs with a higher weight are more likely to have rarer and more valuable art cards inside. We decided to find out if the Evolving Skies pack weight affects the pull rate.  

 

Our Sample Packs

Evolving Skies Booster Boxes

Booster packs for the Evolving Skies expansion can be purchased individually, or can be found in special collection boxes, gift products or collectable tins. They can also be purchased in Booster Boxes.

A Booster Box is a sealed product containing 36 sealed Booster Packs.

We decided to use 3 Booster boxes for our experiment.  This gave us a total of 108 booster packs which we decided should give us a good indication of whether Evolving Skies pack weight affects pull rate.

After unsealing the boxes we began weighing each booster pack.

 

Evolving Skies Pack Weight

We used a sensitive digital scale to get an accurate weight for each pack. 

Evolving Skies Pack Weight

The Evolving Skies pack weight ranged from 21g to 23g.

21g – 21 packs
22g – 62 packs
23g – 25 packs 

 

The Results

All packs had the usual energy card, reverse holo card, 3 x uncommon and 5 x common cards and these were not logged. We also decided not to log the non-holo rare cards. We did log the colour of the code cards – white code cards signify the presence of a holo, half art or full art card, while green code cards indicate no special cards.

 

The 21g Packs

The first Evolving Skies packs to be opened were the 21 x 21g weight packs.

10 of the packs contained green code cards and no special art cards.

11 of the packs contained white code cards. From these packs we pulled the following cards:

6 Rare Holo Cards
2 x Victini – 020/203
Galarian Zapdos – 082/203
2 x Hydreigon – 115/203
Rapid Strike Zygarde – 118/203

3 Half Art V Cards
Gyarados V – 028/203
Medicham V – 083/203
Rayquaza V – 110/203

2 Ultra Rare Cards
Leafeon V – 166/203
Jolteon V – 177/203

Jolteon V

 

The 22g Packs

Next we opened the 62 x 22g packs

34 packs contained green codes and no art or holo cards.
28 packs contained white code cards and from these we pulled the following cards:

11 Rare Holo Cards
2 x Eldegoss – 016/203
Single Strike Entei – 019/203
Victini – 020/203
2 x Regieleki – 060/203
Galarian Zapdos – 082/203
Galarian Articuno – 083/203
Galarian Moltres – 093/203
Hydreigon – 115/203
Kyurem – 116/203

6 Half Art V Cards
Golurk V – 020/203
Volcarona V – 021/203
2 x Dracozolt V – 058/203
Lycanroc V – 091/203
Garbodor V – 100/203

8 Full Art VMAX Cards
Leafeon VMAX – 008/203
Trevenant VMAX – 014/203
Gyarados VMAX – 029/203
2 x Vaporeon VMAX 030/203
Glaceon VMAX 041/203
Dracozolt VMAX 059/203
Umbreon VMAX 095/203

2 Ultra Rare Cards
Leafeon V – 167/203
Rapid Strike Rayquaza – 194/203

1 Secret Rare Card
Darkness Energy – 236/203

Rayquaza Ultra Rare

 

The 23g Packs

Lastly we opened the 25 Evolving Skies 23g weight packs.

17 of the packs contained green code cards and no art or holo cards. 8 packs had a white code card and contained the following cards:

4 Rare Holo Cards
Eldegoss – 016/203
Galarian Articuno – 063/203
Zoroark – 103/203
Regidrago – 124/203

3 Half Art V Cards
Espeon V – 064/203
Umbreon V – 094/203
Noivern V – 117/203

1 Ultra Rare Card
Zinnia’s Resolve – 203/203

Zinnia's Resolve

 

Conclusion

From the 21 x 21g packs we pulled 6 Holo Rare cards, 3 Half Art V cards and 2 Ultra Rare – a 52% pull rate.
From the 62 x 22g packs we pulled 11 Holo Rare cards, 6 Half Art V, 8 Full Art VMAX, 2 Ultra Rare and 1 Secret Rare card – a 45% pull rate.
From the 25 x 23g packs we pulled 4 Holo Rare cards, 3 Half Art V cards and 1 Ultra Rare – a 32% pull rate.

The results of our Evolving Skies pack weight experiment show that it is the lighter packs that have the best pull rate. 

However, if the Holo Rares are excluded and pull rates are calculated with just art cards, the results  are different:

21 x 21g packs = 3 Half Art V cards and 2 Ultra Rare – a 24% pull rate.
62 x 22g packs = 6 Half Art V, 8 Full Art VMAX, 2 Ultra Rare and 1 Secret Rare card – a 38% pull rate.
25 x 23g packs = 3 Half Art V cards and 1 Ultra Rare – a 16% pull rate.

 

 

8 thoughts on “Evolving Skies Pack Weight – does it make a difference?”

  1. You have to do the same amount of packs otherwise you don’t get the right result so try doing 20x21g 20x22g 20x23g then you will right percentage

  2. Thank you for taking the time to comment on this article. We do appreciate your feedback. With our pack weight and pull rate tests we aim to give an analysis of what an average Pokémon fan might pull when opening random booster boxes rather than attempting to do an overall calculation which requires thousands of packs to be opened.

  3. Thank you for taking the time to add your comment. We can now see that we need to take a different approach to our pack weight tests going forward. We will use the same number of each weight packs for all future pack weight tests.

  4. I’m sorry to be this guy… but I’m going to. You guys did NOTHING wrong with this experiment. The people commenting that y’all should have done 20/20/20 obviously failed their high school math class. The pull rate percentage of one grouping doesn’t get affected by the size of a different grouping. Doing this experiment with 21/62/25, just means that your results will be MOST accurate for the 62 grouping. The 21/25 groupings will not be affected at all by the 62 grouping other than being a smaller sample size leading to a higher expected standard deviation. To put more simply, reducing all groups down to 20 would simply make your experiment LESS accurate! GREAT EXPERIMENT guys!! Next time do a larger sample size if anything don’t go smaller! It would be awesome to find out that weighing packs is actually a myth and scammers have been wasting their time!

  5. Thank you for taking the time to add your comment to this discussion and for adding a new perspective. We will definitely take this into consideration for future Pack Weight articles. Over the last few sets the weights of packs have been getting closer and closer often with a large middle weight band and much smaller heavier and lighter bands. Totally agree that it would be good to bust the myth that heavier packs have better cards.

  6. Another insight is that you paid for 3 booster boxes which costs more than $1000, but only got $265 worth of cards out of it. So you also busted the myth that Evolving Skies booster boxes are worth that much.

  7. Thank you for your comment. This analysis was made at the time of the set release in August 2021. The booster boxes were purchased for around £100 each and the entire contents were sold on Ebay UK for a good profit.

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