Brilliant Stars Rainbow Rare Pull Rate — 2.80% per pack (1 in 36)

2.80% of Brilliant Stars booster packs contain a Rainbow Rare card — roughly 1 in 36 packs. Brilliant Stars ships 8 Rainbow Rare cards in the pool, so the chance of pulling any specific Rainbow Rare is 0.0035 (≈1 in 286). 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.
Brilliant Stars Rainbow Rare pull-rate methodology
| Formula | Tier odds = 2.80% per pack; per-card odds = tier odds ÷ 8 Rainbow Rare cards = 1 in 286. |
|---|---|
| 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. |
Rainbow Rare cards in Brilliant Stars
| # | Card | TCGplayer market | Per-card odds |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Charizard VSTAR #174 | $80.41 | 1 in 286 |
| 2 | Arceus VSTAR #176 | $14.06 | 1 in 286 |
| 3 | Shaymin VSTAR #173 | $6.69 | 1 in 286 |
| 4 | Cynthia's Ambition #178 | $6.33 | 1 in 286 |
| 5 | Whimsicott VSTAR #175 | $5.67 | 1 in 286 |
| 6 | Roseanne's Backup #180 | $3.06 | 1 in 286 |
| 7 | Cheren's Care #177 | $2.56 | 1 in 286 |
| 8 | Kindler #179 | $2.25 | 1 in 286 |
How the 2.80% rate is computed
Every Brilliant Stars 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 8 tiers — Rare, Holo Rare, Rainbow Rare, and the era's other chase rarities. The Rainbow Rare tier captures 2.80% of those rare-slot draws (= 2.80 packs out of every 100). Within the Rainbow Rare tier, all 8 cards share the slot uniformly, so per-card odds are 2.80% ÷ 8 = 0.0035 = 1 in 286.
This is the same math PackRip's live Brilliant Stars 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 Rainbow Rare
Rainbow Rare pulls follow a geometric distribution with per-pack rate 0.028000. The expected number of packs until your first Rainbow 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 Rainbow Rare with probability 64.0% — so the average box yields just over 1.0 Rainbow Rare pulls.
Related on PackRip
- Open Brilliant Stars packs free — same pull rates, live RNG
- Brilliant Stars binder completion calculator
- Brilliant Stars per-pack expected value
- Top 25 most valuable Brilliant Stars cards