About These Bundles
Every bundle comes with six boosters, with a very high probability of three white code card boosters. White code cards are associated with better pulls, like rare holo cards, rare ultras, Vs, VMaxs, rare rainbows, and more! But, why half & half? If my sampling was just unusually lucky, those three extra boosters from different weight classes gives you insurance that they might have what the three I think will be lucky lack. Either way, this gives you a very good chance to score white cards in every purchase. To understand why we believe these bundles should hit that mark, please continue reading below...
About Us
I am a father of children who are Pokemon fanatics. As the one who supporting the hobbyists, I'm dipping my toe into selling new, factory-sealed boosters in hopes of defraying their costs. I hope to do this by assisting collectors in improving their pull rates of collectible cards by analyzing card distribution according to booster pack weights. This is not a new idea, but what I sell will be based on what I've personally found through data collection, not from anecdotal information from the Internet. As such, I hope this provides some value to you, the collector.
Statistical sampling of boosters across the weight range can provide some useful indicators of where the more desirable cards can be found, but because we're opening a minority of boosters, it can be difficult to establish hard upper and lower bounds. You may want to consider applying a +/-0.05g variation to the actual values I've found here.
Chilling Reign Series Sampling Results
It's important to say that because of variations across manufacturing runs of different series, the size of the collections, and more, that these results are not likely pertinent to other series. That said, after opening one full box, plus sampling another (after sorting by weight, then opening two boosters at five different weights), we've found an unexpected correlation that makes getting white code card boosters more reliable.
The Pokemon Company has tried to make weighing cards a little less effective through the use of two differently weighted online code cards (one with a predominately green art on the non-code side, and one that is predominantly white). The more collectible cards typically employ the use of more foil materials, making them heavier on average. Those cards are, as far as we've been able to tell, always bundled with the lighter, white code cards. What really took us by surprise is that every booster we opened that weighted 21.68g or more had a white code card. With the full box we opened, that meant all twelve heaviest boosters had white code cards, without exception. When we sampled different weights from the second box, every pack heavier than 21.68g also had white code cards. There may be exceptions to this, but based on these two boxes, we haven't found one. For our purposes, we're going to say 21.70g should be a slam dunk, just in case we hit right on the lower edge of where you could find white code cards, though.
Takeaway #1: every booster weighing more than 21.70g should have a very highly probability of having a white code card.
Takeaway #2: when considering an individual booster box's 36 boosters, the Pokemon Company is hitting their mark of 1 out of ever three boosters in a box having a white code card.
For all those boosters with green code cards, they all had a reverse holo plus a plain rare. The reverse holos were normally a common or uncommon, but you have a 1 in 3 chance of a rare reverse holo card. Once, we even hit a booster with two reverse holo cards, one uncommon and one rare. So while you won't likely see any full art V or Vmax cards, there are still some nice holos to be had here.
Takeaway #3: if you like reverse holo versions of the regular Pokemon cards, the lighter packs with the green code cards can still find you some rare versions.
So, once you've found yourself with the heavier booster packs and are getting those white code cards, what can you expect to find? With less than a box and half as our sample size, it can be hard to say what the distribution is, but we've never not gotten at least a reverse holo and rare holo version of the Pokemon cards. For us, that was exactly half the boosters. The other half of the boosters, however, were V, Vmax, and rare ultras. Quite frankly, that was a lot higher percentage than I was expecting. I can only hope that that trend continues.
Takeaway #4: there appears to be a one in two chance of a rare holo Pokemon card, with the other times being V, Vmax, or some version of a rare ultra, rainbow, etc.
The next question that's begged is at what weights do we see those more rare cards show up at? This series, unlike the Evolving Skies series, doesn't seem have an obvious weight correlation to the quality of the pull. Perhaps that's because the fact that in this series, it seems like only the top third of the weight range seems to be almost exclusively white cards to begin with. We pulled a rare ultra card, for instance, in a booster only weighing 21.71g. That would seem to imply that any booster pack 21.70g or heavier has a shot at a highly collectible card.
Takeaway #5: any booster can have a rare card, as long as it's 21.70g or more.
Conclusion
I know I did this a little backwards, with Evolving Skies being my first foray into analyzing weight/pull distribution, but I never expected Chilling Reign to be so strangely consistent on the white code card to weight distribution. Perhaps this is just a weird batch, I can only hope that all the boxes I bought in this batch stay that way. As always, I hope anyone that purchases these packs will share both their success and failures with us. If the sampling that we've done proves to be anomalous, I will certainly update these listings with those facts.