Ex Crystal Guardians
This set is one huge mess. From the videos available on Youtube, I gained the impression that the number of Pokémon-ex per box varies considerably more than for other sets; I was not able to tell how many Pokémon-ex there generally are per box, nor whether Gold Stars come in place of holos (like in Ex Delta Species, Ex Legend Maker and Ex Holon Phantoms) or in place of Pokémon-ex (like in earlier sets). Interestingly, this is the same impression players got back in 2006 - see the following two threads on the PokeGym forums:
- CG Ex's and *'s per box | The PokeGym
- How Many Ex Cards Per Booster Box In Crystal Guardians?? | Page 2 | The PokeGym
My Youtube sample of 7 boxes yielded 8.43 holos, 2.43 Pokémon-ex and 0.57 Gold Stars on average per box. An ebay seller who was posting on the PokeGym back then (TheDarkTwins) opened 24 boxes and got 3.04 Pokémon-ex and 0.17 Gold Stars on average per box.
The reason the contents of individual boxes seems to vary a lot is possibly connected to the fact that there were most likely no less than 4 different sheets used to print the holos, Pokémon-ex and Gold Stars, and they may have been inserted into packs in a somewhat irregular sequence:
- 1 cosmos holofoil sheet for the “regular” holos (10 in total) which likely also contained the two Gold Stars (neither of them is a Delta Species Pokémon) (all with yellow borders)
- 1 cosmos holofoil sheet for the “regular” Pokémon-ex (9 in total) (all with silver borders)
- 1 refractor holofoil sheet for the 3 Delta Species holos (Blastoise δ, Charizard δ and Ludicolo δ) (all with holofoil yellow borders)
- 1 refractor holofoil sheet for Sceptile ex δ (with silver borders)
I will hypothetically assign the sheets listed above insertion rates of 42, 12, 16 and 2 per 216 packs, respectively, as this leads to all the holos and all the Pokémon-ex being of similar rarity, whether they are Delta Species Pokémon or not.
Before looking at how many times the Gold Stars were likely printed on the holo sheet, it is necessary to look at the reverses to see if the sheet size is still 10x11 or already 11x11. The data isn’t completely conclusive, but the best fit looks like a 10x11 sheet with 22 reverse commons printed twice, so this is the sheet size I will be assuming for all holofoil sheets:
In my model I am assuming each Gold Star to be printed twice on the holo sheet, making the individual cards less rare than most of the Gold Stars from earlier sets, but at the same time making the overall pull rate for Gold Stars lower than for other sets with 3 Gold Stars in them (1 in 141.4 packs, to be exact). I do not consider the fact that I saw 4 Gold Stars pulled in my small sample of 7 boxes statistically relevant.
The rarity table looks as follows, with Ha being the “regular” holo sheet, Hb the Delta Species holo sheet, EXa the “regular” Pokémon-ex sheet and EXb the Delta Species Pokémon-ex sheet which only includes Sceptile ex δ:
The raw data for the holos, rares and Pokémon-ex is shown below, with the dashed lines indicating where the transition from H11 to H10 etc. would occur. For the Pokémon-ex, I decided to not just include my own Youtube sample, but also that which TheDarkTwins posted on the PokeGym forums:
I did not look at the commons or uncommons.