Boundaries Crossed
Here is the rarity table for Boundaries Crossed:
There is not much to say about the holos, rares, uncommons, commons and Ace Specs (labelled SP for “special” in the table, they come in the reverse slot), nor for the “regular” Pokémon-EX. As mentioned in my previous post, I am assuming that the full arts and secret rares were printed on the same sheet. The question is, how many slots on the 10x10 sheet were used for secret rares? With the sample size mentioned in the last post - 28 box openings watched on YouTube - the uncertainty is too large to say anything for sure. The observed box ratio for secret rares was 0.36 for this set. I will be working under the following two assumptions for this set and the next three sets:
- All secret rares appear on the sheet an equal number of times
- The number of times they appear on the sheet was chosen in a way to make the box ratio for secret rares as close as possible to 0.33 (1 in 3 boxes)
Given the insertion rate of the full art/secret rare sheet determined in the last post, namely 11 per case (1.83 per box), that would mean that the 4 secret rares are FA5 cards, i.e. printed on the sheet 5 times each (though it must be stressed that this is just an assumption). That leaves 80 spaces on the sheet for full arts, meaning 8 would appear 9 times on the sheet and 1 8 times.
The raw data for the holos, rares, Pokémon-EX, full arts/secret rares and Ace Specs is as follows (dashed lines indicating where the transition from H7 to H6, etc., would occur):
Nothing can be said about individual card rarities, nor is there any indication of “artificial” rarity differences. The fact Celebi EX full art was observed only once is probably not relevant.
This is the first set since Supreme Victors to require more than one sheet to print the reverses. 112 reverses ought to appear twice if two sheets were used to print them, 18 only once. Like in earlier sets where this was the case, I did a statistical analysis of the reverses to check which type of reverse (rare holos, rares, uncommons or commons) were most likely printed only once on the two sheets. As I have shown for earlier sets, the number of times reverses are printed on the sheet or sheets usually (though not always) depends on their rarity. In the table below, you can see that “model 1” (two sheets used, 18 of the 20 reverse rare holos printed only once, all the other cards twice) fits the observed data very well; I also tried a “model 2” assuming 3 sheets used for printing the reverses (as seems to have been the case with Expedition and Aquapolis) and all 20 reverse rare holos and 7 reverse rares printed twice, the other 103 cards printed three times, but the model doesn’t fit as well:
Thus, I went with model 1 in the rarity table. One interesting conclusion about this set: Though the number of full arts was increased compared to earlier sets, the pull rates for the individual cards remains about the same as in the last few sets.
Edit 2023/10/28: error in rarity table corrected