Why is the Paradox Rift Pack Weight Relevant?
Bulk Pokémon cards are made from card stock, while foil art cards have a layer of holographic material. Due to the extra layer of material in art and holographic cards it is popularly thought that booster packs with a higher weight are more likely to have rarer and more valuable art cards inside. Individual booster packs are frequently advertised as ‘heavy’ suggesting that the higher weight indicates there will be more art cards inside.
Historically, the weight of a booster pack has made a difference in some sets, however, the Pokémon Company has worked hard to try to minimise the weight difference of booster packs. This article seeks to analyse the Paradox Rift Pack Weight to see if heavier packs do make a difference in this set.
Paradox Rift Pack Weight
We purchased three sealed Booster boxes to use for our test. We used a highly sensitive digital scale to get an accurate weight for each pack. The weights ranged from 22.53g to 22.67g. We rounded the weights to the nearest 0.05g giving us 3 different weights – 22.55g, 22.60g and 22.65g. After weighing and grouping all the packs we randomly selected 25 of each weight for our test.
Paradox Rift Pack Weight Results
We decided not to log the numbers of reverse holo, holo rare, uncommon, common or energy cards.
The 22.55g Packs
The first Paradox Rift packs to be opened were the 25 x 22.55g weight packs. 14 of the packs had no art cards. From the other 11 packs we pulled:
027/182 Armarouge ex
058/182 Mewtwo ex (x2)
076/182 Cofagrigus ex
135/182 Aegislash ex
186/182 Magby
225/182 Iron Valiant ex
227/182 Toxtricity ex
242/182 Roark
262/182 Roaring Moon ex
The 22.60g Packs
The 25 x 22.60g weight packs were opened next. 17 packs had no art cards. From the other 8 packs we pulled:
046/182 Tsareena ex
090/182 Vanillish
140/182 Altaria
184/182 Dottler
214/182 Porygon-Z
221/182 Golisopod ex
243/182 Shauntal
257/182 Professor Turo’s Scenario
The 22.65g Packs
The 25 x 22.65g weight packs were opened next. 18 packs contained no art cards. The remaining 7 packs included:
070/182 Iron Hands ex
089/182 Iron Valiant ex
100/182 Toxtricity ex
135/182 Aegislash ex
155/182 Maushold ex
203/182 Slither Wing
228/182 Sandy Shocks ex
Conclusion
From the 25 x 22.55g packs we pulled 10 art cards – a 40% pull rate.
From the 25 x 22.60g packs we pulled 8 art cards – a 32% pull rate
From the 25 x 22.65g packs we pulled 7 art cards – an 28% pull rate
The results of our Paradox Rift pack weight experiment appears to show that the lightest packs have the better pull rate, while the heaviest packs are not so good.
However, there was only a 0.14g difference between the lightest and the heaviest pack in three booster boxes so without an accurate weighing scale the difference would not be noticeable. Additionally this is the smallest difference in weight since we started testing pack weights in February 2021 so it does seem that Pokémon are working hard to make the weight of all their packs the same.
It should also be remembered that only 25 packs of each weight were used for this experiment. Using a greater number of packs may give a different result.
