Black Bolt Illustration Rare Pull Rate — 5.56% per pack (1 in 18)

5.56% of Black Bolt booster packs contain a Illustration Rare card — roughly 1 in 18 packs. Black Bolt ships 69 Illustration Rare cards in the pool, so the chance of pulling any specific Illustration Rare is 0.00081 (≈1 in 1,241). 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.

Black Bolt Illustration Rare pull-rate methodology

Illustration Rare cards in Black Bolt

How the 5.56% rate is computed

Every Black Bolt 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, Illustration Rare, and the era's other chase rarities. The Illustration Rare tier captures 5.56% of those rare-slot draws (= 5.56 packs out of every 100). Within the Illustration Rare tier, all 69 cards share the slot uniformly, so per-card odds are 5.56% ÷ 69 = 0.00081 = 1 in 1,241.

This is the same math PackRip's live Black Bolt simulator uses to roll packs — open as many as you want for free, watch the empirical hit rate converge to the theoretical 5.56% 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 Illustration Rare

Illustration Rare pulls follow a geometric distribution with per-pack rate 0.055600. The expected number of packs until your first Illustration Rare hit is 18; at 95% confidence you'll have one within 53 packs. Most experienced openers crack a sealed booster box (36 packs) and hit Illustration Rare with probability 87.2% — so the average box yields just over 2.0 Illustration Rare pulls.

Related on PackRip

• Open Black Bolt packs free — same pull rates, live RNG
• Black Bolt binder completion calculator
• Black Bolt per-pack expected value
• Top 25 most valuable Black Bolt cards
• Every Illustration Rare card across all 140 booster sets

Other rarity tiers in this set

• Full Art pull rate (1 in 12)
• Pokemon ex pull rate (1 in 6)
• Special Illustration Rare pull rate (1 in 36)
• Hyper Rare pull rate (1 in 36)