The English Pokémon card rarity guide

Team Rocket

For this set, all the sheets are known. The set contains one secret rare (Dark Raichu) which is printed on the holos sheet. Were it not for a strange error on the uncommons sheet, there would not be much to discuss here.

The uncommons sheet contains a Dark Dragonite with the number 5/82 (the holo version’s number) printed on it. If you count how many times the other cards appear on the sheet, you will notice it takes up the space where there should have been a Dark Vaporeon. The error Dark Dragonite is known to exist in both 1st Edition and Unlimited variants, though only the second has ever been filmed being pulled from a pack to my knowledge. Furthermore, the error is quite rare, so obviously it was corrected for the larger part of both the 1st Edition and Unlimited print runs (else it would have a rarity of just slightly less than 1 per box). The question is, how was it corrected?

One solution would be to just discard the 72nd card from each sheet, which is the error card (I am assuming this is technically possible, it apparently worked for the blank 1st card on the Jungle uncommons sheet, but I can’t say for sure if it’s possible to discard a card from the middle of the sheet).

The other solution would be to redesign the sheet and replace the error card with the missing Dark Vaporeon. I think that both solutions were used, namely the first for the 1st Edition print run (which may have already been printed when the error was discovered) and the second for the Unlimited print run. I say that because of the following Youtube videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTAxNiaxvqc: at 01:04:45, PokeRev gets the following uncommons from a 1st Edition pack: Digger - Dark Kadabra - Dark Dragonair. Not rock-solid evidence, cards can be missing in the sequence or get flipped around, but from the same box he also got packs containing the preceding (Nightly Garbage Run - Dark Jolteon - Dark Primeape) and following (Dark Charmeleon - The Boss’s Way - Dark Machoke) 3 cards on the sheet, so it looks like whatever was in the Dark Dragonite’s position is missing from the sequence entirely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMAR55qhvdo: at 0:29:40 and at 0:32:35, Randolph Pokemon gets the following uncommons from Unlimited packs: Dark Kadabra - Dark Vaporeon - Dark Dragonair and Dark Vaporeon - Dark Dragonair - Dark Charmeleon, confirming the missing Dark Vaporeon was inserted.

(I did not study the uncommons in any other videos, but more evidence is certainly available as each box receives nearly a full sheet of uncommons.)

So how did some packs end up containing the error Dark Dragonite? Maybe the error wasn’t noticed until after some cards were already packaged (though this would imply 1st Edition and Unlimited was being packaged in parallel), or maybe the printing company in some instances discarded some other card instead of Dark Dragonite - not an unheard-of type of error for processes like that.

Based on this, the rarity tables for Team Rocket are as follows:

Some final observations on the rarities for this set:
• Like in previous sets, there are no artificial rarity differences between cards of the same nominal rarity.
• Dark Raichu, nominally a secret rare, is not rarer than the other holos.
• The choice of the two H7 cards, Dark Arbok and Dark Weezing, is probably not random.
• Unlike the sheets for previous sets which appear to have a more or less random layout, the order of cards on the sheets follow a more regular pattern.