Sandstorm Rare Holo Pull Rate — 28.00% per pack (1 in 4)
28.00% of Sandstorm booster packs contain a Rare Holo card — roughly 1 in 4 packs. Sandstorm ships 14 Rare Holo cards in the pool, so the chance of pulling any specific Rare Holo is 0.0200 (≈1 in 50). These percentages come from PackRip's own rate table (the same constants the simulator runs on) — they are a model of the product, not a measurement of it. The Pokemon Company has never published pull rates.
Sandstorm Rare Holo pull-rate methodology
| Formula | Tier odds = 28.00% per pack; per-card odds = tier odds ÷ 14 Rare Holo cards = 1 in 50. |
|---|---|
| Assumptions | One independent rare-slot roll per pack; uniform selection within the tier; no pity timers, box mapping, short-print correction, or edition/condition split. |
| Data source | Set checklist and rarity labels from the bundled Pokemon TCG API catalog; tier rates from rareSlotRates(), mirrored from the live pack opener. |
| Update cadence | Regenerated by prerender whenever set metadata, catalog data, or pull-rate constants change. |
| Limitations | This is a theoretical per-pack rate. Real sealed product can show print-run variance, collation quirks, and market-specific edition differences. |
Rare Holo cards in Sandstorm
| # | Card | TCGplayer market | Per-card odds |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Flareon #5 | $81.93 | 1 in 50 |
| 2 | Sableye #10 | $76.45 | 1 in 50 |
| 3 | Jolteon #6 | $73.87 | 1 in 50 |
| 4 | Mawile #9 | $59.74 | 1 in 50 |
| 5 | Ludicolo #7 | $44.19 | 1 in 50 |
| 6 | Zangoose #14 | $41.52 | 1 in 50 |
| 7 | Seviper #11 | $32.65 | 1 in 50 |
| 8 | Shiftry #12 | $27.47 | 1 in 50 |
| 9 | Dusclops #4 | $25.62 | 1 in 50 |
| 10 | Lunatone #8 | $23.49 | 1 in 50 |
| 11 | Cacturne #2 | $22.22 | 1 in 50 |
| 12 | Solrock #13 | $21.36 | 1 in 50 |
| 13 | Armaldo #1 | $18.07 | 1 in 50 |
| 14 | Cradily #3 | $9.16 | 1 in 50 |
How the 28.00% rate is computed
Every Sandstorm booster pack rolls one rare-slot card (plus uncommons, commons, and energy in fixed slots). The rare slot is itself a weighted random draw across 3 tiers — Rare, Holo Rare, Rare Holo, and the era's other chase rarities. The Rare Holo tier captures 28.00% of those rare-slot draws (= 28.00 packs out of every 100). Within the Rare Holo tier, all 14 cards share the slot uniformly, so per-card odds are 28.00% ÷ 14 = 0.0200 = 1 in 50.
This is the same math PackRip's live Sandstorm simulator uses to roll packs — open as many as you want for free, watch the empirical hit rate converge to the theoretical 28.00% over a large enough sample. Source code lives in src/utils/packGenerator.ts and the per-rarity drift is build-time-asserted against the published rates so the simulator and this landing page can never disagree.
Cumulative probability — how many packs to hit Rare Holo
Rare Holo pulls follow a geometric distribution with per-pack rate 0.280000. The expected number of packs until your first Rare Holo hit is 4; at 95% confidence you'll have one within 10 packs. Most experienced openers crack a sealed booster box (36 packs) and hit Rare Holo with probability 100.0% — so the average box yields just over 10.1 Rare Holo pulls.
Related on PackRip
- Open Sandstorm packs free — same pull rates, live RNG
- Sandstorm binder completion calculator
- Sandstorm per-pack expected value
- Top 25 most valuable Sandstorm cards