Why is the Obsidian Flames Pack Weight Relevant?
Regular Pokémon cards are made from card stock, while foil art cards have a layer of holographic material. Due to the extra layer of material in art and holographic cards it is popularly thought that booster packs with a higher weight are more likely to have rarer and more valuable art cards inside. Individual booster packs are frequently advertised as ‘heavy’ suggesting that the higher weight indicates there will be more art cards inside.
While the weight of the pack has made a difference in some set, particularly earlier sets, the Pokémon Company has worked hard to try to minimise the weight difference of booster packs. This article seeks to analyse the Obsidian Flames Pack Weight to see if heavier packs do make a difference in this set.
Obsidian Flames Pack Weight
We purchased three sealed Booster boxes to use for our test. We used a highly sensitive digital scale to get an accurate weight for each pack. The weights ranged from 22.41g to 22.63g. We rounded the weights to 1 decimal point giving us 3 different weights – 22.4g, 22.5g and 22.6g. After weighing and grouping all the packs we randomly selected 20 of each weight for our test.
Obsidian Flames Pack Weight Results
We decided not to log the numbers of reverse holo, holo rare, uncommon, common or energy cards.
The 22.4g Packs
The first Obsidian Flames packs to be opened were the 20 x 22.4g weight packs. Unbelievably 19 of the packs had no art cards. From the other pack we pulled:
213/1978 Glimmora ex
The 22.5g Packs
The 20 x 22.5g weight packs were opened next. 14 packs had no art cards. From the other 6 packs we pulled:
015/197 Decidueye ex
156/197 Revavroom ex
164/197 Pidgeot ex
202/197 Cleffa
208/197 Pidgeotto
217/197 Pidgeot ex
The 22.6g Packs
The 20 x 22.6g weight packs were opened next. Just 6 packs contained no art cards. The remaining 14 packs included 2 packs with 2 art cards giving a total of 16 cards:
066/197 Tyranitar ex
079/197 Miraidon ex
096/197 Vespiquen ex
135/197 Absol ex
159/197 Dragonite ex
179/197 Greedent ex
204/197 Houndour
205/197 Scizor
210/197 Eiscue ex
212/197 Vespiquen ex
219/197 Ortega
224/197 Revavroom ex
227/197 Poppy x 2
228/197 Charizard ex x2
Conclusion
From the 20 x 22.4g packs we pulled just 1 art cards – a 5% pull rate.
From the 20 x 22.5g packs we pulled 6 art cards – a 30% pull rate
From the 20 x 22.6g packs we pulled 16 art cards – an 80% pull rate
The results of our Obsidian Flames pack weight experiment appears to show that the lightest packs have the worst pull rate, while the heaviest packs clearly have a much better pull rate.
However, there was only a 0.2g difference between the lightest and the heaviest pack so without an accurate scale the difference would not be noticeable. And to this end it does seem that Pokémon are having some success in making the weight of all their packs the same.
It should also be remembered that only 20 packs of each weight were used for this experiment. Using a greater number of packs may give a different result.
