Digression: A very short introduction to the Sword & Shield series
As mentioned in my last post, modelling pull rates of Sword & Shield series sets is a good deal less complex than for the Sun & Moon series, as the full arts now appear to all feature the same holofoil pattern and texture, and thus I am assuming they were all printed on the same sheet. Special cards like the Amazing Rares, Radiant Pokémon and Trainer Gallery cards which come in the reverse slot aside, the following ultra-rare sheets are assumed to exist: “regular” Pokémon-V, full arts (including Pokémon-VMAX and Pokémon-VSTAR), and secret rares (which, unlike the full arts, have a glittery card texture). That the Pokémon-VMAX were printed on the same sheet as the full arts can be seen from the following miscut from Evolving Skies, featuring Dracozolt VMAX and Espeon V full art:
I am assuming the same thing for the Pokémon-VSTAR. The box ratios I observed from Youtube videos are shown below (the number of packs ranges from 1,224 and 6,946):
“Special” denotes the Amazing Rares and Radiant Pokémon and TG1, TG2 and TG3 the “regular” Trainer Gallery cards, Pokémon-V/VMAX/VSTAR from the Trainer Gallery and the black and gold cards from the Trainer Gallery which feature a glittery card texture and which I thus assume were printed on a separate sheet. Here are two interesting miscuts of Trainer Gallery cards:
The first shows Pokémon-V and Pokémon-VMAX from the Trainer Gallery were printed on the same sheet. The second shows the gold and black Pikachu-VMAX from the Trainer Gallery appears to have been printed next to another gold and black card, which underlines the assumption that this type of card was printed on a separate sheet. One other note: I haven’t looked at the Radiant Pokémon in detail yet so I’m not completely ruling out they may have been printed on the same sheet as some Trainer Gallery cards.
Back to the table above: “Sum 1” denotes the number of holo or better per box in the samples, and it varies between 14.23 and 14.54. “Sum 2” is the number of “hits” - in this context, Pokémon-V or better, ignoring any cards which come in the reverse slot, and it varies between 7.82 and 8.19. I feel very confident in modelling the first to always be 14.4 per box (2 in 5 packs), which means the sequence length of 10 boxes (as opposed to 6 boxes used to model Gen I-V sets) comes in handy. As to the second, I am strongly inclined to assume the number of “hits” per box is generally 8, and the number of holos per box 6.4.
So much for the introduction, the next post will be about Sword & Shield Base Set.