Pitch Black Special Illustration Rare Pull Rate — 2.80% per pack (1 in 36)
2.80% of Pitch Black booster packs contain a Special Illustration Rare card — roughly 1 in 36 packs. Pitch Black ships 6 Special Illustration Rare cards in the pool, so the chance of pulling any specific Special Illustration Rare is 0.0047 (≈1 in 214). 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.
Pitch Black Special Illustration Rare pull-rate methodology
| Formula | Tier odds = 2.80% per pack; per-card odds = tier odds ÷ 6 Special Illustration Rare cards = 1 in 214. |
|---|---|
| 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. |
Special Illustration Rare cards in Pitch Black
| # | Card | TCGplayer market | Per-card odds |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mega Zeraora ex #114 | — | 1 in 214 |
| 2 | Mega Chandelure ex #115 | — | 1 in 214 |
| 3 | Mega Darkrai ex #116 | — | 1 in 214 |
| 4 | Morpeko ex #117 | — | 1 in 214 |
| 5 | Gladion's Final Battle #118 | — | 1 in 214 |
| 6 | Gwynn #119 | — | 1 in 214 |
How the 2.80% rate is computed
Every Pitch Black 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 6 tiers — Rare, Holo Rare, Special Illustration Rare, and the era's other chase rarities. The Special Illustration Rare tier captures 2.80% of those rare-slot draws (= 2.80 packs out of every 100). Within the Special Illustration Rare tier, all 6 cards share the slot uniformly, so per-card odds are 2.80% ÷ 6 = 0.0047 = 1 in 214.
This is the same math PackRip's live Pitch Black simulator uses to roll packs — open as many as you want for free, watch the empirical hit rate converge to the theoretical 2.80% 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 Special Illustration Rare
Special Illustration Rare pulls follow a geometric distribution with per-pack rate 0.028000. The expected number of packs until your first Special Illustration Rare hit is 36; at 95% confidence you'll have one within 106 packs. Most experienced openers crack a sealed booster box (36 packs) and hit Special Illustration Rare with probability 64.0% — so the average box yields just over 1.0 Special Illustration Rare pulls.
Related on PackRip
- Open Pitch Black packs free — same pull rates, live RNG
- Pitch Black binder completion calculator
- Pitch Black per-pack expected value
- Top 25 most valuable Pitch Black cards
- Every Special Illustration Rare card across all 140 booster sets